There's a genre of post now where a hundred people show up somewhere not knowing what they'll build, and by the afternoon they have something to sell. It's true. It doesn't mean what people think it means.
Skill is stored effort. The hours you already spent, sitting there quietly multiplying the hours you spend today. Which is why "he built it in a weekend" is a lie of omission. The weekend is real. The eight years that told him which weekend to spend are invisible, so they get filed under instinct.
AI is borrowed effort. An enormous amount of it, and everyone gets the same portion on the same day for the same price. Whatever it hands you for free it hands the next person for free. So its output is roughly the average of what has already been done, and effort is the distance from that average. The hundred people each pulled one sample from one distribution, then found it strange that the samples rhyme.
The part people have backwards is that tools widen the distribution. Everyone assumes that when a thing gets easy, the field flattens out. It has never once done that. Kodak sold the first snapshot camera in 1888 with the line "you press the button, we do the rest," and Ansel Adams still needed forty years. The multiplier lands on skill, and skill varies, so a ten-times tool takes a gap of nine and turns it into a gap of ninety. Chess engines handed every player alive perfect analysis, and the players who used them hardest pulled further ahead of the field.
Which is why the bar never drops. A product used to take a week. Now it takes a weekend. The good one still takes a month, because the bar is set by whoever is willing to spend everything they have, and that is still a person with a body and a small number of good hours in a day. Efficiency never gets banked. It gets eaten by ambition.
Some effort compresses. Typing, drafting, the obvious build. That part is heading to nearly zero. Some doesn't. Three years of users hitting your thing in ways you didn't plan for. Six years of data you wrote down every morning. Someone deciding you're worth trusting. Nine women can't make a baby in a month, and nobody catches that up by trying harder this week.
The tools changed what an hour buys. Nobody got more hours.
— Simon