
The Third Race to the Bottom
Consulting has played this game twice before—with body shops, then offshore. Now AI is the new lever. But what if the pattern itself is the problem?

Consulting has played this game twice before—with body shops, then offshore. Now AI is the new lever. But what if the pattern itself is the problem?

Wade Foster doesn't send memos about AI. He runs hackathons and show-and-tells. That distinction matters more than most CEOs realize—and it's the same thing I've been telling my own teams.

In the 1950s, engineers resisted compilers because they feared losing control. Now we're hitting that same phase transition—except the 'assembly' we're abstracting away is Python itself.

I don't need more Salesmen. I need a Sushi Master, a Pitmaster, and a Molecular Gastronomist. AI lets us return to the Guild—craftspeople in their own lanes, augmenting their own mastery.

An LLM is the ultimate observer. Like the angels in City of Angels, it watches everything. But it cannot taste. That's both a gap and an opportunity.

What if the billable hour isn't a business model—it's a coping mechanism? A way to avoid confronting that the thing we're selling might not be scarce anymore.

I've been the bridge. Between strategy and code, between design and delivery. It's exhausting. And lately I've been wondering if exhausting is the same thing as valuable.

Everyone spent 2024-2025 experimenting with AI features. Q1 2026 is when the survivors figure out what actually works—and kill what doesn't.

Every e-commerce platform is racing to add AI features. But what if the real opportunity isn't AI features—it's AI architecture? What if the store itself could generate in real-time?

After 25 years bridging strategy to production, I still can't answer 'what do you do?' cleanly. That might be the point.