the machine does the task and you still have to choose it

a test that went around yesterday put twelve licensed accountants up against a frontier ai model on real accounting tasks.

the humans averaged about 37 percent and took anywhere from thirty minutes to three hours. the model scored 100 percent on every run and finished each one in under ten minutes....

the people who ran it said this doesn't mean accountants are replaceable. sure. but everyone read the headline, not the footnote.

here's what i think it means. competent work just became a commodity. if your value is doing the task right, you're now competing with something that costs pennies.

so what's left?

i recorded an episode this afternoon with a guest who has spent two decades advising people whose names are on the cover. a big part of his job, he told me, is talking the people who motivate everyone else back down to earth.

they get the applause and the nice seats, and after a while they start believing the clapping. he's the one who tells them their behaviour doesn't match their brand.

then i asked what a client walks out with after working with him. one word. clarity. without it, he said, people confuse activity with productivity.

that's the accountant test in one sentence. the machine has unlimited activity. it'll do the task a thousand times without blinking. what it can't do is decide which task is worth doing.

think of a treadmill. it'll let you run forever and never take you anywhere. clarity is the decision to step off and walk to the place you meant to go.

everyone thinks the scarce thing in this era is skill. it isn't. it's judgment about what to point the skill at, and the stomach to hear when you're pointing it wrong.

his advice for a founder with one idea and no audience was short. validate first. find out if people will trade time, energy and dollars for it. then build

long term, this is the real job of a founder. not doing the work. choosing the work. the doing is going to keep getting cheaper untill it costs close to nothing.

it's how we run outbound too. the machines do the volume, you do the deciding, and you hold every relationship. i wrote up how it fits together on the offer page.

so be honest with yourself.... how much of last week was activity, and how much of it moved anything?