The Great Pirate Era
We are living in the calm before the Great Pirate Era 1 begins.
Frankly, this is one of the most exciting times you could be alive in history if you are interested in technology. The means to execute and turn your ideas into reality has never been easier, and doesn’t feel real. In an age where knowledge and technical ability get abstracted away, the idea of “taste” is what remains that makes you distinctly human.
I remember when I first heard about this idea (and then a few hundred times over on tech Twitter), I thought of taste in its most naive sense, as in how users feel while they use your product. While I believe this to be core to what makes a user-facing application great and matters even more in the day of slop. I want to talk about the other interpretation of what people mean when they talk about taste.
The other way you can interpret taste is having the intuition in choosing what problems to solve now that the barrier to knowledge-based technology has been pretty much eradicated. This idea has been making its rounds on Twitter and I find it super interesting.
The most important form of taste that will dictate our world belongs to the labs. We’re past in comparing which model wins a benchmark, but the focus should be on which problems are even worth racing towards.
And yet most of the conversation is still fixated on frontier AI labs to provide X% improvements on benchmarks with stronger models. I’m writing this in March 2026, Opus 4.6 was released last month and while I personally love the model and use it daily, it still felt like a linear upgrade from Opus 4.5, just like how GPT-5.X Thinking seemed like the next obvious upgrade from the previous 5.X and o-series models. This idea of growth feels very linear and while there are countless innovations that I probably don’t see with each release, it feels as if there could be more done with what we have right now.
I believe that the world is overdue for a paradigm shift. The launch of AlphaGo and GPT were times when the general public saw the true capabilities of artificial intelligence. And with all the resources available to us right now, it’s inevitable that there will be a discovery of a form of intelligence (not AGI) that supersedes Large Language Models.
The first one to get there will eventually end up kicking off the Great Pirate Era where the only limits to inventions and the world beyond us will be human ingenuity.
The race for the Laugh-Tale 2 has begun, and only when the treasure is found, we will usher in a golden age of invention.
Footnotes
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The Great Pirate Era is a reference to One Piece. In the story, the legendary pirate Gol D. Roger hides his mythical treasure, the "One Piece", out for the world to discover ushering in an age where everyone takes to the seas to find his treasure. ↩
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Before the Great Pirate Era, Laugh-Tale was the final island where Gol D. Roger discovered the "One Piece". His discoveries and the "treasure" he found on this island are what eventually led to the start of The Great Pirate Era. ↩