An edge stops working the moment it becomes famous.
That's something I keep coming back to, and in this time of AI it has never felt more true. By the time a tool or framework is all over your feed on social, it feels like the edge is already gone and you feel like you are being left behind by the fast moving tech space. Talking with my friends I noticed the pattern of everyone stressing out, Anthropic releases Fable 5 and day one you feel like you are behind.
But the point I am trying to make is: being early to the tool was never the edge anyway.
The feed makes that hard to see. Algorithms going berserk and rewarding whatever is loudest week in week out. Marketing is so optimized now that every launch of a new feature, product or tool makes you feel like you are already behind when it's released, and that is the point, you want to rush to use it as much as possible do everything all at once. Not once do you stop and look at general adoption, stats on how much those tools are actually being used.
I came across a graph stating that only 0.1% of people use an agent harness when using AI, most of the population is only using it in browser and not optimizing a single thing. Are they behind? Not at all. The hype fog makes it seem like the super user is just your average guy playing around with AI. And the term "permanent underclass" has been used to incite fear in people trying to keep up.
Scrolling during the weekend on socials you've saved five different posts about the new MCP that will change the game, you plan to go through it on Monday. A week goes by, its the next weekend, you opened exactly 0 of the posts you saved. You feel like you missed the bus, the loop repeats itself.
...But, nothing has changed. You're not behind. You're not in the "permanent underclass". The panic was manufactured, the product of optimized marketing meeting an algorithm that runs on urgency. You stressed because someone in a marketing team wanted to push their product faster, to more people, you paid the price.
Because the edge was never the tool. A tool is the thing anyone can copy off a feed in an afternoon, which is exactly why it can't stay an edge for long. The boring keeps the lights on while you stress about the new and shiny.