People. Process. Product.

There’s an essay called “The Bitter Lesson.” The gist is that human cleverness loses to raw computation. Every time. So, let’s take compute seriously.

The person with the most compute wins. The company with the most compute wins. The government with the most compute wins…You’ve seen this movie…

We learned to turn rocks into gas, spin them through tens of thousands of centrifuges, refine them into spicy metal, bolt it to a missile, and bury it underground on 24/7 standby. Then we put the same bombs on planes that never land and submarines in every ocean.

If compute equals victory, everyone is already building an AI Manhattan Project. Look around — it’s already here. So everyone races to hoard compute, and everything orbiting that economy becomes irrationally(?) valuable.

The moment anyone can fake anything, nobody can believe anything. Do you believe what you read these days? The next five years are going to be turbulent, unfair, and loud. Oh wait... That’s now.

…Here is where the story turns…

When everything can be faked, you do what humans did before institutions: you ask someone you trust. Ryan Findley calls it “SSL for people”: chains of human beings who can vouch for one another. Not because a blue check or a giant platform says so, but because they share history. Repeated interaction. Reputation. Mutual risk. A relationship can be impersonated. But the history behind that relationship is much harder to fake (for now).

Fable is nothing short of sensational. On max mode, what it pulls off is genuinely wild. It's a direct replacement for developers. Not all — but many.

Yeah but… it’s not going to replace bad management.

We've poured billions into building AGI, and management loves it. Of course they do! Management has the dollars, and AI is the shiniest thing those dollars have ever bought. It makes everyone underneath them “faster”, “cheaper”, more “replaceable.”

What we have not done…not with billions, not with millions, not with one serious dollar…is try to fix bad management.

Sit with that asymmetry. We'll happily automate the engineer, the analyst, the writer, the support rep, and spend a small nation's GDP doing it. But the manager who can't run a meeting, can't make a call, can't tell you what good looks like?

It's funny. At the end of the day, bad management is still bad management. No model is coming to fix it, because no one has been paid.

A great thief has a beautiful house. He throws parties, and his guests admire the artifacts on his walls. Nobody asks where they came from.

A decent thief has a beautiful house too. He throws parties — until the night the police arrive and admire the artifacts on his walls.

A bad thief has no artifacts. He was caught with his hand still on the frame.

It's not really a tool like any we've used before. A screwdriver screws. A drill — drills. Every tool I've ever picked up only does a few things. AI does millions! Point it at almost anything and it takes the shape of the job. It's shapeless. We've never held something like it.

In the right hands it's fucking amazing to watch.

I've cut plenty of wood with a chainsaw. So if someone dumped a block of ice on my driveway, and I still had a chainsaw, I'd take a swing at carving it. Competition-worthy? N-O-P-E. Pride would sneak into my smile. Look at what I had no business creating! I'd show all my friends.

Then someone who does it for a living walks by, pats me on the head, and keeps moving.

With AI, I'm the one walking by you now. You hold up the thing you had no business creating, grinning, showing it to anyone who'll look — and I pat your head and keep moving.

I've worn that exact grin. I got lucky: a polymath background, turned designer that codes. That shapeless tool in my hands is a superpower. I can do almost literally anything. I just need time.

And that's a weird feeling.

Amazon will now let you design merch by talking to Alexa and have it printed direct-to-garment, shipped Prime. Describe a thing, get a hoodie. The avalanche of slop is on its way.

It's a novelty. Fine. But here's why I don't like it.

Some kids down the street made a flyer for their neighborhood car wash. Twenty bucks, we'll come over, we'll clean your car. Good hustle. Let's go! Except the flyer was designed by AI. It looked like literally everything else! Same fake confidence, same nobody-made-this design.

My reaction… I'm not using your service now.

The whole point of a neighborhood car wash is that it's your neighbors. Local kids. Somebody local, here, real. That's the entire pitch! And the slop stripped it out. The flyer that was supposed to say "we're the kids from down the street" says "we're the same as everyone, everywhere."

They should've drawn it like a kid. A crayon car and a crooked phone number would've out-converted the AI version ten to one, because it would've been true.

Draw it like a kid. I'll give you $20 bucks.

Everyone's optimizing for the robot now.

Listen to how people talk about it. They've got a magic toolset, a harness, the perfect prompt — and it's going to be the tits for their company. They're squeezing every last drop of efficiency out of the work.

Here's what gets squeezed out: improvisation. The wrong turn that becomes the whole point. The bored doodle that becomes the brand. The delight of making a thing without knowing exactly how it'll come out.

Optimize a creative process to death and you don't get more creation.

People are going to look up from their perfectly tuned pipeline one day and realize they don't enjoy a single part of it anymore.