Six Seconds. Zero Reflex.

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Anthropic shipped Opus 4.7 this week and pushed it as the default in Claude Code with a setting called xhigh effort — they pay extra inference cost so the model holds focus longer on every task. Why do they engineer focus for their model and refuse it for ours? I'll come back to that at the end. (6 tips before you re-prompt everything)

Marrakech, last week. I'm hunting a specific shop in the medina. The map the riad gave me is in Arabic. Phone out, Gemini open: "not available in your region." And I just stand there. Six seconds. Phone in hand. Like someone unplugged me.

No reflex. No plan B. No "OK, I'll just ask someone." Just blank. I ended up turning to the guy next to me — gestures, broken French, it worked. But on the way back, one question got stuck in my skull: this AI dependency, isn't it making us deeply stupid?

Six months of Claude/GPT/Gemini on continuous drip, and basic things had vanished. Remembering a phone number. Navigating without the blue dot. Writing three lines without "polish this please." Each small surrender feels like a productivity win. Stacked, it's not productivity anymore. It's a rewiring.

Everyone's selling "taste" as the new AI moat. Not wrong — but it's half the diagnosis. Taste is judgment. Judgment gets built through repeated friction. Skip the friction, skip the lesson. And that's exactly what AI removes, one query at a time. While Opus 4.7 is gaining the ability to stay focused across 1M tokens, we're abandoning ours between two browser tabs.

Here's the honest test: measure the gap between waking up tomorrow morning and your first AI prompt. I tried it in Marrakech over three days — nine minutes, twelve, then seven. Most developers I asked said zero. The phone wakes up with them. That gap is the muscle. You shrink it on purpose, or it shrinks on its own.

AI Won't Steal Your Job. You Already Handed It Over.

Phil

PS: what was your last pebble moment — the thing that caught you flat-footed the day the AI wasn't there? Hit reply, I'm collecting them.

Back to Opus 4.7. The reason Anthropic engineers focus into their model and we don't for ours: we forgot focus was a setting. Their engineers made a deliberate technical choice — pay for long-horizon attention. We prompt while scrolling. They decided. So can we, every morning. 🤔

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