Cheap

Got back to my apartment after being away for a while, and the washing machine had been sitting unused for about a year. First load came out smelling terrible. Normally that’s the kind of small annoying task I’d put off for weeks, googling around for conflicting answers and never feeling sure what to do (unless the landlord buys a new one). This time I just asked Fable 5 and it walked me through the whole thing. It told me what cleaning powder to buy and how to run an empty hot cycle, and it sorted out the Italian buttons on the machine for me. I followed along and the smell was gone.

Small thing, but it stuck with me. Cleaning a washing machine I’d never cleaned before is pure execution. I knew nothing about how to clean one, but I didn’t need to agonize over whether to bother. I just followed along and it was done.

That’s the pattern across everything I touch now. The cost of going from “I want this” to “it’s done” keeps dropping.

I forget how expensive execution used to be. Twenty years ago, turning an idea into a real thing was the hard part. Building an app meant a team of engineers for a year. Even a contract or a financial model could take months of skilled labor. Execution was the bottleneck, so society paid its executors well, the programmers and analysts and lawyers and designers. A lot of elite education was really just training to become a high-end executor.

Now every one of those steps is getting radically cheaper. One person with AI tools can produce the kind of software and design and research that used to need a whole team.

The part I keep thinking about is more personal. I’m INTJ, and people like me quietly believe our execution is stronger than everyone else’s. Being good at execution was almost an identity. Give me a problem and I’ll grind it out better than anyone. That edge is mostly gone now, and my execution is cheap like everyone else’s.

But something else shifted too. A lot of my hesitation has just disappeared. Most of it always came from not feeling like I knew enough to begin, so I’d hold off on starting. It’s like a student stalling on homework, not because the homework is hard but because they don’t feel ready yet. That brake is gone now, since the model fills in whatever I’m missing as I go. I started the washing machine thing knowing nothing and finished it fine.

So if execution is cheap, the value moves to deciding what to do, and I keep underestimating how much weight that carries now. A lot of real execution gets wiped out almost as fast as it shows up. The apps and functions and whole pieces of software that people built careers on can get rebuilt by a model in an afternoon, so the building itself stops holding much value. The thing that survives is the decision of what was worth making in the first place.

And that leaves taste, which I’m not even sure how to judge. When the model hands me a hundred versions of something, picking the good one isn’t something I can write down. I know it when I see it but I can’t always say why, and the model won’t tell me either. It’ll happily call all hundred of them fine. Maybe taste is just the leftover sense of what’s worth doing once everything measurable has been automated away. Whatever it is, taste is the one thing that hasn’t gotten cheaper, and I think that’s because it can’t really be copied.

People get knowledgeable by learning, slowly connecting the dots over years until the world makes a bit more sense. The model already did all of that, took in just about all the knowledge there is. But all that knowledge never made the model wise, and I don’t think that’s going to change. Holding all the knowledge clearly isn’t the same as having taste. Whatever taste is, it sits past knowledge, somewhere that knowing more doesn’t reach on its own.

I won’t pretend I’ve figured this out. I can’t predict where this goes, and “deciding what to do” is still vague to me. I need to sit with it more. But the direction feels clear enough today. Execution keeps getting cheaper and that isn’t slowing down.

For now I’m just noticing it in small places, like the washing machine. A chore that would normally sit around for weeks took ten minutes. The gap between wanting and doing keeps shrinking, and I’m still adjusting to what that means.