The Productivity Arrived.
The Leisure Never Did.

This one is for everyone living in Cursor, Claude, Codex, or whatever agent swarm you're running all day.

(If you're not, I'm disappointed in you.)

I was around for the first wave of personal computers in the 1980s. The promise was simple: do the same work in less time, and get some life back.

We got dramatically more productive. A day's work kept expanding anyway. The output expected from one person in 1995 would have looked absurd a decade earlier.

In 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that rising productivity would give his grandchildren a 15-hour workweek.

He saw the machine half of the equation clearly. He missed the human half: competitors don't let productivity gains become leisure.

Every gain becomes the new starting line. Then the race continues from there.

AI is the same pattern, only faster.

The engineer with AI ships more. The product manager with AI analyzes more. The founder with AI executes more.

And once enough people can do more, "more" becomes the expectation.

Nobody is working fewer hours. We're working the same hours, producing dramatically more, at higher intensity. That's not a complaint - it's a description of the terrain. Pretending otherwise is how people get blindsided.

So if you're already all-in, here's the part that matters: don't run at a pace that breaks you chasing every model, wrapper, and benchmark on your feed.

The people still standing a few years from now won't be the ones who sprinted hardest. They'll be the ones who built systems and judgment that compound while the tools change underneath them.

Skills tied to one tool depreciate with the tool. Judgment about what to build, what to trust, and where to aim the machines carries forward through every model release.