The Computomatix Times

I'm leaving X for some time to focus on building.

But before I leave, I want to share some thoughts on where we are with AI right now.

If you are building with AI, then this is for you.

I wish I had at least 1% of @levelsio's reach already because I feel more builders need to hear this.

TLDR: Your skills and good taste matter a lot. Be the most ambitious you've ever been and use AI wisely.

Superintelligence is defined as systems exceeding all human capability across pretty much all domains imaginable, and especially strategic agency. Models like Fable 5 and K3 are superhuman in some domains like code generation and breadth of recall, but they are also subhuman in domains like long-horizon autonomy, physical-world interaction, sustained original research, good taste, etc.

We are directing them, and they remain constrained by us humans and institutions. They're not behind the steering wheel yet. The tool hasn't become our master yet. We're still the master over the tool.

The reality is, human actors of all kind, not just deeply technical ones, are wielding AI like a magic wand now, shaping the software economy at the speed of compute, throttled by their limited attention, human speed of expression and prompting.

You reading this, you are special. Special in your own unique and wonderful way. And what AI gives you is an amplifier to express yourself, your ideas, your dreams, your imagination, and your ambition more than you ever could before.

It seems unfair to us old-school coders who had to grind our ways through the dark coal mines, hiking through manual coding and debugging hell in order to create amazing software systems and apps. It's frustrating as to the moon and back to see your skills become irrelevant so fast, at least if you believe the narrative that you've wasted the better part of your life acquiring them.

It is true that there is a certain, quite strong homogenization effect. Millions of people prompting to replicate or iterate on what's known must inevitably lead to a lot of overlap with structurally low diversity. AI produces convergent styles. It's in its nature, like that one designer doing all the designs for everything. In the same way we are also all starting to sound the same, being influenced by AIs way of expressing thought.

X, and everyone's own social circle or audience, produces selection bias. It's skewing the reality we perceive based on what the people in our feed and around us talk about or show us. So we tend to oversample trend-chasing indie apps and undersample deep tech systems, enterprise systems, research tooling or domain-specific work that flies under the radar, below the clouds of hype or algorithmic push.

Apps that took a year to make now take mere hours, it seems. It is both true and false at the same time. Superficially it is true because you get something that appears to behave like an app that was meticulously crafted over the course of an entire year by a talented engineer or even a whole team. What took so long can now be scaffolded with ease, by anyone. Engineers, chefs, strippers. Even our non-technical partners, friends and parents. Great.

But when we dig deeper, the truth is that complex products require reliability engineering, security, compliance, integrations, support and so much more that in the end, even with this powerful AI we have now to help us go from A to B through something like an Einstein-Rosen-Bridge warping space and time, things take their good amount of time to get right. Less than they did before, all things equal, but not mere hours.

Your skill is still highly relevant because AI amplifies you. It gives you leverage. The widespread idea that AI renders skill irrelevant doesn't compute, because either we have output quality that varies, in which case skill still differentiates, or it doesn't vary at all. And if it doesn't vary at all, the concept of "better" is meaningless. In other terms: A quality gradient can't exist in a flattened distribution. This is essentially your mathematical proof right there that your skill is in fact highly relevant.

What AI did is, it raised the floor dramatically. It also raised the ceiling, but not as much as the floor. This somewhat compresses the skill relevance gradient, but it doesn't eliminate it in any meaningful way.

When was the last time that access to powerful tools has resulted in broadly equal results? Never.

There was a time you needed to have a degree in chemistry or something in order to be able to take and develop photos. My grandfather, a scientist, used to have a laboratory for that. Taking and then developing pictures required immense skill.

Then one day digital cameras came along. Now any fool could take pictures, faster and easier than ever, thousands a day in full color or 3D even, instead of just 10 in monochrome. And yet, we all know that some people routinely take amazingly awe-inspiring photos, National Geographic front cover style that make us pause and look, while most others take tens to hundreds of photos a day that just end up clogging up our cloud drives.

We all have access to the same English language, but not everyone writes equally well. The equalization applies to the generation layer that is commoditized, but not to our taste, judgement, distribution, trust, or timing.

