With AI accelerating the parts that used to take a team, one person can now design, build, and ship a polished native app. But that leverage only holds if the app stays small enough for one person to keep holding. Scope is the variable that decides whether AI leverage compounds or collapses.

But at some point, I started to realize something was off. The machine kept learning things it was never supposed to learn. Today it counts those r’s without trouble (though some people still bring up the strawberry). What’s more, OpenAI recently published more than 700 papers with the solutions to hundreds of open problems in mathematics.

Scientists from around the world called the results “unreal” and “breathtaking.” They wrote of “disorientation and bewilderment,” of “grief,” “shock,” and “disgust.” Hugo Duminil-Copin, winner of the Fields Medal (the highest prize in mathematics), wrote: “The shock is immense. I am paralyzed.”

Much of the labor involved in creating software doesn't add any value to the final product. It's simply the work required to get from an idea to its execution. Work that, until recently, couldn't be avoided.

And I think that's where we're getting confused again. We're treating the elimination of labor as the elimination of creativity, when those are two very different things.

The value of creative work lies in the ideas, decisions, and vision behind it, not in how difficult the tools make it to bring those things to life.

If I went back in time, I would take myself aside and say: “you appear to be making the most common mistake that scared men make in intimate relationships, which is believing that your job is to stop your partner from having emotions that are distressing to you. Consider that this is an attempt to control her, and that she’s not going to like it any more than you like being controlled. Maybe you could appreciate that she trusts you enough to show you difficult emotions. Maybe you could actually try to understand her perspective.

Economists refer to this as the “lump of labor” fallacy, the mistaken idea that there’s one long list of all the jobs that need to be done, and that list only ever gets shorter. Technology has obviously displaced human labor; if it hadn’t, we’d all still be farmers, like we were until a few hundred years ago. [1] It just hasn’t replaced human labor on average.

But the fact is all jobs are unnecessary. In the strictest sense, we don’t need financial advisors, IT guys, kindergarten teachers, or any other professions. Humans survived just fine for several hundred thousand years doing only two jobs, namely, “hunter” and “gatherer”. The fact that our modern luxuries feel like bare necessities is proof of our limitless capacity to upgrade our nice-to-haves into must-haves. This is why the labor-lump doesn’t shrink, and why the lump of labor fallacy would perhaps be better called the finite desires fallacy.

In 2014, a group of sleep researchers at Harvard Medical School reported that people who read on an e-book at night with a dim bedside light took longer to fall asleep, were less sleepy, had lower levels of melatonin, and were less alert the next morning compared to people who read a printed book with a dim bedside light before bed.271

But Fable 5.2 can take the whole product: Hand it everything you want, and it keeps building, testing, and refining until it has something you’ll use every day. It’s the first model we’ve tested that lets professionals build production-grade tools of their own without ever reading the underlying code.