sids blog

AI isn’t ultimate leverage because it does things for you. It’s ultimate leverage because it collapses the time between “I don’t understand this” and “I can build with this” across every domain simultaneously.

Historically, becoming excellent at anything meant picking one narrow lane and spending a decade in it, because acquiring competence was slow and expensive. AI cuts that acquisition cost. That’s the actual mechanism. Makes everything easier is the surface effect; collapses the cost of acquiring new competence is the underlying cause.

If you only use AI as a faster pair of hands (write the email, generate the code, summarize the document), you capture the surface gains. If you use it as a competence compressor, deliberately going from ignorance to working proficiency in new areas, you start compounding in a way that was previously reserved for a tiny number of polymaths or people with extreme resources.