Warren Buffett sits on more capital than almost anyone on earth, but more money hasn't made his job easier. With that much capital, a bad bet is expensive, so most opportunities don't clear the bar. He's disciplined not because he lacks options, but because he has too many and can't chase them all.

AI just handed regular people a version of that problem. Not money. Ability. Suddenly you can build almost anything you think of. An idea used to die from lack of skill or time to execute it. Now it doesn't die that easily. You can start it tonight.

That sounds like freedom, and it is, for a while. But the constraint didn't disappear, it just moved. You're not short on capability anymore. You're short on time and attention, the same way Buffett is short on great opportunities relative to his cash. Every direction you chase is capital spent. Chase enough of them and you've got a pile of half-built projects and nothing that actually compounds.

The skill was never "can I build this." It's "is this worth building." That's Buffett's whole job, and now it's yours too.

Buffett's method for handling this is the "circle of competence." He only invests in what he deeply understands, not because he's incapable of learning new industries, but because he's disciplined about it. Everything else goes in what he literally calls the "too hard" pile. No debate, no FOMO. Outside the circle, it's an automatic pass.

AI changes what that circle even means for the rest of us. It used to be that knowledge was the moat. You had an edge in the things you'd spent years learning, and everything else was, correctly, too hard. AI collapses a lot of that. Now anyone can get competent-enough answers on almost anything in minutes. The "too hard" pile just got a lot smaller for surface-level competence.

But that's exactly why depth matters more, not less. When everyone can generate a decent plan for anything, the edge stops being "I know something you don't" and becomes "I know this specific thing at a level AI can't fake." Your real circle of competence, the stuff you've built real judgment on through actual reps, not prompts, is the one place nobody can shortcut you. Everything outside it is now easy to dabble in and easy to be mediocre at.

The move isn't to chase every direction AI opens up. It's the same as Buffett's: find where your circle actually is, and point your time there. Everything else goes in the pile.