The End of Rationing

"So why isn't our software 10x better?"

The answer has nothing to do with rationing. When all software is designed to grab the most attention, serve the most adds, collect the most data, deliver the maximum amount of the cheapest content and generally be as exploitive of its users as possible, no amount of rationing or not rationing will effect it.

McMaster Carr, a company worth a little over a billion, sells metal, bolts, casters, and many other industrial bits and bobs. Their website is infinitely better than Amazons. Why? It has nothing to do with rationing and everything to do with trying to actual deliver a good customer experience.

I don't think any of this makes much sense. The problem that this article ignores is that people build different things with AI, not the same things but faster. They build more superficial things, more throwaway things, things that are tailor-made for chasing the buck, and it just doesn't feel genuine or interesting.

It was much the same with search. Google search allowed us to find things faster at first...but over time websites responded to that and started doing SEO crap. Now almost every search results in a billion websites that say the same thing, but shallowly. Yes you can still find some gems but was it worth it?

AI makes things faster, but now it means we can target superificial needs very quickly...and so a new breed of crap software will be built with it. As long as there's a dollar sign at the end of the road.

I am not sure this is default a good thing.

I recall something I once heard about product marketing. The experiment was a product like jam, and they had 3 flavour options available in one case and 12 options available in another. It was a test on how hard it was to make a decision as well as how confident the person was they made the right decision later on.

One of Sartre's points on existentialism was that radical freedom leads to anxiety.

In some sense, AI is removing scarcity. It isn't clear to me that this is the same kind of thing as going from starvation to surplus. It is more like the jam case where we aren't increasing abundance in a total sense, we increasing the options within the existing surplus.

Those who haven't read Mythical Man Month are doomed to repeat it. I don't recall anywhere in the book where it states that the problems described in its essays don't apply to you if you're working with dozens of the most intelligent engineers in the world who can produce code in hours instead of days.

I was discussing this with someone else and used the analogy of nuclear energy. Although nuclear plants are highly complex and use forces that have only been understood for the last hundred years, at the end of the day it's still boiling water to create steam to spin a turbine, and nothing about nuclear innovation can engineer away the laws of thermodynamics.

Agents have and will continue to drastically change how we develop code, but it's my belief that drastically changing our software practices to speed up development just means we're going to hit engineering limits faster, rather than being able to overcome those limits entirely.

At least what I’m seeing at work is that AI tools have generated thousands of security reports after scanning all of the old code. So our whole team has been bogged down for months now removing eval(), updating ancient packages, updating docker images that haven’t been rebuilt in years, etc. It shows no improvement to the end user but since all of these vulnerabilities have suddenly become very visible we have to action them all right now.

> Companies like Rippling and PostHog were the trailblazers, bundling several related products long before agents.

The trailblazer was Microsoft Office.

People respond to incentives: Why do a hard thing when I can do an easy thing?

During the hype cycle, making "x for y" is easiest to get funded and exit.

Once the hype crashes and we're in the trough of disillusionment, then people are bearish. So founders either move to the next hype cycle or figure out a more durable business from the ashes

I don't think the last decade of tech (particularly SV) hiring can in any way be defined as "rationing". If anything, we have seen large software companies grossly over-hire for all of the expected dumb reasons (mostly internal politics) and find themselves in the very predictable situation that more people != more productivity.

Maybe OP can explain why with unlimited tokens neither OAI nor Anthropic have any first party apps other than the main Claude/chatgpt apps

There are only so many rust migrations you can do, at some point you gotta ship something user visible which means you have to deal with people which means the code was never the bottleneck even in 2014

To be honest I don’t believe this is the case. Admittedly, I don’t have any experience with the best of the best models, only up to clause Opus. AI accelerates coding for myself a hell of a lot, but frankly the amount of time I spend coding complex programs feels about the same. I think there’s still a bottleneck, and it has been reiterated here before: judgement, testing, and understanding. If AI really accelerated coding, no amount of cultural inertia would be able to hold it back. It’s just not.

Before we were spending 10:1 on features:quality . I worry that ratio will remain, but at 100x or 1000x the velocity.

There's no reason to think that companies are suddenly going to be spending 1:1 features : quality because both are faster / cheaper .

So expect the low quality to continue, and naturally get worse, because complexity is going up 1000x

My theory is that most people have more software in their lives already than they want or need.

I'm more interested in what the world looks like when everyone has their own personalised software.

"Build me a high speed railway. Make no mistakes."

Now that SaaS CRUD apps can be built in 10 minutes, we can maybe do something more worthwhile, no? So much wasted effort has gone into this field already, in my opinion.

... by improving model efficiency so AI tokens are "too cheap to meter" or alternately not that much more expensive to operate than conventional sorts of software?

