You can finally say this without being canceled: AI isn't creating a Cambrian explosion of apps, if anything it's holding app creation back. Earlier tech waves had 'the mythical man-month'. Our generation has 'the mythical AI engineer' who magically turns enormous token usage into equally enormously-adopted products. Well, where are the apps and new businesses then? Because compared to prior cycles (e.g. the mobile app boom starting in 2010 or so), right now seems positively sterile, app and UX-wise. Other than Claude or ChatGPT itself, name a new app you use now you weren't already using five years ago? It's a truism of tech that throwing more people and time at a product often results in only lack of focus, confusion, and yet more code to support. This is the parable of the company that over-raised and over-hired and grew too quickly, and now has lots of mediocre, weakly-adopted products, internal communication problems, distracted leadership, code bloat, technical debt...and so the spiral begins, which ends with an apologetic CEO post after some layoffs announcing "we're refocusing on our core customer". Every tech company announcing they're either lowering token caps or shifting to lower-priced models is essentially saying: "we o̵v̵e̵r̵-̵h̵i̵r̵e̵d̵ over-spent on tokens, and are scaling back to focus on our core product" blah blah blah...same same. It's the corporate version of someone using AI to write a long email, someone else using AI to summarize it, and both sides would have been better off just writing a shorter email. But now, even small companies can have that same problem thanks to AI. I refuse to believe that an LLM prompt is the teleological endpoint of human interaction with computer intelligence. The fact we've apparently recrudesced to CLIs, like me farting around with RedHat 7.1 in 2001, feels like a step back. Another world here has to be possible, and while I have every faith (as someone as deep in AI psychosis as the next person) that AI can help get us out of it...just racking up tokens costs isn't how we get there. The AI Jesus isn't coming to save us, human taste, discernment, and radical re-invention will. Like Kafka wrote in his notebooks: "The messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary; he will come only on the day after his arrival; he will come, not on the last day, but on the very last.”