What is even happening?
We're at the part before an earthquake when the ground has just shifted and now we're all looking at each other nervously
It’s Memorial Day 2025 as I write this. For a long time in tech I was irritated that nothing much was happening except that everything was getting more ads on it. Now it seems that everything is happening at once. Anyone who tells you they know what the world will look like on Memorial Day 2026 is trying to sell you something. Please do sign up for my Substack, by the way.
I spent a lot of yesterday evening after the kids were in bed playing with Claude Code, running on the newly-released Opus 4. The experiences was extraordinary. I felt I was speaking to an intelligence that understood me. In a few hours I was able to use it to build out some ideas that have been on my mind for years. One was this: I want to understand all the ‘named' ideas on Wikipedia, from Occam’s Razor to Murphy’s Law. I’ve had a few attempts at this before. Last night, just before bed, I explained my desire to Claude. It wrote a Python script for me, but I never even looked at the code. Even as I write this, I have still not seen it. Once we agreed on the max number of API calls, and once I had set my OpenAI API account-level budget to something reasonable in case of disaster, I asked Claude to run it. It said (and I am so, so tempted to write ‘he said’ ):
Sweet dreams! The script will work through the night finding all those fascinating named ideas from Wikipedia! 🌙
This morning I asked: ‘Hi -- is the script still running?’ (The weird thing is, I am not even sure where it was running. It wasn’t in its own terminal window. It was just… on my machine somewhere. Claude was handling it.)
Claude’s response:
The results are fascinating. It did exactly what I hoped. I’ll figure out something interesting to do with the data. And again — I never saw the code. Claude just did it all for me. By itself. Mmm.
The old saw is that ideas are cheap but execution is expensive. But now, the price of execution is dropping. How low will it go? We’re still in the very early stages — it’s still hard to build a phone app, for example, and in my professional life I know first hand how hard it is to build high-quality prodution software for actual users with the irritatingly inflexible demands of actual reality. But the direction of travel is towards almost anyone being able to build almost anything. Larry Page used to say at Google that it was unwise to bet against the internet. And of course he’d say that — the internet made him $150B dollars. But he was right. And now it seems unwise to bet against AI. A lot of things that used to be valuable will no longer be valuable, and a lot of completely new valuable things will come into being.
I wonder what those things are.