The curve won’t wait for you

People throw the word exponential around until it stops meaning anything. So let’s put down a number, a verifiable one, and look it in the face.

The curve has a measurement

An independent research institute, METR, had a simple idea. Instead of grading AI with exam scores, measure the length of the tasks an AI can carry through to the end on its own. The yardstick: the time it takes a human professional to accomplish the same thing.

The result fits in one sentence. That length doubles roughly every seven months, and it has done so steadily for six years. At the end of 2022, when ChatGPT came out, the best models could hold a thirty-second task. By early 2026, some complete, on their own, tasks that take an expert several hours. And the trend isn’t slowing, it’s accelerating: over the recent period, the doubling happens more like every four months. The original measurement dates from spring 2025, and every generation released since has only confirmed the slope, or steepened it.

That’s what an exponential is. Not a slope you climb calmly at your own pace. A step that moves while you’re deciding whether to take it. By the time your steering committee delivers its opinion on AI, the capability it was debating has doubled. By the time you draft the usage charter, it has doubled again.

What it looks like from the inside

I’m not telling you about a report I read. I’m telling you about what I lived. In the past few months, I multiplied my capacity to produce by twenty. Alone. Several sites rebuilt from scratch, a business architecture reconstructed, an ERP installed, tools created from nothing. Even with a full team, we wouldn’t have kept up. Not better — not at all.

Want a concrete benchmark for the speed? A focus group I ran four months ago for a research project on HR already feels like it belongs to another century, given how much the tools have changed since. And this guide you’re reading, from the first brainstorm to going live, layout included, took me less than an afternoon. Let’s be honest about what that means: I’m talking about writing and laying out a body of thinking, not conjuring it out of thin air. A large share of the sources comes from groundwork that’s been running on my side for three years. AI didn’t think in my place. It collapsed the time between the thought and its finished form. That’s the curve, at the scale of a single person.

Now, the honesty I owe you

And it runs against what you’d expect from a text about power.

The same institute, METR, ran another study. A randomized controlled trial, the protocol usually reserved for drugs. Seasoned developers, on their own code, projects they knew by heart. Verdict: with the AI tools of early 2025, they took nineteen percent longer. Slower. And that’s not even the most troubling part. Those same developers were convinced they had been twenty percent faster. Nearly forty points of gap between what they felt and what had actually happened.

One caveat is in order, and it’s a delicious one. That study was run with early-2025 tools. On AI timescales, that’s an eternity. And I’m not the one saying so, METR is. The same institute re-ran its protocol, and in early 2026, on the same developers, the sign flipped: instead of nineteen percent of time lost, they now estimate a gain of around eighteen percent. The reason is plain: agentic tool usage exploded in 2025, and a tipping point came in late 2025 with the arrival of Gemini 3, then Claude Opus 4.7 and GPT-5.5, which made a spectacular leap on code. To the point where a growing share of those developers would now refuse to work without them. There’s the curve, caught red-handed: a landmark study overturned by its own author within a year.

Let’s stay honest, because that’s what separates a fact from a sales pitch. METR says it themselves: these new numbers are fragile, selection bias, small sample, and they’re reworking their method. And the recent studies, taken together, sketch a wide spread, from outright slowdown to massive acceleration depending on the developers, the language, and how clean the code is. To my mind, big studies like this one are already obsolete by the time you read them, because everything has changed in six months. So don’t hold on to the percentage. Hold on to what doesn’t expire: the gap between what you feel and what is actually happening. No new model version will ever erase that, because it isn’t a matter of tools, it’s a matter of humans.

So, does AI make you slower, or does it multiply you by twenty? Both. And that is the whole subject of this guide.

A French creator, Micode, framed the risk with a line that stuck: AI won’t replace us, it will make us stupid. His thesis, in the video La Fabrique à Idiots, isn’t that the machine takes your job. It’s that it takes your effort. Delegate without thinking and you atrophy, until you end up mistaking the text produced for the skill acquired. That is exactly the trap the perception gap reveals: you feel stronger while you’re getting weaker.

The lever isn’t in the tool

The tool alone does nothing. Bolted onto an old way of working, it slows you down, because it adds mental load and constant back-and-forth. You spend your time explaining, rereading, correcting. That is exactly what the study measured.

My x20 didn’t come from a plugin I switched on one morning. It came from a complete overhaul of how I produce. Of what I delegate and what I keep. Of how I chain tasks, how I break down a problem, how I check a result.

That is precisely what separates the one falling behind from the one multiplying by twenty. The same tool. Two worlds.

The whole difference is there, between a crutch and a lever. The crutch carries you, spares you the effort, and ends up atrophying you. The lever always demands your strength, but it multiplies it. Micode describes the crutch. I’m talking about the lever. It’s the same object, and they are two fates.

This chapter isn’t a threat, it’s a filter

The curve will keep going, whether you’re ready or not. No one will pause it while you get organized. The only thing still yours is choosing which side of the lever you’ll be on.

And that, no tool will ever decide for you.