10x is the new floor
Good enough just stopped being enough
I live in two realities.
In one, founders are swapping tools by the week. They max out token limits before lunch and feel anxious about it. A solo engineer is now shipping what took a team of five last year. People refactor workflows every quarter and still feel behind. Everyone around me has welcomed AI into every part of their workflow (thinking AND shipping).
In the other, I sit across from Fortune 500 execs who still think of LLMs as a toy. VPs of Engineering who haven’t opened Cursor. And, these aren’t just random people on the street. These are people with decades of experience who have refused to update their mental models. Their priors froze when LLMs couldn’t count the number of Rs in strawberry. The models have improved every week since. The harnesses around them have gotten dramatically better. They wouldn’t know because they refuse to get their hands dirty.
It’d be one thing if these realities existed in different parts of the world. But, I’m seeing them in one place. At the same dinner.
Block cut 4,000 people last month. 40% of the company. Jack was blunt: smaller teams with AI tools do more and do it better. He predicted most companies will follow within a year. The stock jumped 24%.
Working at startups, the “10x engineer” was always a mythical being. That one person on every team who shipped while everyone else was still debating the right abstraction layer. We told stories about them like Usain Bolt. Aspirational. One per generation.
I think the world has not priced in the fact that AI has raised the floor. A human paired with AI can already perform at the 10x level. The mythical 10x didn’t get better. The floor just rose to meet them.
The talent market used to follow a bell curve. Most people clustered around average. Companies built compensation and leveling around that distribution. Show up, do solid work, get promoted on schedule. That curve is splitting in half. Every week the tools get more capable, and more people will be expected to perform at the new level.
The people who have truly embraced AI have figured out their job is to be a conductor. Hold all the context, the feeling, the texture in their head while using a fleet of agents to handle the execution. It’s like playing chess while making sure a dozen trains don’t run into each other, even though each train has its own conductor. You just need to hear when something’s off.
The other side still meets their OKRs. I was at a dinner recently and sat next to a VP of Product. 16 years at big tech companies. Runs a tight ship. When I asked what he’d personally built with AI, he listed things his team had done. His hands hadn’t been dirty in years. Built a career on reliable competence. Shows up, hits deadlines, keeps the trains running.
That profile used to be the most valued in corporate America for half a century. $300K and a comfortable trajectory. The tools just caught up to it. Heck, let’s be honest, they are better than them.
AI should be renamed amplification intelligence. It simply showed who already had agency and curiosity, and amplified them. The variance used to always exist. Now, it’s clear as night and day.
This is coming for all of us faster than any of us like to admit. The two realities are colliding fast. And when they do, only one version of “good enough” survives.