A good idea is not enough. The question is always: compared to what? Every investment, every business decision, every allocation of time is a choice among alternatives. The failure to think in terms of opportunity cost is the single most common and costly mistake I see intelligent people make.
Engineers are becoming "compute allocators" rather than code writers. When Claude can run for eight hours on a single task, you're really deciding how to spend $500 of compute. The critical skill is no longer writing code; it's deciding what's worth building, defining the boundaries of what you need to know, and staying in sync with the agent throughout the process.
A profession that knows everything about microfinance impact evaluations and almost nothing about industrialization has misallocated its own intellectual capital on a pretty heroic scale.
Conversations shift from "Should we staff a designer on this project?" to "Here's the actual work; let's discuss how to make it better." PMs can now unblock themselves, test ideas with users earlier, and advocate for design resources with real prototypes instead of abstract arguments.
It's opportunity costs, not marginal costs, that are the challenge facing hyperscalers. How much compute should go to customers, and which ones? How much should be reserved for internal workloads?
But in reality, he's screwed the pooch compared to OpenAI, whose approach was, "Let's just sign these crazy fucking deals." OpenAI has got way more access to compute than Anthropic by the end of the year.
7mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
