Having First Dibs Is Overrated

Every new AI launch comes with the same implied question: Have you tried it yet? It’s tempting to think the right answer is always yes. It’s not.

Owning the first iPhone didn’t make you better at using smartphones. It just meant you got there first. Within a couple of years everyone else had the same capabilities, often with fewer bugs and a clearer idea of what actually mattered.

The same pattern keeps repeating in software. I see people contorting their workflow to accommodate whatever shiny beta feature launched this week. They’ll open one app just to send something into another app, even though the destination app already lets them do the same thing faster. The workflow bends around the feature. That’s backwards.

The feature isn’t valuable because it’s new. It’s valuable if it removes a step you actually perform every day.

AI has made this even more obvious. A few months ago, if someone announced parallel agents or automated research or persistent memory, you had to decide whether to jump ecosystems immediately or risk missing out.

Now I mostly wait.

Three months is an eternity in AI. If a feature is genuinely useful, there’s a good chance it’ll show up in both the major labs before you’ve even finished rebuilding your workflow around the original version. I’d rather use the implementation that survives the first wave of reality than the one that wins launch week on X.

That doesn’t mean I ignore new tools.

I’m a tinkerer. I install weird software. I play with unfinished ideas. I like seeing what breaks before the thing gets polished. But I’ve stopped confusing exploration with commitment. Those are different activities.

Exploration is spending an hour understanding what’s possible. Commitment is rebuilding your daily workflow around a feature that might disappear next month.

The first is curiosity. The second is migration cost.

Don’t optimize for having first dibs. I think the better strategy is to have second pick.

Let other people discover the dead ends. Let the market figure out which ideas are durable. Then adopt the survivors with confidence.

Being early is useful for learning, but it is overrated as an advantage. The question is not whether you tried it first. It is whether anything you learned still matters after the next release.