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.
Nobody in Canberra has stood up and said “we’re banning VPNs.” They don’t have to. If you’ve watched how this government operates, you already know where this is heading.
The under-16 social media ban kicked in back in December. TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, all of them now have to take “reasonable steps” to keep kids off, or cop fines up to $49.5 million. Fine. Whatever you think of the policy, that’s the law now.
Someone has registered isfable5back.com. The whole site is one word, “No,” with a little timer counting how long the best coding model anyone’s used has been switched off. A week now. I check it more than I’d like to admit.
If you missed it, the US Commerce Department ordered Anthropic to cut off Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for any foreign national on the 12th, at 5:21pm Eastern, citing national security. There’s no clean way to tell a foreign national from a US person across a few hundred million accounts on a Friday afternoon, so Anthropic did the only thing it could and pulled both models for everyone. I wrote about the politics of that already, the part where Dario spent months asking for exactly this power and then got hit with it. This post is the more selfish question. The one every developer who’d built Fable 5 into their day is actually asking. Is it coming back, and when it does, will it still be the thing we lost?
On the 10th of June, Dario Amodei published an essay arguing that governments should have the legal power to block dangerous AI deployments. Two days later, on the 12th at 5:21pm Eastern, the US Commerce Department used that exact power on him. It ordered Anthropic to cut off all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for any foreign national, anywhere in the world, citing national security. There was no way to comply selectively, so Anthropic pulled both models for everyone, paying customers included.
I started writing TypeScript in 2015, back when admitting that out loud in certain circles got you looks. It was barely past 1.0, the tooling was rough outside Visual Studio, and half the people I respected thought I’d lost the plot. I tried it on a side project, saw the editor catch a whole class of dumb mistakes before I’d even saved the file, and that was it. I was in.
A couple of years ago I wrote a post about the dangers of leaning on AI too hard. At the time it felt a bit like shouting at a cloud. The tools were handy, sure, but most people I knew still wrote the bulk of their own code and reached for ChatGPT when they got stuck.
That world’s gone. Pichai stood up at Cloud Next this year and said 75% of new code at Google is now AI-generated. Two years ago that number was 25%. The engineers there aren’t really writing code anymore so much as approving it. And Google isn’t a special case here. Everyone else is a year or two behind them on the same road.
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.
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.