What Is an Hour Worth?

I recently added 18 solar panels to the 20 already on my house. Now I'm putting a massive new system on my parents' place. Installed, it would run north of $110,000. I'm doing it myself for under $30,000.

That gap holds a lot of stories: supply chains, markups, what "installed" really pays for. But the one I can't put down has nothing to do with solar.

It started with my own power bills, climbing until solar stopped being a someday project and turned into a math problem I had to solve. That's how I found him: a guy on Facebook Marketplace selling panels at a great price, plus inverters, batteries, racking, basically anything I needed. He hustles.

When I decided to go big on my parents' place, he had the supplier contacts I didn't. He came in a lot cheaper than internet suppliers on every battery. His margins are thin. He's young, he's responsive, he's just trying to make a living, and he's good at it.

So I told him he needed a real website. He sent me what he'd been building in Squarespace. It was a mess. I offered to spend some of my time cleaning it up. And because I didn't want to become his webmaster for life, I offered to teach him how to use AI to manage the thing himself.

Then he said something that gave me pause.

He said he was interested in learning my tricks.

Tricks.

I get why he'd call them that. From the outside it looks like sleight of hand. I open a laptop, things happen, a working site appears. And to be honest: AI does a huge amount of that lifting now. I'm not hand-coding his site from scratch. I lean on these tools constantly, and some days I can't cleanly tell where my skill ends and the model's begins.

But here's the thing. He was already using AI. Squarespace has its own built-in version, and he'd let it run. It had generated photos of solar installs so bad they'd get laughed out of the reddit posts that exists purely for bad solar installs. It had also taken his prompt, the instructions he typed to the AI, and pasted them into the live site as body text.

Similar tools. Wildly different result.

So whatever I'm adding, it isn't the typing. It's knowing that fake install photos read as fraud to anyone who knows solar. It's knowing your prompt doesn't belong in the footer. It's knowing what "done" looks like, and catching the machine in the half-second it starts to lie to you.

Also, the part that took a life to learn. Software architecture, frameworks, APIs, UI and UX, DNS, the whole development lifecycle, and now the AI version of it. None of it made me able to generate a website. The AI does that for anyone. What the years bought me is the judgment to drive the thing and the taste to throw out what's wrong. AI didn't make the work easy. It moved the hard part somewhere you can't see, which is exactly why, from the outside, it looks like a trick.

This is not a TikTok how-to. It's years. (Okay, at least a YouTube how-to.)

And here's the part that actually got me. I'm not just building him a website (I'm doing that too). That would be one-time labor, an hour traded for a thing. I'm teaching him to use AI himself, which means everything he builds after this gets faster, forever. That hour doesn't produce a website. It compounds. The market knows it, which is why a teaching hour is priced miles above a labor hour. It's the entire consulting industry.

So what is that worth? Not in the abstract. What's it worth to this guy, right now? I'm in the middle of launching my own company and my funds are tight. I genuinely want to help him. But "help" and "what's fair" turn out to be two very different things, and I'm trying to navigate this correctly.

I'll admit something else, too. I might be wrong about how easy this is. What feels like nothing to me may be genuinely hard for someone who's never touched it. Or it might not be. He might pick it up fast. I'm honestly curious to find out.

Here's the thing I keep circling.

All of us are carrying a world of knowledge and skill and experience. Up to now we've collectively worked out how to put a price on it, but mostly through a lot of exploitation and extraction along the way. The price of an hour has never really been about the hour. It's about bargaining power, scarcity, credentials, and a pile of social judgments about whose time matters more.

A while back I came across a group in LA running a time bank. https://www.ourtimebank.com/ The idea is simple: everyone's time is valued equally. A lawyer's hour is worth the same as a plumber's. A doctor's hour is worth the same as a neighbor's who comes over to help you move something heavy. One hour, one hour.

Apply that to my situation and does it still hold? The obvious objection isn't even skill: surgeon versus plumber. It's that some hours compound and some don't. My teaching hour makes him better forever; an hour of his stacking panels does not. By any market logic, mine is worth more.

So why should one-for-one survive it? Maybe because the multiplier isn't mine to charge for. The compounding lands in HIS lap (he's the one who gets faster on every future job), and it's co-produced: my hour is useless without all the hours of his own work applying it. Charging a premium for the teaching would mean billing him today for value he generates later, with his own effort. That's a royalty on someone else's future labor, the exact extraction I think we all need to question.

It's also the same impulse as not wanting to be his webmaster. Charging for the leverage is just manufacturing dependency, the move of the consultant who teaches you precisely enough to keep you needing him. One-for-one kills that incentive. I hand the capability over clean and don't skim the upside. Knowledge that spreads instead of concentrating.

And somewhere in here I realized I'd wandered into the oldest version of this problem: how we pay teachers.

Teaching is the purest compounding work there is. A good teacher makes every student more capable for the rest of their life. And we have always paid it like one-time labor. Society quietly banks the multiplier, a more capable population, and hands the teacher a wage. The same royalty on the future, just at civilizational scale. Damn, do they get screwed.

The internet did crack this problem ... A good explainer on YouTube reaches millions, and for the first time a teacher can capture value that scales with reach instead of hours. For a very few of them it's been genuinely freeing, and some amazing teaching now lives online. But isn't this 90% reach ... and reach isn't teaching. Is this us now paying the performance of teaching instead of holding ourselves accountable for learning.

Which is the trap of value-produced all over again.

So I keep landing in the same place. One-for-one isn't fair by value-produced math; trading a compounding capability for an hour of someone's time. It's only fair if you change what you're measuring, not the value produced but the time lived. That turns out to be the whole game. The radical move was never the number; it's the choice of what goes underneath it. Measure lived time and the premium disappears. Measure value produced and it comes roaring back, dragging every judgment about whose hour matters more right back in with it.

I'll make a confession... every gut instinct I have says teaching, mentoring, anyone who hands you something you get to keep for life, should be worth more. They're carrying something different than labor, and some part of me wants to put a premium on it. Then I remember the argument I just talked myself into. Nope. One hour, one hour.

I keep coming back to it because more and more of us are working outside the old arrangements. Not employee and employer. Not even the clean version of buyer and service provider, because a lot of services have quietly become too expensive to actually buy. Something is breaking, and people are improvising around it.

We all still have to eat. There will always be a premium for the things you can rely on: a warranty, work done on time, work done exactly the way you wanted. That premium isn't going away, and it shouldn't.

But I suspect this only works the way it's working for me because he's giving me something too: the prices, the supplier access, the hustle. And there's real regard between us. Among strangers, someone usually defects back to value-produced. Which may be exactly why these arrangements keep turning up in communities and time banks and neighbors helping neighbors, and not on the open market. The thing that makes one-for-one hold is the relationship around it. And maybe that's the whole point. Maybe the externality, the good kind, is that valuing time this way quietly rebuilds the thing that holds a community together in the first place.

So here's the question I'm actually sitting with, the one that made me write this down:

What is my time worth once you strip away all the inherited judgments about whose time is worth more?

I don't have the full answer. But I think a fair place to start is this: one hour equals one hour. No margin added.

I'll teach him. We'll figure out the rest as we go.