Welcome to the Age of Authorship
Where the only thing that matters is mattering.
Hi all,
Happy I-don’t-know-what-day-it-is for all those who were at SXSW.
As I mentioned last week, there’s no pod this week. Instead, we have something that I’ve been wrestling with for the last few weeks, ever since I fired up Claude Code a month ago and stared the devil in the eye.
I say with all seriousness, though completely aware of how unhinged it sounds: the world has changed, and most of the world just doesn’t know it yet.
I know they don’t know because of this graph. This is our 8B person world. The red dot represents the people who have tried to build something with Claude Code, or Codex, or [insert building tool name here]. The number of users of prompting LLMs is fractionally bigger (regular Claude, ChatGPT, etc), but those two worlds aren’t the same.
That dot is about to become every yellow, green, and white dot, give or take, being generous, 2 years. Maybe less. Regardless, it’s going to be fast. The speed of adoption will be staggering.
It’s going to be massive.
And it’s going to change everything.
Let’s go back to what the red dot represents. It represents people who are building.
Last month alone, I’ve built a peptide app with B2B and B2C functionality. I built a search tool for GOOD THINKING. I built a job board. I built a website for a side project. None of these took more than a day. The build took a couple of hours max. The extra few hours were spent fussing over design choices and features. All of them work as well, if not better, than something I would have paid someone to do just 6 months ago.
I’m addicted to building. And can do it to my heart’s content for the price of $199/year.
But this is not an “agencies are dead” letter.
This is also not the “is AI killing creativity” conversation. AI slop is lazy. Full stop.
This isn’t even a pro-AI letter.
This is a “the world has changed” letter.
It’s a “what does the future look like, what survives in the future, and what to do about it all” letter.
Once you pop, you just can’t stop.
People are addicted to building.
The examples of what people are building are endless.
Tobi Lütke runs Shopify. $100 billion company. In 2024, he made 94 code commits. Not that surprising. CEOs don’t need to build. And, in the old world, you could argue that they shouldn’t have been. The time it would’ve taken, the value that they would’ve added, would not have made sense. But in this new world, Tobi is a builder again. He made 957 in the first 45 days of 2026. More commits than ever before. And running the company. Today, it doesn’t make sense for him to not build.
A cardiologist placed 3rd at Anthropic’s hackathon. Built a patient care app in a weekend. To the tune of 3.4M views.
Parents are building tools for other parents.
People are coding custom vaccines for their sick dogs and curing their cancer.
And if you’re thinking: “but will the kids, who have no attention span, actually do this?” The quick answer is yes. We have proven that we have endless attention for low-lift, fun activities that are entirely about what interests us. Especially if these occasionally have the capacity to change your financial fate overnight.
And the gap between seeing something and making it real is gone. Not shrinking. Gone.
We have entered an Age of Authorship.
And in a very short time. We’ll all be living in it.
But the question I’m wrestling with after living here for only a month is this:
When anyone can build anything, what is worthy of existing?
When the 8 billion show up in the Age of Authorship, when your product can be rebuilt in a weekend by someone who’s never heard your name, when the cost of making something is nothing, and the cost of walking away from it is less.
What do you refuse to discard?
That is the mattering problem.
The question of whether you matter isn’t new. It’s as old as time.
But in the Age of Authorship, mattering matters more. When anyone can build anything, the only thing that separates what lasts from what gets discarded is whether anyone cared that it existed.
And everything else is noise.
The hard part used to be building. It’s not anymore.
The hard part is mattering.
And most brands, most leaders, most companies have not caught up to this. They are still solving for the old hard part. Still optimizing for speed, efficiency, and scale.
For how. Not what. Not why.
Still asking “how do we build faster” when the question is “why should this exist at all.”
Mattering is going to be about trust, connection, and relevance in the moment. A topic for another giant letter, certainly.
More importantly, we’ve changed and not many have noticed.
Some people are arguing that not every company or every person wants to build.
There’s a debate happening right now about whether companies like Campbell’s will build their own CRMs with AI.
Quite honestly, this is the wrong debate.
The question isn’t about if we’ll vibe-code, agent or context-engineer our way to individual SaaS. We might, we won’t, it doesn’t matter.
What matters is the mindset shift.
We can build if we want to. It’s not “I should?” It’s “could I?”
The biggest shifts in culture come from massive mindset shifts.
We’ve shifted into author mode.
The point is, if we wanted to, we could. And many, many billions of people can. And will.
And will expect to. Demand to.
A lot of people will tell you taste is the new differentiator. That when building is free, the person with the best ‘eye’ wins.
I’ll be very frank: that’s not enough.
When billions of people can build, taste will be in the multitudes of millions. There is no shortage of people with good taste.
The differentiator of the future is vision.
Not what it should look like. What should exist. Taste is a component of vision. But vision is knowing what to build, why it matters, and what the world looks like if you get it right. That’s harder than taste. And far more rare.
Claire Vo said: the arena has changed. Not the players. Not the rules. The arena itself. And what you need to compete in the new one comes down to three things.
The visionary and the builder used to be two people. The whole economy was structured around that separation. Management and labor. Creative and production. Strategy and implementation. You saw it. Someone else made it.
By the time it existed, it was a negotiated, made-by-committee version of your imagination.
That’s over.
