Doesn't AI make it easier to do good work?

It does, and that's exactly why it doesn't give you an edge. A grammar checker, a tone of voice document, a code checker and a research tool that answers in seconds are available to everybody at the same moment. Whatever they make easy becomes the new standard, so work that clears it is simply meeting the standard rather than standing out.

What does clearing the bar easily actually mean?

The checks run whether or not you remember them. A voice rule that only fires when you think to open the document is still effort, and effort gets skipped on a busy afternoon. Once the check is built into the route the work takes, the raised bar gets cleared as a matter of course, and your attention is free for whatever the checks can't see.

Is a tone of voice document enough on its own?

No. A document states the rules and nothing makes you read it at the moment you break one. Mine only started working properly when a command began counting the things it could count, such as how often the prose contracts, and put the number in front of me before anything was published.

AI Raised the Bar. Now Clear It Without Trying

Everybody got the same tools at roughly the same time. A grammar checker, a tone of voice document, a code checker, and research that comes back in seconds instead of an afternoon.

Good work has never been easier to produce. That’s the problem, and it’s also the whole opportunity.

Easier for everybody means easier for nobody

When a tool makes good work easier for you, it makes it easier for your competitor on the same morning. The work didn’t get easier to stand out with. The standard went up.

A proposal with a spelling mistake in it used to be ordinary. Now it tells the reader you didn’t run the thing everybody runs. A website with a slow page, a broken link or a title that trails off used to be normal. Now there’s a free tool that finds all three in a minute, so leaving them there says something about you rather than about the web.

The floor went up, and the floor is where the reader starts judging you.

There’s a number on this. In 2023 Harvard Business School and Boston Consulting Group gave GPT-4 to 758 of BCG’s consultants and measured the quality of what they produced. The consultants who started in the bottom half improved by 43%, and the top half improved by 17%. Ethan Mollick, one of the study’s authors, put the result in a sentence (@emollick, 24 September 2023): “The gap between the average performances of top and bottom performers was 22%, it shrunk to a mere 4%.”

Who gained most when the consultants got AI Improvement in the quality of their work, by where they started The gap between the top and bottom halves shrank from 22% to 4%. Dell'Acqua, Mollick et al., Navigating the Jagged Technological Frontier, Harvard Business School and BCG field experiment with 758 consultants, published September 2023; figures as reported by co-author Ethan Mollick, One Useful Thing, 24 September 2023.

The people who started lowest moved furthest, and the distance that used to separate good from ordinary nearly disappeared.

What the new bar looks like from my desk

I run my business through Claude Code, and the bar I’ve got to clear is the one the tools set. Three of them show what that means in practice.

The tone of voice document

I’ve got one, and it’s long. I’ve written about what goes into it already. It’s a good document, and for months it did less than I thought, because a document only works when you open it at the moment you’re about to break it.

What changed things was a command that reads a draft and counts the parts of the voice that can be counted. The clearest one is how often the prose contracts, it’s rather than it is. My published writing runs at a median of 29.7 contractions per thousand words. A draft I rejected on 12 September ran at 8.1, and it read like a document rather than a person. I knew it was wrong the moment I read it. The number told me why, and it told me before anybody else saw it.

The document set the bar. The counter is what lets me clear it without thinking about it.

The code checker

Every site I build goes through a check before it deploys. It refuses the things that have tripped me up before: a title with a pipe in it, a private page that search engines can see, and, since 23 September, a layout fault where two width rules on one element quietly delete the column the text sits in.

That last one got its check the day I found it on a live page. The check went across 47 built sites and 1,206 pages, found 3 more, all on one other site, and every one of them was opened to make sure it was real.

Nobody will ever notice a page that doesn’t have that fault. It’s the new floor, and clearing it only gets you to zero.

The tool being there was never the bar. Using it every time is.

The instant research

This is the one that taught me the most, because the system with every tool to hand failed it.

On 21 September I asked Monica, the name I give Claude Code in my business, what she thought about writing for landlords on Energy Pages, my energy grants site. She recommended building on the page for the Great British Insulation Scheme. That scheme closed on 31 March 2026, six months earlier.

The answer was sitting in a register on the site itself, one command away, and she’d read that file earlier the same day for a different question. She recommended from a page’s title instead, and every fact stacked on top of the mistake agreed with every other one, which is why it felt finished.

The research was instant. Nobody ran it. Having the check and running the check are two different things, and only one of them clears the bar.

Clearing it easily is the goal

The bar went up for everybody, and there’s no going back to where it was.

In The Bear, one of the best series I’ve watched recently, the temperamental Richie gets sent to clean forks. Nobody tells him why, and by the end of the episode nobody needs to. I’ll tell you anyway. The house sets its standards so high that streaky cutlery screams “I don’t pay attention to detail”.

The goal is clearing the bar easily.

Easily means the checks run whether or not I remember them, because on a busy afternoon I won’t. The spelling, the voice, the page layout, the question of whether a scheme is still open: every one of those is now standard, and every one of them costs real effort if I’m doing it by hand and by memory.

Built into the route the work takes, they don’t cost anything, and the floor gets cleared as a matter of course.

You’ve got the same tools I have. What decides it is whether they fire when you’re tired, or only when you remember.