It's a different view of scaling. I mean a lot of people have this absurd idea of "super intelligence" which is like the cover of this book

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermind_(novel)

i mean what does "intelligence quotient 10,000" even mean? On the other hand it's very easy to imagine a world where we have systems like the best ones we have now but we can really afford to use them.

> After Claude Code (AC), the economics that gave us every single piece of software we use today have inverted. Building software has become cheap, with the marginal cost of building a new feature approaching zero, while running it, now that AI sits in the critical path, has become expensive.

This is such a weird take, if I need some piece of software why would an ongoing operating cost be having an AI sitting in the critical path.

If the argument is that making software has become cheap because you can use AI to generate software, it doesn't seem to follow that you would build all software as some sort of shell around AI. If I ask claude to build me a task tracking app, I imagine it would build me something with some bog standard data storage and not decide that it needs to keep the tasks in an LLM.

I don't agree with most of this post, but this part stood out as supremely odd. There is a lot of software that isn't made any better by having AI jammed into it as an always on piece of the operating puzzle.

I think we're about to see a shift in terms of what is a viable software product and what isn't.

In the past, if you wanted to do a task, you had to choose from one of a few (or maybe just one) incumbents and make their tool fit your task. Failing that, build your own tool, but that was expensive. If you did build your own, the tool might have value and could potentially be sold to others.

Going forward, building your own will be much easier and cheaper. Even if the incumbent tools suit the task well, you might choose to build your own for a variety of other reasons. e.g. If the incumbent raises prices or chooses to enshitify. What you will probably not do is adopt some third party's vibe-coded clone of an incumbent's tool, because that won't be customized to your needs and it won't have the track record of the incumbent. You can't trust it or control it so it will be better to build your own.

If an incumbent exists and you can now vibe-code a clone, you probably can't sell that clone "as is" and expect to be successful. You might be able to sell your services to customize and refine tools for small businesses that can't really afford to hire a solitary soul to build their own solution, but don't expect that niche to persist long-term.

The free holiday will last forever. Make your plans accordingly.

hehe...Before Claude(BC) and After Claude(AC).

In Claude we trust.

this reads like an ad.

It seems the thinking behind why software exists in the first place revolves around two main questions: 1. What problem or bottleneck can society use help with, along with a large initial impact that can be further enlarged later. Are there attractions already out in the market: such as an echo amongst the general public adjacent to a clearer sentiment that can be heard. Mirror the reality that most of the greatest and grandest injection to market creators of a new market ( Mark Zuckerburg, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page ) there many more you can name here in the U.S. and overseas, however the point is these are usually odd individuals that are not exactly a fit for society in general. Their views are often " outside looking in" to what appears to be a missing gap or a general vacuum. Mark zuckerberg was in college and the main goal was to to be inspired or posses an idea taken from someone else perhaps. Same goes for Jeff Bezos, who i might add had a comfortable job before taking the risk of selling books online, this could be a simple observation of his mother growing frustrated during the .com era where there might have been a stigma against physical books as the U.S. was going through a transition. There isn't really a clear path for most of these people just an idea that was given or inspired and an ability to "look in".

2. What is the end goal? The arena looks like that are venture capitalists, Co-founders, founders, angel investors. An MVP that can show off the minimal representation of your vision. At a time where these were steps that each serve their purpose and each come with their own challenges and journeys that are entirely different from one another.

There are oddities that currently exist without little echoed direction, there are two main operating systems for phones and computers. there are only a handful of tech companies with influence and control over direction to which the tech world heads towards. This was more true a few years back, however now we have tech companies directly involved with government and atrocities abroad. The tech companies you remember are no more along with it every piece of software. You might question the exaggeration and dramatized scene before you, but i assure you it is true. OpenAI was a disruptor until 13b was the aid that helped make them pop only after Elon Musk had something to do with the lab before their founded success. It is not that special anymore, just some tech company that comes to disrupt the market for a few years until that main hosting and dependence on the very firms you are looking to challenge. Web3 is not: A blockchain for the internet. A sickening redundant use of AI. Unintentionally reading articles on online of crime and most had section describing the criminal's activity and leading up to the crime with AI prompt they used to convict them. It is clear. We are transitioning through a very large era to the next. China's GDP was report to be better than expected this year that is huge news to the world, specifically for the U.S. it means wen are behind on all things that is "U.S.". our foreign policy is the wrong approach, our relationship between Canada, China, Mexico etc are amongst the worst handled in history technically, Staling knew signing the treaty with Germany was not a guarantee but a time reference for the invasion. Sided and worked with Britain and the U.S.. The shame lies in the h-1 visas and the attack on the education system as a whole. The government has turned their back on the very thing that made the U.S. what it is for many years. Politics are amongst the worst. The responsibilities were in the hands of the U.S. the idol model for the rest of the world to use as inspiration.True Americans are still found just not heard.