There Was Time Now

A Twilight Zone story supplies the central metaphor: book-loving bank teller Henry Bemis survives a nuclear blast and finds himself with the solitude and library he always wanted, only to break his glasses before he can read. His despairing realization that he finally has time captures the tension explored here: people in San Francisco now have unprecedented power to make things, but that new capacity does not guarantee a meaningful purpose for using it.

AI tools such as Sol and Opus can turn long-held ambitions or sudden ideas into working products with startling ease. Yet the “Bitter Lesson” - that broad methods powered by more computing outperform carefully handcrafted solutions - seems to be reshaping software and organizations as well as AI research. Startups built to solve particular problems may be overtaken by large AI labs that can apply their resources across fields including programming, finance, security, and biology. The author points to Anthropic’s rapid growth as an extreme example of this shift. The resulting predicament is not that there is nothing left to build, but that people eager to create may discover that models or powerful companies will build many things without them. The old work remains, but the kind of mission many prepared for is changing, leaving an unsettling question about where human ambition belongs.