Something quietly crossed a threshold in the last year. Major platforms are shipping dozens of releases per week now. Not patch notes — actual capability changes. AI is the engine behind this, and it's real: development cycles that used to take sprints now take hours.
That's genuinely new. Software has never moved this fast before.
The side effect nobody is talking about is what it does to users. Features arrive before anyone has internalized the last batch. The mental model users carry around in their heads — what the product does, how it works, what they can trust it to do — is almost always out of date. The software has moved on. The user hasn't.
This creates a gap that didn't really exist before at this scale. We've always had a lag between what software could do and what users knew about. Usually it was a minor inconvenience. Now it's becoming a structural problem. Power users absorb updates fast and pull further ahead. Casual users fall further behind. The distance between "what this tool can do" and "what the average user thinks it can do" keeps widening with every release cycle.
That gap is a product problem, an adoption problem, and eventually a trust problem. Users who can't keep up start to feel like the product is unpredictable — not because it is, but because the cadence of change exceeds their capacity to track it. That's a different kind of friction than we've had to design for before, and most teams aren't treating it as a first-class concern yet.