It’s 9am. You’ve just made your coffee. You’re ready to be productive. Then your calendar reminds you that you have standup in five minutes. You sigh, open the video call, and wait for everyone to trickle in over the next seven minutes while Dave figures out why his microphone isn’t working again.
Finally, the ritual begins. Sarah goes first. “Yesterday I worked on the API stuff, today I’m continuing with the API stuff, no blockers.” Fantastic. Groundbreaking information. Absolutely could not have been a single line of text.
GPT-5.5 dropped yesterday under the rumoured codename Spud, and I’ve been hammering on it inside Codex for most of today. I want to say something that probably won’t be popular. It feels a lot like GPT-5.4.
That’s not a bad thing exactly, but it’s also not the leap the X timeline had me bracing for. Every leaker for the past month was whispering about big model smell. The general vibe was that OpenAI was about to drag the throne back from Anthropic in one swing. Sam’s strawberry potato tweet didn’t help calm anyone down. By the time the announcement landed, half the AI internet had convinced itself we were getting a generational jump.
At 25 I could code until 3am, sleep four hours, and do it again the next night. I had endless energy. I also had no idea what to do with it. I would start projects and abandon them. Chase every shiny new framework. Rewrite working code because I read a blog post that made me feel bad about my architecture. The engine was running hot but the steering was all over the place.
For fifteen years I played guitar in my bedroom. Noodling. Learning the opening riff of songs and never finishing them. Playing the same power chords I learned in 2005. I owned nice gear. I watched YouTube tutorials. I told people I played guitar, which was technically true in the same way someone who owns running shoes is technically a runner.
Then I started playing at church and everything changed.
In six months I learned more than the previous fifteen years combined. Not because church music is particularly complex (it is not) but because I finally had something I never had before: a reason to actually get better.
Remember Web3? The decentralised future where users owned their data and corporations did not control everything? The revolution that was going to disrupt Big Tech and return power to the people?
It was speculation. That is all it ever was. The tech industry took gambling on tokens and wrapped it in revolutionary language to make it sound like innovation. The revolution was not coming. The tokens were coming. That was the whole thing.
Let me save you the suspense. If your job can be done from a laptop and an internet connection, there is no good reason you should be commuting into an office during a fuel shock like this.
We already ran the biggest accidental experiment in remote work anyone could have asked for. It worked. The world did not end. Companies did not collapse. Projects still shipped, meetings still happened, and the entire knowledge economy did not spontaneously burst into flames because people were working from spare bedrooms instead of beige carpet boxes in the CBD.
We used to build things. Software that did something. Products that solved problems. Tools that people used.
Now we build apps to talk about building things. Project management tools for managing projects that produce nothing. Communication platforms for communicating about communication. Productivity apps that consume more time than they save.
The industry has become meta. We are so busy building tools for building that we forgot to build anything.
Look at a modern developer’s setup. They have tools for task management. Tools for note-taking. Tools for documentation. Tools for communication. Tools for code review. Tools for deployment. Tools for monitoring. Tools for managing the other tools. Each tool promises productivity. Together they consume productivity. The time spent configuring, maintaining, and switching between tools is time not spent on actual work. The tools became the work.
You spent years building expertise. Learning the domain. Mastering the tools. Understanding the nuances that only come with experience. This expertise is your value. It is why people pay you. It is why you have a career.
It has an expiration date. And that date is approaching faster than you think.
This is not pessimism. This is pattern recognition. The half-life of expertise is shortening. The skills that were valuable for decades are now valuable for years. The knowledge that used to compound is now depreciating. The ground is shifting under everyone’s feet.
The RBA just raised the cash rate to 4.1%. That is two hikes in two months. The big four banks are tipping a third in May to 4.35%, which would be three consecutive rate rises for the first time since March 2023, back when they were trying to wrangle post-COVID inflation. Two rate hikes in the first quarter of 2026 has added $225 a month to the average home loan, or $2,700 a year. That nearly wipes out the three rate cuts we got in 2025.
You can earn more money. You can rebuild your health. You can make new friends to replace the ones you lost. Most resources that feel scarce can be regenerated if you invest the effort.
Attention cannot. You have a finite amount of attention in your lifetime. When you spend it, it is gone. There is no getting it back. There is no earning more. You get what you get and then you die.