I Don't Need More Horsepower. I Need More Road.

A lot of people have been asking me if I have tried Fable Five yet. And the honest answer is, no.

It is not because I do not think it is impressive. I am sure it is impressive. Every new model at this point is some combination of faster, smarter, more capable, and always more expensive. But here’s the thing, I already have about as smart and capable a model as I’m going to need right now.

My team is building software faster than I have ever seen software built before. Faster than my clients have ever seen it built before. In some cases, faster than we can review it and at this point, faster than users can use it and react to it.

Software is not valuable because it exists. Software is valuable because someone uses it, gets something out of it, and then gives you some signal about what should happen next.

We can build a feature in a day now, which is great. But then a customer has to discover it. They have to understand it. They have to care enough to use it. We have to watch the usage patterns. We have to listen to what they say. We have to decide whether the thing we built is producing ROI, creating value, or just adding another button to a screen that already had too many buttons. That takes time.

You cannot release a feature on Monday, pile three more things on top of it by Wednesday, and pretend you are building a better product because the machine allowed you to move that fast. At some point, you are no longer developing software. You are burying feedback under output.

And that is why the current models already feel fast enough for a lot of real business work.

The accuracy of GPT-5.5 is excellent. It is far ahead of what we were using even a year ago. Last year we were using Sonnet and thinking, “This is incredible. This changes everything.” And it did. Even then, we were already moving faster than most organizations could keep up with. Not just faster than their code review process. Faster than their users. Faster than their internal decision-making. Faster than the customer feedback loop.

So when a new model comes out and the pitch is, “This is even more powerful,” my reaction is not disbelief. My reaction is, “Okay, but is that the thing slowing me down?” Right now, for me, it is not.

I would rather have better harnesses, better orchestration patterns, better ways to route work across different models so cost stays reasonable, and better systems for managing agents, reviews, tests, deployment, customer feedback, and product direction.

But paying more money for a slower, more expensive model because it has more raw intelligence does not make business sense by default. Not when the thing I am doing already has more than enough horsepower.

I think about this like my car.

I drive a Dodge Challenger. My wife bought it for me when she saw me eyeing some older classic cars and thought he doesn’t need another project. When we were looking at the different models, of course there was the Hellcat. There was the Demon. There were versions of this thing pushing close to a thousand horsepower.

And I bought the six-cylinder model. It has something like 300 horsepower, which is already more than enough for a normal human being driving to get coffee or take his kids somewhere.

A thousand horsepower sounds amazing. It is an incredible vanity metric. It is the kind of number that makes people lean forward and go, “Wait, what?” But I am not a race car driver. I do not drag race on the weekends. I am not taking the thing to a track. I am driving around town. I have not been pulled over for speeding in the last 20 years.

Where I live, I can drive 55 miles per hour tops on most roads. If you live out in the desert somewhere and the speed limit is 95, fine. Guess what? Any consumer car can still do that. You do not need a thousand horses to go the speed limit or even a little beyond it.

So if you buy the thousand-horsepower version, you are not buying it for practical utility. You are buying it because you love it, because you collect it, because it makes you feel something, because it is ridiculous in the exact way you want it to be ridiculous. And that is fine. But it is not because you needed that much car to go to the grocery store.

That is how I feel about a lot of this AI model discussion right now. The horsepower is incredible. The benchmarks are impressive. The demos are wild. But in my actual business, speed is not the main problem anymore.

We keep finding ways to move faster with fewer people involved using the models we already have. The question is not, “Can we build more software faster?” The question is, “Do we have enough of the right work to point all this capacity at?”

And that is where things get hard again, maybe the hardest it’s ever been. Because once you get all this AI leverage, the real problem shows up: you need more customers.

That is the part I think a lot of businesses are starting to feel, even if they have not said it out loud yet.

AI has helped companies get leaner. It has helped teams move faster. It has helped businesses trim the bottom line. You can automate some tasks. You can reduce headcount in certain areas. You can get more output from fewer people. You can become a much slimmer company. But you cannot cut your way back to prosperity.

It is the same idea as personal finance. You can save money. You can spend less. You can get disciplined. But you cannot save your way into true wealth if there is no growth on the other side. Business works the same way.

