The Flat Curve Society

Written days after the US government briefly switched off Fable, this is Steve extrapolating from one alarming week in June 2026 to the shape of the next decade — half geopolitical forecast, half management memo, with a concession speech tucked between them. To the crowd that always predicted AI would never replace engineers, after years of arguing the opposite, he offers: "In a way, you turned out to be right. A very practical way." The forecast is aggressive and specific about what gets restricted, when, and how far open models can climb against the compute wall, so unlike most AI punditry it can actually be graded, and soon.

The memo half rests on a Netflix training experiment Steve watched Ezra Savard present in April, and it carries unusually concrete numbers: what a day's token spend reveals about where an engineer stands, and how few classroom hours it takes to move them up a level for good, provided nobody cuts the corners that made every cheaper variant of the course fail. Along the way Steve describes his habit of hoarding "back-pocket evals," projects that defeated the last model, saved up so each new release feels like Christmas morning. That trick is worth stealing whatever becomes of the geopolitics. The funniest line in the piece comes from a CEO who still writes all his code by hand.