Warren Buffett has more capital than he can easily put to work.

That sounds like a great problem to have. But with that much capital, most opportunities aren't worth pursuing. Small investments barely matter to Berkshire Hathaway, and there are only so many places where billions of dollars can produce an attractive return.

So Buffett passes on almost everything.

AI is creating a strangely similar problem for the rest of us.

Until recently, most ideas came with a natural filter. You might have an idea for an app, but you couldn't code. You might want to analyze a pile of data, automate part of your job, make a video, or build some little tool for yourself.

Eventually you ran into something you couldn't do, couldn't afford, or didn't have time to learn.

A lot of those barriers are disappearing.

I notice it constantly now. I'll have an idea and realize I could probably have a working version by tonight.

The problem is that I have more of those ideas than I have nights.

When the cost of trying something drops far enough, saying yes gets very easy. You can start another project before you've decided whether the project deserves to exist. Do that enough and you can spend a lot of time proving that you could do things without producing much that compounds.

Buffett has dealt with his version of this problem for decades. One of the ways he describes his boundaries is the "circle of competence."

There are businesses he understands deeply enough to make a judgment about, and there are businesses he doesn't. If something falls outside the area where he believes he has the understanding required to make a good decision, he can pass.

He has also talked about having a "too hard" pile.

AI is making that pile smaller for everyone.

You can enter an unfamiliar field and get oriented in minutes. You can write code in a language you've never used, work through financial statements, research an industry, or prototype something without spending months acquiring the underlying skills first.

That's enormously useful. It also makes it easy to confuse access with judgment.

AI can get me surprisingly far into a field I know almost nothing about. What it can't give me instantly are the thousands of little corrections that come from having actually done the work. I don't recognize the edge cases immediately. I don't have years of mistakes sitting in the back of my head telling me when something looks technically correct but feels wrong.

In the areas where I do have those reps, AI is completely different. I can move much faster because I know what I'm looking at. I can reject bad output quickly. I can ask better questions.

That makes the circle of competence more important as AI gets better.

There are going to be more things we can do than things worth spending our time on.

Buffett has capital.

We have hours.

Spend accordingly.