The visionary is on the front line now. Not delegating from the back office. Not writing briefs for other people to interpret. Building the thing. Directly. At the speed of thought. The brief becomes a demo. “What if” becomes “look at this.”
And this is not just leadership. Not just employees. It’s your customers.
They are about to stop consuming your product and start rewriting it.
Not personalizing. Authoring.
Rebuilding the entire experience because they can see it better than you built it.
Picture me, this is how I think after 3 weeks in the new world:
I’m on a Zara site showing products one at a time and I want to see them side by side. I don’t accept that anymore. I remake it. Re-author. Co-author.
Or, picture yourself in the job you have. Today, you’re expected to play in your lane. Marketing if you’re marketing. Product, if you’re product. Finance if you’re finance.
That will change. You’ll expect—and want—to have more agency.
To fix what needs fixing. To build what should be built.
A vertical of 1.
This is the Age of Authorship.
Not content creation.
Not personalization.
Everyone becomes the author of their own experience. Their shopping. Their health. Their career. Their kids’ education.
Drug development becomes a market of one. Your genome, your microbiome, your biomarkers in real time. Kids go to school not because they need a job but because learning, when it’s for you, is a fun part of the human experience.
The skills you’re missing? You’ll download those. Want a business degree from HBS? A skill you download.
What you can’t download is vision. Imagination. A desire to author.
Your career is not a ladder anymore. It’s a novel. You author a chapter, close it, open another. Identity comes from what you’re building right now, not the title on your business card. Jobs might not exist in the future, not as we know them today, but work, work will.
This is true for you. And it’s true for your brand.
Your brand is not a ladder either. A brand that stays in one lane, defines itself by one product, plays it safe with one identity, that’s the ladder. And the ladder leads to death.
The brands that survive the Age of Authorship will be the ones that build new chapters. New value. Continuously. Not a rebrand every five years. A living, breathing thing that evolves because the people behind it are evolving. Brands that are open to change. To evolving. And most importantly, highly focused on adding value. And mattering.
Your career will contain multitudes. So will the brands worth keeping.
What will you choose to work on?
This is the thrilling part.
Building is fun. Get in there.
But there’s a pendulum. There always is.
It’s exhausting.
When everything is available, everything is replaceable, and nothing accumulates meaning, infinite choice stops feeling like freedom.
We will be gasping to surrender. And to put in the effort. And to do anything that can’t grow overnight.
We’ll live for the unscalable.
We’ll commit to a restaurant for a month. Not because we lack choices. But because we’re tired of choosing. We want to trust a vision. We want our presence to make the place exist. Not a loyalty program. Shared stakes in a dream.
We’ll pay for hotels that have no data on you. And travel to anti-training lands where AI cannot build for you. The most luxurious thing in the world will be a place that doesn’t know allow for much at all. Where you can let happenstance, gut, and effort guide you.
As humans, we say we love ease. But we’re also hard-wired for hard-earned. The trip you trained for. The sport that can’t stream. The skill you built with your hands. Because the effort is where the bliss lives.
In a world of infinite digital abundance, the scarcest thing is something that requires your participation. And whatever cannot be perfectly reproduced.
And the last piece. The thing that will hold it all together?
Shared stakes. Belonging.
The restaurant that would notice if you stopped coming. The team that trained together. The community that would feel it if you left. Not your output. You.
You can’t download ‘parenting’ as a skill. Trust that if we could, we would. First-hand experience is a requirement.
You can upskill your knowledge and build for fandoms, but nothing can replace hours, days, and years of experiencing the fandom itself.
Authorship is how we work.
Unscalable is how we live.
Shared stakes are why it all matters.
The world that’s coming will be built by everyone.
But it will only be worth living in if it’s led by people who know why any of it should exist.
The 8 billion are coming.
Time to figure out what matters.
If you got to the end here and are thinking: where do I begin? Is this woman insane? Holy f*ck we are f-ed. Take a moment.
Download Claude Code.
Make something fun.
Then try to get it to do your job.
Argue with it. Make it ask you questions if you’re not clear. But build something else. You don’t have to cure your dog’s cancer on the 2nd go. But you’ll see how that might be possible.
Then try to build an entire business. Start by rebuilding something your client owns that you think could be better. Sure, you won’t get it right. But you’ll be shocked, I swear, at what you can do.
Then sit back and ask yourself, now that you’re in it, if anything in this infinite world of possibilities will matter.
Drink copious amounts of tea [or insert drink of choice here] in the week where you have a perma-crisis that nothing matters.
And then, when you emerge, as you will, as I have, ask what you can do to be ready for a world where the only thing that matters is mattering.
Take it from Eileen Gu. Your life moves in the direction of your dominant thoughts. You can choose to doom. You can read every article about what’s ending and what’s dying and let it paralyze you.
Since the dawn of time, humans have “figured it out.” We didn’t predict what electricity would bring, but damn, it’s been wild. AI is not the new internet. It’s the new electricity.
You get to decide if that feels like the most exciting time to be alive or if it doesn’t.
I know which one I chose.
Building, leading, and creating something that matters.
Let’s get to work.
That’s all, folx.
– Chris
If you read this and liked it, that little heart is there for that. The algo and I appreciate it.
As usual, nailed it. And arrived here from my inbox to say so 🧡
Challenge excepted. I’m downloading Claude Code now!