Technological progress has changed the price of human labor many times in the exact same way: a person gets a more productive tool, the previous volume of work starts taking less time, and the market gradually stops paying for that volume as if the old tool still didn't exist. This is not a punishment for the worker, nor is it necessarily a devaluation of their profession. It is a natural consequence of productivity growth.

Imagine that ten companies each need one ditchdigger. A person with a shovel spends almost all their working time meeting the need of a single company. Then the excavator appears. A good operator is able to complete the previous volume of work several times faster. But this doesn't mean each company suddenly has ten times more dirt that urgently needs to be dug. They still need roughly the same result, or at most a little bit more.

Therefore, it is strange to expect one company to pay an excavator operator ten times more just because their machine is ten times more productive than a shovel. For the client, it is more rational to buy the required volume of work cheaper or in less time. And for the excavator operator, it is more rational to sell their freed-up capacity to other clients. One person starts serving multiple companies not because their labor has gotten worse, but because their productivity has become too large for the needs of a single client.

A similar transition is happening with programmers. AI, agents, code generation, and modern infrastructure allow a strong specialist to complete many tasks noticeably faster. But a company's internal demand for development does not have to grow at the same rate. If it used to need one programmer for almost a full month, after a boost in productivity it might be able to get by with a substantially smaller fraction of their time. Even if the backlog is large, the speed of making product decisions, implementing changes, testing, working with users, and the organization itself limits the useful volume of development.

From this, the price of the previous work naturally changes. If a task that the company previously paid for with several days or weeks of working time is now solved in hours, the market will gradually tend to pay for the new cost volume rather than maintaining the old price just because this work used to be slower. An early specialist might receive a premium for a rare skill in working with AI for some time, but as the technology spreads, the new productivity becomes the baseline expectation.

This does not mean that high salaries will disappear altogether. Complex roles, unique expertise, high responsibility, and companies that genuinely need the full capacity of a strong specialist will remain. But there do not have to be as many such positions as there are people freed up by productivity growth. Therefore, relying solely on the restoration of the old model one company → one specialist → high monthly salary is becoming an increasingly unreliable strategy.

For a specialist, the more natural response is to change the unit of sale for their own labor. If previously one client bought almost a whole month for a conditional €5000, now that same total income can be made up of five clients at €1000 each, ten at €500 each, or a mixed model of several clients, their own products, and services. The specific numbers can be anything; the principle is what matters: one increased productive capacity serves multiple independent sources of demand.

Such a transition should not be perceived as a defeat. It is pointless for a ditchdigger to defend the economics of the shovel after the invention of the excavator. It is much more useful to master the new tool and restructure the way they sell their work. Technological leaps have destroyed the old norm of productivity and created a new one many times over. AI is simply the latest such leap, only happening much faster.

For a solopreneur, this is especially important. AI turns a single person into an organization, but the economic meaning of this enhancement only appears when the person knows how to distribute their capacity across multiple tasks and clients. Therefore, their own distribution infrastructure and a designed sales system become not just additional skills on top of the profession, but a necessary part of the new income model.

At the same time, this economics only works where the client themselves is able to utilize the new productivity. A modern specialist can be very fast on a well-structured project and almost completely lose their advantage inside heavy legacy code, manual processes, and an environment where any change is dangerous. Therefore, both sides will need to adapt: the specialist must learn to sell results and serve multiple sources of demand, while companies must maintain a technological level where modern productivity can actually be realized.

The main practical takeaway is simple: productivity growth should not be denied, nor should one demand that the market continue to value the old volume of labor at the old price. It is much more useful to embrace the new norm ahead of others and rebuild your own economics around it. This is precisely the opportunity developed by the future solopreneur model.