The Builder’s Singularity

The history of progress is the history of people overcoming friction. In the past, you had to convince someone to give you capital, form a team, hire engineers, rent servers, build interfaces, write code, debug it, test it, ship it. And if your idea didn't take off, you started over again, a little more tired and maybe a little more broke. Most ideas died long before they ever reached users. Some died even before they reached a prototype. They died in coffee shops, in notebooks, in late night texts. They died because the effort of making them real was too high.

Now something strange is happening. One by one, those layers of friction are disappearing. The capital required to launch an idea has dropped to something close to zero. The time required to test an interface has shrunk from weeks to minutes. Even the need to know how to code, once a moat around the world of builders, is melting away. AI isn't just another tool. It's the subtraction of cost. It's what happens when the friction of building goes away.

What’s left, then, when the effort of building fades into the background? You're left with three things: bias for action (agency), the ability to describe (prompting), and the originality of the idea (what should we build).

Bias for action, or what people now call agency, is the difference between a builder and a yapper. It’s the trait that turns a person’s thoughts into motion. High agency is rare. Most people wait to be told what to do. Most people look around for permission. But if you’re someone who wakes up and builds, who doesn't need to be told twice, the world that AI is creating is your playground.

Prompting might seem like a strange skill to emphasize. But when you are talking to a machine, what matters is your ability to articulate exactly what you want. That used to be a rare trait mostly useful to authors and UX people and product managers. Now it is an engineering tool. If you can describe the desired behavior of an app or interface or story clearly and precisely, an AI can build it for you. Prompting is just interface design in a new form. The clearer your thoughts, the more accurately you can externalize them. The better you write, the more powerful your build.

And finally, the hardest and most enduring skill of all: what to build. This has always been hard. You could give two people the same tools and one of them builds a toy while the other builds a revolution. Tools don’t matter without direction. AI doesn’t help much here. It gives you leverage, not vision. But it does make it possible for anyone with a vision to act on it immediately, and that’s the crucial shift.

If you have these three things; the will to build, the ability to express, and a nose for what matters, then you no longer need a team, or a budget, or a decade. You can do in a week what used to take a year. You can test ten ideas in the time it takes others to commit to one. And this changes the math of building entirely.
Before, entrepreneurship was constrained by access: to capital, talent, and permission. Now it's constrained by imagination. You can imagine something this morning, prompt it into existence by lunch, and start testing it by dinner. The latency between idea and experiment is nearing zero. That shift is not incremental. It's explosive.

We are going to see a kind of entrepreneurship that looks more like jazz than opera. Rapid, improvisational, unpolished. Built fast, launched faster, and iterated in real time. Small teams, sometimes solo creators, building entire experiences without touching a line of code. They will fail more often, but that won’t matter. The cost of failure is dropping as fast as the cost of trying.

Most people will see AI as a threat to jobs, or as another wave of automation. They will debate its ethics, its power, its bias. And those debates matter. But they will also miss something: that for a certain kind of person, AI is removing the last excuses.

In the past, you had to wait. Now you just have to act. If you have even a little agency, and a little originality, the distance between you and impact has never been smaller.

We talk a lot about the danger of AI. But what we should talk about more is its invitation. Because it’s not telling you what to build. It’s asking: why aren’t you building already?