October 14th 2025

The Reflective Operator, Vol. 01

Series: This essay is part of “The Reflective Operator” — an ongoing exploration of technology, behaviour, and meaning in the age of intelligent systems. I write to think, not to defend. Each piece is a step toward clarity in a world moving faster than ever.

The future didn’t announce itself — it just started building beside me.

"Holy Shit.”

Those two words flew out of my mouth when I revisited Replit after Agent 3’s release last month.

From planning to building to debugging, I had a team of agents working in synchronicity. The whole process unfolded like a relay race: my Fullstack Agent wrote the backend, handed it off to the Architect for review, and finally to the Tester for debugging.

In under two hours, I had a working application that would have cost five figures to develop just three years ago.

I’ve always been into tech but I only started building it in 2021 and experimenting with AI tools in early 2023. But this felt different — like watching the future assemble itself in real time.

The speed of improvement is absurd; every week new use cases appear, and it just keeps getting easier to build and ship.

AI isn’t a silver bullet. And yes, the industry is full of hyperbole. But dismissing what’s happening would be as foolish as taking part in the party — plus we’ve never been good at grasping exponential change or escape velocity as a species.

It's not a matter of if, its a matter of when Execution is commoditised. And that moment changed how I think about building. It forced me to ask the question every founder will soon face:

When execution becomes a commodity, what becomes our edge?

The Pace of Change

In my 17 years in business, the last two have outpaced the previous fifteen combined. We’ve lived through the dot-com boom, web 2.0, smartphones, and social media — but nothing matches the velocity of what’s happening right now.

So what does all this change mean for both us and our businesses?

Let’s start with the basic building blocks of creation: ideas, knowledge, and execution.

Ideas

Ideas have always been cheap. Everyone has them; good, bad, amazing but few are brave enough to face rejection in pursuit of validation.

We all have that one uncle who says, “I had that idea years ago.”

Cool — but you did nothing about it.

Ideas aren’t the problem. They never were.

Knowledge

Knowledge used to be a moat.

In the early 2000s, it lived behind university walls and paywalled journals. By 2010, it was free and everywhere — YouTube, blogs, MOOCs. Knowledge went from privilege to commodity, and the internet handed everyone a master’s degree in whatever they wanted to learn.

Thank you, Internet.

Execution

For the longest time, execution was a huge differentiator.
You could have a great idea and abundant knowledge, but you still needed capital, talent, and operational skill to bring it to life.

That was the founder’s edge. That edge is disintegrating.

As I saw first-hand, it cost me a total of $25 of compute, an hour of planning and one hour of tinkering to build a functional MVP using AI agents — something that would have cost between £30k-£60k just three years ago.

No team. Minimal risk. Just a few prompts of instruction and an agent network doing the work. Yes, a human still needs to be in the loop — perhaps a few, if the project is technically demanding. That in itself is both empowering and unsettling.

Execution is on a fast track to join knowledge and ideas in the commodity bin.

The next question writes itself:

When everyone can build anything, what still matters?

Discernment

The edge perhaps is moving from execution to discernment.

When building and writing code is close to free, your advantage is knowing what not to build.

It’s your ability to:

  • Spot patterns and opportunities others miss.
  • Understand the problem better than your users do.
  • Translate that understanding into clarity for your agents.
  • Build environments that feel stable, meaningful, human.

Because in a world where everyone can make, the only thing that matters is whether anyone cares. Execution and speed will level off.

So what comes next?

The implications of this shift are enormous.

When execution becomes cheap, the real value moves elsewhere — into meaning, trust, and discernment.

We’ll need to redefine what it means to create value when anyone can build anything. To rediscover what it means to contribute when machines can do almost everything faster. And to rebuild identity in a world that no longer measures worth by output alone.

That won’t be easy. It will challenge how we work, how we learn, and how we define purpose itself.

But that’s the work worth doing.

Because as the tools become more intelligent, the humans who thrive will be the ones who stay intentional — those who build with empathy, curiosity, and care.

You might be wondering, as am I, where’s the edge now?

It's probably still too early to tell but I believe it belongs to those who can move across disciplines fluidly, who can see problems clearly, design elegantly, tell stories persuasively, and distribute effectively.

Well-rounded generalists & multi-skilled developers will rise — strategic organisers of systems, data, and experience, weaving coherence from chaos. Building communities around those same experiences and products.

Maybe the bigger question we’ll all have to face is:

What does it mean to be human when our identity has been tied to productivity for so long?

This is just the beginning of what’s next within this series — an exploration of how we build alongside machines, where our edges move, and how we keep meaning alive in the process.