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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

"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.

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

In Claude we trust.

... 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.

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

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

this reads like an ad.