multi-tabling
Riley Brown said something that caught my attention:
“AI Agent Workflows in 2026 will look like Online Poker in 2010. During the online poker boom, really good players started multi-tabling — playing 10-20 tables at once.”
I’ve been chewing on this idea for a while — maybe not in those words, but the same vein.
In 2019 I called it the great contraction. Infrastructure getting leaner. WordPress giving way to static sites. The bloat receding.
In 2020, contraction and expansion: “cloud expansion, coupled with office contraction. Add in a desire for freedom, and innovation will happen.”
By 2022, contraction across all industries: “Ubiquitous computing means everyone can start a business… Working for oneself creates more opportunity for individual.”
And then later that year, the contraction changes: “There is now enough CPU and GPU power to go around. How that value is created is TBD.”
The thread I kept pulling on: contraction in one place creates expansion somewhere else. Leaner infrastructure meant individuals could compete with companies. Fewer gatekeepers meant more surface area for the person willing to do the work.
Riley’s framing gave it a name. Multi-tabling. One person, many tables. The poker players didn’t get more brain — they got better tools to deploy the brain they had across more decisions per hour.
That’s the pattern.
TEAM SIZE SURFACE AREA PER PERSON
│ │
mainframes ██│██ │██
PCs │████ │████
web 2.0 │████████████████ │██████
lean/agile │ ██████████ │██████████
AI agents │ ████ │██████████████████████
└──────────────── └────────────────
'70 '90 '10 '26 '70 '90 '10 '26
Mainframes concentrated compute in one room — few had access. PCs put a machine on every desk — teams got bigger, but specialization meant everyone stayed in their lane. Cloud moved infrastructure back to centralized data centers — but that outsourced the ops burden, so smaller teams could ship more.
Now AI contracts the team. One person. Many agents. Many projects.
The TBD from 2022 has an answer now. The contraction was never about doing less. It was about freeing up attention to do more.