There's a structural problem sitting inside a lot of service businesses right now, and it's becoming harder to ignore as AI compresses task time across most professional categories. Hourly billing was built on an assumption that AI is quietly breaking: that time spent is a reasonable proxy for value delivered. When a task that used to take three hours now takes forty minutes, that assumption stops holding, and the business built around it has to confront an uncomfortable choice. ------------- Context ------------- Hourly billing has worked reasonably well for a long time because, for most of professional history, time spent and value delivered were roughly correlated. A more complex project took more hours. A more experienced professional could do the same work faster, and the market generally accepted that experience justified a higher rate even at lower total hours. The system wasn't perfect, but the underlying correlation held well enough to function. AI breaks that correlation in a specific and significant way. The same expertise, applied with AI assistance, now produces the same or better output in a fraction of the time. This isn't a marginal shift. For some categories of work, the time reduction is dramatic: a proposal that took three hours now takes forty minutes, a piece of analysis that took a full day now takes ninety minutes. If billing stays strictly hourly, the client pays dramatically less for work that delivers the same value it always did, and the professional's revenue for that engagement collapses even though nothing about the value delivered has changed. The alternative, padding hours to preserve revenue at the old rate, creates a different and more corrosive problem. It requires either working less efficiently than the tools allow, which defeats the purpose of adopting them, or billing for time that wasn't actually spent, which is an ethical problem that doesn't hold up to scrutiny if a client ever asks detailed questions about how the time was used.

Anthropic finally brought Fable 5 back and in the same week, they also launched the new Sonnet 5 model. In this video, I break down everything you need to know about these models and explains which one you should be using. Enjoy!

Most people think success is about money. It's not. Money is just what buys you options. I've worked hard for decades. Not because I fell in love with the grind, but because I fell in love with what the work could create. Every uncomfortable conversation. Every risk. Every time I wanted to quit but didn't. None of it was just to make more. It was to own my time. To be there for the people I love. To create memories instead of regrets. To have the freedom to say yes to what matters and no to what doesn't. Don't chase success because you want to look successful. Chase it because one day you'll realize time is the only thing you can't earn back. Work hard. Do the uncomfortable things. Become the person capable of creating the life you want. Because real success isn't measured by what you own. It's measured by how fully you get to live. Question for you: If you had complete freedom over your time one year from now, what would you spend more of it doing... and who would you spend it with?