The Floor Moved. The Explanation for Who's Lagging Didn't.

Nikunj Kothari's post on AI and the talent market is worth reading for one observation that most takes on this topic miss entirely.

Most AI productivity writing argues about whether the best people are getting dramatically better. Kothari shifts the frame: the 10x engineer was never that rare — the floor was just low enough that average looked fine. Now it isn't.

That's genuinely clarifying. It explains the Block layoffs better than "AI replaces workers" does. It explains why some team sizes are collapsing without anyone getting fired for incompetence. The competitive problem isn't that the ceiling rose. It's that standing still now means falling behind.

Hold that. Then look at how the piece explains why some senior people haven't adopted.

The VP of Engineering who hasn't opened Cursor. The exec who "refused to update their mental models." The framing is consistent: non-adoption is a character failure. Stubbornness. Frozen priors. The tell is the strawberry line — as if the reason experienced professionals are cautious about LLMs is that they formed a view in 2023 and stopped paying attention.

That's not an explanation. It's a dismissal. A 16-year VP of Product who hasn't personally built with AI might be navigating institutional risk, managing a team that can't afford failed experiments, or working in a domain where the tools genuinely haven't proven their value yet. The piece never seriously entertains that. Non-adoption gets one explanation: the adopters have "agency and curiosity" and the others don't.

Which is a convenient thing to believe if you're writing from inside the startup ecosystem and want the diagnosis to be simple.

The floor observation is real and underpriced. The explanation for who's standing on the wrong side of it is too easy to be trusted.