AI Is Giving Me an Unfair Advantage

In that screenshot, you can see opencode instances running Opus 4.5. What you don't see are the six more in hidden tabs. They're all executing a sophisticated plan right now.

Here's the kind of prompt I might throw at them:

Create a nix module that sets up an rclone mount in this repo, configurable for S3 and R2.

That's me adding scalable blob storage to an app in a way that lets me move files around like any other directory. Meanwhile, a less experienced developer probably hasn't heard of rclone. They're dragging images into S3 buckets through AWS's clunky web interface. They're spending three hours debugging why a CORS policy won't let their images load.

The AI helps them too. It really does. But here's the uncomfortable part: while it cut their three-hour task down to ninety minutes, it cut my equivalent task down to five. And I wasn't just setting up storage—I was tricking Claude into generating my repo's README and teammate onboarding docs at the same time.

I'm asking for things a new developer doesn't even know to want yet.

It's Not Multiplication - It's Exponential

When I think about the productivity gain here, it's painfully obvious that AI doesn't add a flat percentage to everyone's output. It multiplies what you already have.

That hypothetical junior dev? Maybe 50% more productive. Me? Something closer to 1,000%. The gap isn't shrinking. It's compounding.

This is going to create a kind of wage gap that worries me. Not because I'm on the wrong side of it—but because of what it means for the solo developer ecosystem. The fresh-out-of-college founder building convert-my-image-to-jpeg.app might not stand a chance against a FAANG team with the same tools and ten years of accumulated context.

For some reason, that doesn't sit right with me.

What I'm Actually Afraid Of

I used to play nine simultaneous $0.01/$0.02 online poker games. You'd have this grid of tables, each one demanding just enough attention that you could barely keep up. It was a grind, but if you knew the patterns, you could print money while worse players tilted off their stacks one at a time.

That's what my screen looks like right now. A chess grid of Claudes, each one churning through a piece of something larger than any single session could hold.

I really hope the future isn't what I think it is. I hope there's still room for the scrappy builder who doesn't have a decade of infrastructure knowledge baked into their prompts. I hope the leverage stays democratizing instead of consolidating.

But as I sit here watching nine agents run like penny-stakes poker tables, I can't help but feel like that's not where we're headed.