AI smashed through barriers to entry and brought them down like the Berlin wall. Now competition floods the market and drives economic profit toward zero in the layer that got commoditized, that is, the generation layer. Margins gravitate to zero, but not equally everywhere.

So what is it that survives this kind of "commoditization of everything"? What do we do, if we drink this snake oil? The classic sets of moats persist. Distribution, brand, trust, network effects, proprietary data, switching costs, regulatory position, capital intensity, and any kinds of significant embeddedness.

Yes, anyone can start using Claude Code & co and copy some app's code in an hour just based on screenshots. But it doesn't copy its user base, proprietary data in the cloud, its trust, its integrations or anything like that.

There is a sense that AI forces us to rush, because everyone is working so fast now. Well, the race was always on. So how about speed-to-trend? It's a temporary edge at best, but not a long-term differentiator. The fruits that hang low are just being picked faster overall, by more hunters and gatherers searching for them.

There is a widespread belief that all the value is going to accrue to the frontier AI companies in the end, who are the ones selling this immense power to everyone else.

In fact it's a bit sad to see all these non-influencer vibe coders raising their hopes for nothing, buying the picks and shovels from the AI frontier labs to go dig for gold. It's like watching 100 ducks fight for a small handful of breadcrumbs, and it's funny until you realize they are essentially fighting for their survival. That's not how the world should be, right?

Well, in reality the frontier AI companies spend astronomical amounts of money on research and development, including things like AI infrastructure and energy, training and inference, etc.

They themselves are essentially ducks in the lake, fighting for their survival for breadcrumbs. They suffer competitive commoditization pressure as much as we do, just at a different level. At the model layer, rather than the generation layer.

Structurally the winners are consumers and users who capture the surplus when production costs fall to the ground, but that of course doesn't really help us builders much, at least not those who have to make a living off of it.

And, let's be real. It may seem funny to have AI spit out an app that someone else previously spent an entire year on creating meticulously by hand, and then upload that to compete. The opportunity is short-lived, and the cost of opportunity a lot are missing is this:

The real gold rush is not that now you can make an app in a few hours instead of a year. The non-obvious that will become common sense soon is that an app that takes 2 hours to make is worth -5$ minus the value of your time + the value of demand which is likely $0 unless you have distribution, which you then burn with slop.

The real opportunity that AI has opened up is WIELDING ENORMOUS COMPLEXITY x EXCELLENCE.

Just imagine for a moment what you could accomplish, if only you would take this new superpower, your amazingly valuable skills, your great taste, your power of imagination, and do something that is outrageously AMBITIOUS! Something that makes others think you must be absolutely mental to even think for a second that it could be accomplished. And then go and work for a full year on just that, utilizing AI to the fullest extent possible. Milking the beast until its dry.

What will that be? No, not another Bumble clone. Not another weather app. For AI's sake, please, not an "app" at all. But something that the world actually needs. Think about it! Think bigger! And when you thought you've thought bigger, think even bigger. You're still aiming too low. THINK BIGGER!

Here is my bucket list of things I want to accomplish before I die.

- A platform that solves the number one root cause of poverty for good, giving everyone a fair chance at living a good life free of financial worries (it's far more than a "platform").

- A floating city in international waters, driven and governed by AI under a human charter (capital intensive, long story, and yes it will be fundable and doable)

- A digital twin of Earth for climate analytics, climate communications and Earth sciences education (the world's most advanced nature simulation by far, unlike anything you've ever seen or heard of)

- Truly reliable, explainable AI that can reason through complex systems and across extremely vast design spaces without stalling under the pressure of combinatorial explosion, laying the foundation for generative engineering so we can work on great and complex things like the USS Voyager and other incredible things far beyond today's vibe coding

- Something so insane, they would lock me up just for saying it out loud

A good heuristic: If talking about it doesn't make you sound like a complete lunatic, and building it doesn't scare you, you're probably aiming too low and the thing you're about to do will be commoditized rapidly (or is already).

Gone building. Back when there's something to show.