Many people think AI is going to be a singularity. But Amdahl's Law and Gustafson's Law suggest otherwise. You get diminishing gains with more power, and yet more power unlocks new things. Better CPUs didn't lead to instant simulations and word processing, they led to social networks and TVs that spy on you.

But you have to internalize these algorithms well enough to understand how the world works.

The API revolution might be another thing - you were able to swap out a database with any other. Risky decisions are fine when they're reversible. Databases were a more reversible way to deal with scaling and architecture.

I worked at a B2B unicorn once that raised funds, not so much because they needed the money, but because it symbolized to the market that they were here to stay. That they're not going to run out of money and enshittifies when the market downturns.

Style 2: You are free to use any tool you like as long as you build this full app in an hour. Evaluation is that it works and that it follows appropriate architecture.

Style 3: You're given a dumber model, like Gemini Flash or Claude Haiku, and need to solve this problem.

Recently there's been more intricate graves and sometimes tombs, but time by time, people fall back to the original traditions. After all, the big caliphs who ruled empires were buried under two stones.

They gave out discounts but that doesn't magically solve the problem of capacity and led to the service being overloaded instead.

Now you tell some idea of what you want and AI gives you a better thing than what you originally imagined. Then you go into a rabbit hole... simulate productivity, sales, customer, cash flow, materials for the building, make it curvy, make it pop up in 3D, populate it with NPCs, give your NPCs wages and background, write a dialogue with the ghosts of Christmas. It ends up being a game in itself.

It's good fun. It costs me $20 and I can do it and deploy it from my phone.

For everything else, MCP.

It's more that releases have become the new devlog these days. Someone who only talks about an idea and hasn't written a line of code will likely never do the idea. If they're open to reading comments and discuss feedback, it's cool.

But using HN purely as a marketing channel is rather rude.

They're fully dead from what I see. With low code, you'd drag a component onto the screen, click it, look for a field (which may have a different name to the original field), fill that in, and then spend 30 min trying to align it on screen.

With agents, you just tell them what to do. Draw boxes on a piece of paper, take a photo with Claude on your phone, and you'll have a functioning UI.

If you wanted to modify layouts, you can do it straight from the toilet seat on your phone.

The other big feature in low code is maintaining API specs. You'd tell it what the tables are, what to connect to, data objects, and all that. Another thing that AI does better.

Tools like Cursor do something very similar. They claim to be using 2 million tokens or something, but those are cheap tokens which make the code space more searchable.

Assets are harder to measure. Facebook used to say something silly like every user was worth $100. That sounded ridiculous for a completely free app but over a decade later, the company is worth more than that. Revenue is an easier way of measuring assets than profit.

Profit doesn't really matter. It gets taxed. But it's not about dodging taxes; it's because sitting on a pile of money is inefficient. They can hire people. They can buy hardware. They can give discounts to users with high CLTV. They can acquire instead of building. It's healthy to have profit close to $0, if not slightly negative. If revenues fall or costs increase, they can make up for the difference by just firing people or cutting unprofitable projects.

Also when they're raising money, it makes absolutely no sense to be profitable. If they were profitable, why would they raise money? Just use the profits.

What matters after death? What matters before it?

Avoiding death is impractical. The lifehack is to propagate a bit of your life forwards, i.e. children. Make sure they end up with all the advantage you can give them. Many can't do this, so the other trick is to propagate similar cells - family, humanity, earth creatures.

I'm a believer in occasionalism though. The philosophy/theology takes a few years to click, but in the end I think all that matters is patience and perseverance.

Patience for the trials and temptations of life. Perseverance is the struggle. Some call it a journey, but I think the anime Berserk captures it perfectly. To struggle as if you're branded for death and all odds are stacked against you.

If you believe in a judgement day, then these virtues will be rewarded. If you do not, then throwing yourself into whatever gets in your way is a more enjoyable way of living life than being passive. And in engineering terms, if you channel a lot of energy somewhere, something happens.

Some people think aiming at goals is the most important thing you can do. Sam Altman is one of those people. You can spend a lifetime aiming and still miss.