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.
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.
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.
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.
The startup mythology has a convenient excuse built in. Most startups fail because the market is tough, the competition is fierce, the timing was wrong. External factors. Bad luck. Forces beyond anyone’s control.
This is cope. Most startups fail because the founders are bad at business. The market was fine. The idea was fine. The execution was bad because the people doing the execution did not know what they were doing.
There was a moment, somewhere around 2012, when the internet was as good as it was ever going to get. We did not know it at the time. We thought it would keep getting better. Instead it got worse, and we have been coasting on momentum ever since.
This is not just nostalgia. The structural incentives that made the early internet good have reversed. What we have now is optimised for different things, and those things are mostly bad for the people using it.
The return-to-office push has been justified with a lot of words. Collaboration. Culture. Serendipitous encounters. Innovation. Mentorship. Water cooler conversations. The magic that supposedly happens when bodies occupy the same physical space.
It is all bullshit.
The office exists because managers do not trust you to work without being watched. That is it. That is the reason. Everything else is a story they tell to make the distrust sound reasonable.
In 2008, the financial crisis destroyed millions of jobs. The unemployment rate doubled. People lost homes, savings, careers. It was the worst economic crisis in generations and it scarred everyone who lived through it.
I think we are headed for something worse. Not a financial crisis. An automation crisis. The kind of job displacement that makes 2008 look like a practice run.
This is not going to happen all at once. It is going to happen gradually, then suddenly, the way these things always happen. And when it hits, we will not be ready because we spent the warning period arguing about whether it was real.