by a4isms | 2025-06-03 21:13:35+00:00
I have been in this industry since the mid 80s. I can't tell you how many people worry that I can't handle change because as a veteran, I must cling to what was. Meanwhile, of course, the reason I am still in the industry is because of my plasticity. Nothing is as it was for me, and I have changed just about everything about how I work multiple times. But what does stay the same all this time are people and businesses and how we/they behave.

Which brings me to your comment. The comparison to Uber drivers is apt, and to use a fashionable word these days, the threat to people and startups alike is "enshittification." These tools are not sold, they are rented. Should a few behemoths gain effective control of the market, we know from history that we won't see these tools become commodities and nearly free, we'll see the users of these tools (again, both people and businesses) squeezed until their margins are paper-thin.

Back when articles by Joel Spolsky regularly hit the top page of Hacker News, he wrote "Strategy Letter V:" https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

The relevant takeaway was that companies try to commoditize their complements, and for LLM vendors, every startup is a complement. A brick-and-mortar metaphor is that of a retailer in a mall. If you as a retailer are paying more in rent than you're making, you are "working for the landlord," just as if you are making less than 30% of profit on everything you sell or rent through Apple's App Store, you're working for Apple.

I once described that as "Sharecropping in Apple's Orchard," and if I'm hesitant about the direction we're going, it's not anything about clinging to punch cards and ferromagnetic RAM, it's more the worry that it's not just a question of programmers becoming enshittified by their tools, it's also the entire notion of a software business "Sharecropping the LLM vendor's fields."

We spend way too much time talking about programming itself and not enough about whither the software business if its leverage is bound to tools that can only be rented on terms set by vendors.

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I don't know for certain where things will go or how we'll get there. I actually like the idea that a solo founder could create a billion-dollar company with no employees in my lifetime. And I have always liked the idea of software being "Wheels for the Mind," and we could be on a path to that, rather than turning humans into "reverse centaurs" that labour for the software rather than the other way around.

Once upon a time, VCs would always ask a startup, "What is your Plan B should you start getting traction and then Microsoft decides to compete with you/commoditize you by giving the same thing away?" That era passed, and Paul Graham celebrated it: https://paulgraham.com/microsoft.html

Then when startups became cheap to launch—thank you increased tech leverage and cheap money and YCombinator industrializing early-stage venture capital—the question became, "What is your moat against three smart kids launching a competitor?"

Now I wonder if the key question will bifurcate:

1. What is your moat against somebody launching competition even more cheaply than smart kids with YCombinator's backing, and;

2. How are you insulated against the cost of load-bearing tooling for everything in your business becoming arbitrarily more expensive?