When even the experts feel like clients

Ethan Mollick got early access to Claude 5 Fable, the first Mythos-class model, and wrote up what it felt like to use. The facts alone are worth the read. He asked for an isochrone map, the kind that shows how far you can travel in a given time, and Fable spun up its own research agents, pulled over 2,200 specific flights plus rail schedules from the TGV to the Shinkansen, then coded the map. On another project it wrote a 19-page design document and then worked for nine and a half hours straight.

What stuck with me was how Mollick describes his own role:

Last year I called this working with a wizard: you chant the spell and something happens. With Fable the spell has gotten powerful enough that I am no longer sure I am the wizard. I am closer to a patron. I describe what I want, I pay for it, and I judge the result.

And later, on what the model has become:

A patron commissions a single artist. Fable is closer to a whole studio, where I am the client who signs off on the final work without ever setting foot on the floor.

If even an expert in the field like Ethan Mollick feels like a client, the age of personalized software is dawning on us. Tools get built for one person, on demand, priced by the token. Experts will focus more on interfacing and product management: describing what to commission, judging the delivery, catching what slipped through, which Mollick still could, reviewing the nine-and-a-half-hour build in about an hour. That hour looks a lot like the job description going forward.