The thing about AI that keeps circling back for me isn't the speed. It's the asynchrony. That's the actual shift. Not "tasks completed faster" but "tasks completed while you're doing something else entirely." The world starts operating on different clocks. You kick something off, go live your life, come back to a result. That's not optimization. That's a different mode of existence.

The abundance argument has been made before, and it's correct. Every abstraction layer in history created abundance. Assembly to C, C to Python, manual labor to machines. Each time, people predicted displacement. Each time, humans found higher-order things to do and the net expanded. AI is another layer in that chain. A steep one. The gains at scale are going to be genuinely strange, the kind where the global output of human effort looks unrecognizable compared to what it is today, because every individual scales in a way they just couldn't before.

The counter-intuitive part is what happens to developers specifically. Higher abstraction means operating at altitude. You're not managing memory, you're not writing boilerplate, you're not even writing most of the code. You're thinking about architecture, intent, tradeoffs. The work gets more conceptual, which sounds good until you notice what quietly disappears on the way up: the care. The detail. The thing where someone actually understood every moving part of what they built. That gets rarer as the altitude increases. Not because people become lazy. Because the abstraction makes it easier not to go there, and the feedback loop that would've told you "you need to understand this" gets muted.

And then there's the mechanical watch thing. There's a reason people are obsessed with them. Not because they tell time better. Because someone cared enough to spend hundreds of hours on tolerances measured in microns, on parts that fit just so, on a mechanism that doesn't need a battery because the physics was thought through that deeply. The care is the object. That level of depth becomes rarer as the world offloads more and more to abstraction. Which means it also becomes more valuable. The few people who still go there, who still want to understand the thing all the way down, will produce something that the high-altitude operators genuinely can't. Not better. Different. And there will be an audience for it.

So the parting thought is just: the world goes async, most people climb to higher altitude, and the detail-oriented few become something like artisans. Both paths are real. Both produce value. Just very different kinds.