I accidentally switched to the Claude Code Plus plan — the low-bandwidth version. The quota was pitiful — one moderately large task could burn through five hours of quota in one shot, and after that all I could do was wait. I spent a full day living the “low-bandwidth life,” and the feeling was that every move had to be calculated, trial and error became prohibitive, impossible to produce anything of value.

This experience reminded me of a concept from the animated series Pantheon: after human consciousness is uploaded into a digital world, your processing speed depends on the compute you’re allocated. The rich run blazingly fast — three weeks in the real world is five years for them. The poor? They crawl. In a purely digital world, compute is time, time is the speed of evolution, and the speed of evolution is class.

This is no longer sci-fi. AI bandwidth and class are already tightly coupled. If your tokens aren’t enough, you simply cannot do what someone with 20x or 100x your tokens can do. Your iteration speed doesn’t drop to zero — the base of the exponent just gets smaller. The progress curves of these two groups can never converge; over time, the gap diverges to infinity. The only difference from Pantheon — we haven’t uploaded our consciousness yet, but we’ve already uploaded our productivity.

People who don’t use AI and people who use it deeply are living in two different worlds. If you’ve never experienced the high-speed version, you’d think slower is fine — ChatGPT or whatever works just as well. But once you’ve tasted it, there’s no going back. That’s when I realized how deep my dependency on this thing goes. If Anthropic shuts down tomorrow, or the power grid goes out, it would feel like losing a chunk of your electronic brain. Orange AI wrote a story on X called Eternal Burn about exactly this world.

We’re already living in it.