February 6, 2026

TL;DR. Willccbb takes a shot at Anthropic's ad style with a sardonic one-liner.

TL;DR. Everywhere — chess, war, business — we've engineered out the opening and middlegame to skip straight to a scripted endgame, mistaking recitation for play.

Takeaways

• Kasparov burned 40% of his clock on the opening in 1985; today's grandmasters blitz the first 25 moves from memorized engine lines, which is why Magnus quit classical for blitz — formats too fast to recite.
• Modern wars perform endgames without openings: Yemen bombings of rubble, theatrical strikes on Fordow, Caribbean boat theater — both sides reciting a script toward a foreordained position.
• The middlegame hasn't disappeared, only our willingness to engage it: Donbas trenches haven't moved in three years, the Somme with drones, where real consequences still land off-script.
• "Across every domain we have stopped playing openings… The instinct everywhere is to skip directly to the endgame."