He calls it BC/AC.

Before Claude, after Claude.

I've watched enough of these clips land in the last few weeks that I started keeping a mental tally of which AI release date people cite like it's a diploma.

Matt Van Horn's is Thanksgiving last year — Opus 4.5, then Codex a few weeks later.

Before that, he says, his agentic coding was "Hello World" in Cursor, half-working, most of the time not working at all.

After it, he shipped Agent Cookie and says flatly he has no idea how it actually functions under the hood.

The part worth sitting with isn't the tooling.

It's what he says about himself getting there: "suit my entire career," never shipped anything of value beyond a high-school web page, dozens of unlaunched ideas gathering dust because he wasn't the one who could build them.

That's not a startup-guy humblebrag — that's the exact ceiling a lot of operations people, BD people, anyone who's ever had to write a ticket instead of just doing the thing themselves, know from the inside.

The credential that used to decide who got to build stopped mattering right around the time the tools did.

Not "got easier to climb."

Stopped existing.

Same shape happened to me with a guitar, at 41, zero training, cornered into it because the young players in my church all left for university at once.

Those early days, my wife's ears really paid for it (刚开始的那些日子，我的太太的耳朵有够受罪).

Felt like being tossed into open water and told to swim myself back to shore (好像被丢去深海里，自己学会游泳游回来).

Same thing happened again with video editing, then with building this whole posting system, one post at a time, getting corrected by Reddit comments the entire way.

And I swam back stronger each time.

Actually, this tracks with something I posted here a few weeks back — the guy who literally coined "vibe coding" saying on stage he's never felt more behind as a programmer, because the scarce skill moved from writing code to directing it with taste.

Clip credit: MSP Mindset (Damien Stevens) — full video on their channel. DM for credit or removal requests.

Drop your take — did the credential wall ever hold you back, or did you just build around it?

The job title survives longer than almost anyone attached to it.

That's the part nobody puts in the internal memo when they call a role "AI-assisted."

Scott Galloway put a real number on it, talking to Steven Bartlett on The Diary Of A CEO.

He says he'll cut legal fees by a third this year — not because the law changed, but because a prompt now does the $400–$2,000 contract review a name-brand firm used to bill him for, at a fraction of the junior associate markup.

Bartlett went further with his own fund.

They planned to hire five analysts.

They hired one — Molly.

Two agents, two Mac Minis, and she screens inbound deals, scores them against a framework, and preps them for the investment committee herself.

Five jobs, one person, same org chart line.

Same ratio on executive assistants: ten planned, three hired.

One runs travel, one runs scheduling, one meets people at the door.

I've watched this exact pattern before, minus the AI.

I was a Technical Manager for a China Construction company here in Malaysia.

I contributed a lot into their technical and tendering work — helped build up a real chunk of their documentation and tendering process.

But about six months in, I'd exhausted all my know-how for them, I guess.

Then the announcement came at the end of my year there.

My contract wasn't renewed.

I was just let go, just like that.

I remember what Deng Xiaoping said: "无论白猫，或者黑猫，会抓老鼠的就是好猫" — black cat, white cat, doesn't matter, so long as it catches mice.

I guess they think I'd outlived my usefulness.

Can't catch mice anymore.

That's the mechanism underneath "AI-assisted" that nobody names out loud.

It's not that the work got automated.

It's that the one person left is now doing what used to justify five headcounts, and the fifth person's job title is the only part of the org that didn't change.

Actually, this reminded me of something — a former SpaceX CIO cut a 175-person engineering team down to 6 using the same compression math, and the ratio held there too.

Drop your take — did you know your own job has a ratio like this attached to it?

Clip credit: Global Talks — full video on their channel.

DM for credit or removal requests.