You can use AI to get lean. You can reduce waste. You can make the machine more efficient. But the company still has to grow. Revenue still has to come in. Customers still have to buy. Someone still has to want the thing. And that is as hard as it has ever been. In fact, AI has made it harder.

Because if there is one place where AI has not produced the same kind of magic for me, it is marketing.

The strongest use case for AI, at least from what I can see, is software engineering. It helps generate code, debug, refactor, build features, explore architecture, write tests, and move from idea to implementation faster than we ever could before. There is no doubt in my mind that AI is useful there.

Marketing has been a different story.

AI helps with the surrounding tasks. It helps edit clips. It helps organize content. It helps generate variations. It helps resize banners. It helps create rough drafts. It helps with production workflows that used to be painful and expensive. That stuff matters.

But the core creative work? The thing that gets attention? The thing that makes someone stop scrolling, care, laugh, trust you, or feel like you understand something true? AI is not solving that for me.

In fact, a lot of AI marketing feels like it is making the internet noisier. Look at your inbox. If it is anything like mine, there are 200 messages from AI-powered cold outreach companies telling you that their system will get you warm leads from cold email.

Every one of them sounds the same. Every one of them has the same false familiarity. Every one of them has the same fake personalization. Every one of them is “checking if this is a priority” or “circling back” or “noticed you help companies scale” or whatever sentence the machine decided was the average of every mediocre sales email ever written. And the result is not better marketing. It is more noise.

We have tried AI-style outreach campaigns. We have tried the automations. We have tried to use these tools to come up with creative that can get attention online. And the truth is, the output is boring most of the time. It is clean. It is competent. It is polished. But it is boring. People scroll past it.

That is a problem, because marketing and advertising are not supposed to find the average of a thing. They are supposed to get attention. They are supposed to break a pattern. They are supposed to make someone feel something specific enough that they remember you.

When everyone has access to “good enough” design, “good enough” copy, “good enough” video editing, and “good enough” campaign ideas, the baseline rises. But the baseline rising does not make everyone stand out. It makes everyone easier to ignore.

That is why the podcast matters. We are there. We film it. We sit down. We talk. We disagree. We laugh. We try to say something real. The most time-consuming part is still the human part: being on camera, doing the work, and having something to say.

AI helps us produce it. Tools like Riverside help us make something with a level of quality we could not have afforded or maintained years ago. AI helps with clips, edits, summaries, titles, repurposing, and all the other production work around the act itself. But everybody has access to that now.

So the production baseline goes up, and now your podcast looks pretty good. Mine looks pretty good. Everyone’s looks pretty good. But then you compare it to something like Diary of a CEO or Joe Rogan or any major show with a full human team behind it, and you can see the difference. Maybe the gap is 10%, but that 10% is everything.

That last 10% is often the difference between good and great. It is the difference between “this looks professional” and “this feels alive.” It is the difference between clean output and something people want to watch.

And that last 10% still requires humans who care. Humans who know when a cut feels wrong. Humans who understand rhythm, emotion, timing, story, tension, and the strange little details that make something worth paying attention to.

So yes, AI has helped us with marketing operations. But AI has not replaced the hard part of growth.

The hard part of growth is still trust. The hard part is still attention. The hard part is still being in the room.

The funny thing is, the more AI content floods the market, the more old-school human behavior seems to matter: conferences, coffee, handshakes, conversations, referrals, and sitting across from another person to understand what they are trying to do.

That stuff is working because it is real, and real has contrast again.

So when people ask me why I am not more excited about the newest, biggest, most powerful model, that is my answer.

I am not against it. I am not unimpressed by it. I am not pretending the technology is not incredible. I just already have enough speed, I have enough horsepower, and I cannot put the pedal to the floor anyway.

What I need is more road.

What I need is more customers. More trust. More distribution. More human moments that create actual demand. More people who understand what we do and why it matters.

Because once every company has trimmed itself down, once every team has automated what it can automate, once every business is running leaner than it used to, they are all going to run into the same wall. You cannot cut your way into growth, and you still have to sell, matter, and be chosen.

And I do not think more AI-generated marketing noise solves that. By its nature, once everyone is doing it, it fades into the background. It ceases to be marketing and becomes atmosphere.

So maybe the next great business advantage is not more speed. Maybe it is being more human in a world where everyone else is trying to sound like a machine pretending to be one.