February 2020 Again. And the Silence of Engineers.

TL;DR:

• The shock: Talking with dozens of tech professionals lately, I notice a pattern: nobody pays for an AI subscription out of their own pocket. Nobody knows frontier models.
• The "Future Shock": We're suffering a psychological paralysis diagnosed in 1970. The human brain can't handle exponential change.
• The "February 2020" effect: AI this month (February 2026) crossed a line. It's no longer a glorified autocomplete — now it has judgment and agency.
• The plan: Take advantage of the general blindness. Pay for the tool, break systems, and build an edge while everyone else sleeps.

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It's ten at night. I just got Max to sleep and sat straight down at the computer because a strange thought got stuck in my head after giving a talk to about 60 people this afternoon.

This thought was half alarm, half disbelief.

Over the last few weeks, through my role and my initiative of evangelizing about Artificial Intelligence, I've had the chance to talk with a lot of tech professionals. Brilliant people, the kind who keep corporate systems running at different companies.

When I talk to them about standard strategy — what corporations give us, the Copilots, the in-house solutions — everything is in order. They nod their heads.

The problem comes when I go off the corporate script and ask a couple of uncomfortable questions:

"Who here knows what a frontier model is?" Silence.

"Who is paying out of their own pocket for a Claude Opus, Gemini Advanced, or ChatGPT Plus subscription?"

Almost nobody raises their hand. Let alone asking about autonomous agents, local models, or how to connect complex workflows. For the vast majority, AI is still that free chat they ask to summarize an email once in a while.

And I repeat: I'm talking about tech people.

If those of us in the trenches building software have no idea what's happening in the street, the everyday professional who doesn't know how to set up a proxy is walking blind toward the cliff.

The "Future Shock" (A Warning from 1970)

Looking for an explanation for this lethargy, I remembered Alvin Toffler.

In 1970, Toffler published a book called Future Shock. His thesis was brutal and today is prophetic: human beings and institutions (aka Corpo) are biologically designed to process slow, incremental changes. When the technological environment accelerates brutally, we enter a state of "psychological shock."

We become paralyzed. We try to apply the rules of the old world to a world that no longer exists, because our wetware can't handle exponential change.

That's exactly what I see in many people in the industry. And note — I'm not talking about the social media ecosystem where there are more experts than actual people. I mean the flesh-and-blood people you actually work with or interact with directly.

And note it's not laziness you see — it's evolutionary paralysis. Our linear brain can't process that a technology that in 2022 couldn't do basic math is today rewriting how software is created.

And if you think I'm exaggerating about our industry's essence having changed forever, watch the interview I listened to this weekend while putting in kilometers on the treadmill — Boris Cherny, the leader of Claude Code at Anthropic. Among all the gems he dropped, he said two things that leave you cold:

He now ships up to 30 Pull Requests daily just by orchestrating multiple parallel agents and planning. "Code" is no longer a human problem.

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The February 2020 Syndrome

All of this led me to a viral article that Matt Shumer put out a few days ago called "Something Big Is Happening." Shumer used a perfect analogy: "Think about February 2020."

Do you remember? We were hearing about a virus in Asia. But the stock market was going up, everyone was happy (or most were), we were having barbecues, and if someone told you they were stockpiling toilet paper to lock themselves in, you thought they were crazy. Three weeks later, the entire world turned inside out.

With AI we're in exactly that phase of "this is an exaggeration."

While the majority, gripped by Future Shock, debates whether AI hallucinates or not, the reality is that on February 5th of this year, models launched (GPT-5.3 Codex, Opus 4.6) that broke the matrix. They no longer hand you a draft for you to fix. You describe a system, they write thousands of lines of code, test it, see what fails, correct it on their own, and hand you the finished product. They have something that was previously exclusive to humans: They have judgment.

And the most chilling (or fascinating) thing: AI is already writing the code for the next AI. The feedback loop closed.

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The Marathon Wall

Anyone who has run 42km knows what "The Wall" is. Around kilometer 32, the body runs out of glycogen, and if you didn't do your homework in training and nutrition, the system collapses. You shut down.

The labor market is reaching its kilometer 32. A lot of people believe their job is safe because "AI doesn't have empathy" or "doesn't understand my company's context." It's the same denial of someone who goes out to run a marathon fast thinking the wall won't hit them.

If your job passes through a screen, a massive portion of what you do is about to be automated. And not in five years.

Your Survival Plan (Take Advantage of the Ignorance)

I'm not writing this to you at ten at night to depress you. I'm writing it because the mass ignorance provoked by this Future Shock is, paradoxically, your greatest competitive advantage if you decide to wake up today.

While everyone else moves at tortoise speed waiting for a committee to approve the use of a tool, you have to move at market speed.

The information asymmetry right now is brutal. The person who walks into a meeting room today knowing how to dominate tools that everyone else doesn't even know exist becomes untouchable.

Don't wait for the market to tell you your chair disappeared.

Take charge.

Pablo / Above Average