jared

Assorted things I've been mulling over regarding agents in the economy: • Companies are in some sense the original superintelligence. It's often the case that they can use their amortized cognitive surplus to advance their interests against those of certain consumers: relative to the optimization capacity of companies, consumers can be inattentive, underinformed, irrational, etc. (Think, say, of some of the classic insurance upsells at the end of a booking process, which is typically priced substantially above what a regular policy would cost.) Herbert Simon introduced the idea of bounded rationality, and firms often end up benefiting from it. Thanks to personal agents, we will probably get somewhat more rational in how we engage with companies. • How exactly will outcomes change? Well, certain kinds of price discrimination will work less well (how do coupons work if every agent hunts fastidiously for them?), and certain kinds of customer cross-subsidy will change (today, people who forget to cancel subscriptions subsidize those who don't). Taken across the economy as a whole, I'm not sure what the incidence of all of this will be. • In corporate strategy, people have long debated the relative importance of distribution and product quality. Perhaps you've made something better, but does anyone know about it? Won't people just continue to buy the ACME Corp Mousetraps? Personal agents will, I think, act as a kind of structural subsidy for product quality. How would markets look different if individuals always spent at least 10 hours researching their purchases? On the margin, focusing on making a product better is, I think, going to become a more effective strategy for companies. This is good! • It true, a corollary is that information about product quality will become more important and impactful. Today, most people have very limited ability to aggregate and integrate such data, but agents will have insatiable thirst for such signals. (It's often said that data is becoming more valuable because it helps in the training of models. That's obviously true, but I think there's a secondary way in which it's more valuable simply as a complement to cheaper intelligence.) • A big question is whether agents will increase superstar effects (rational agents all settle on the same product) or increase dispersion (because everyone has slightly different tastes and preferences, which agents are good at eliciting, finally overcoming the artificial clustering we've been subjected to). • Many internet companies have monetized demand routing, which is in turn often predicated on short attention spans. "I'll click on the first thing I see." This has led to some amount of inefficiency, as companies try to propitiate capricious ranking algorithms and incur various placement fees. It's not all deadweight loss (willingness to pay is itself a kind of signal, which is valuable to buyers), but it's not great. How will the nature and value of this routing change in a world of personal agents? I don't know the answer, but I think that the effects might be pretty big. • Much of what I'm writing hinges on the assumption that personal agents will be on the consumer's side. I suspect that that will be the winning strategy, but whether it's true, and what it means to be true, involves a lot of other questions. Taken as a whole, the market is a massively parallelized, decentralized, and highly imperfect value attribution machine, and, taking stock of all of the effects, it seems to me that the quality point may well be the biggest: that agents will change the nature of the backpropagation such that the rewards for better products increase. Maybe this is too optimistic, but I suspect (and hope) that companies that make things that they're proud of will feel that the universe is a little more partisan in their favor.

As engineering, product, design, DS, etc. melt into a new kind of role, I was reflecting on what roles might look like in the future. For example, when I look at the Claude Code team I see what I think is five archetypes: 1. Prototyper: comes up with brand new ideas; churns out many ideas, most of which don't ship 2. Builder: quickly turns a prototype/idea into production-grade product/infra 3. Sweeper: cleans up the UI, simplifies the code and system, unships, optimizes performance 4. Grower: takes a product that has been built and iterates on it to improve Product-Market Fit 5. Maintainer: owns a mature system to make it secure, reliable, fast, and efficient as it scales Many people span across 2 roles, and sometimes 3 roles. I also notice that these roles are not really tied to job function -- eg. across Anthropic, some designers match category 1, some 2, some 3; same for engineers, PM, DS. A healthy team needs a mix of these, depending on the product: - A product that is new and pre-PMF needs people that are strong at 1+2+3 - A product that is growing and has found PMF needs 2+3+4 and some 5 - A product that has strong PMF needs 3+4+5 and some 2 Maybe product roles of the future will look more like this, and less like the domain-specific roles of today?

1/ SuperEarn Early Beta pre-deposit is live. Introducing SuperEarn, a stablecoin yield orchestration protocol on Kaia. Join the ride now: start.superearn.io/4oBEQ9T 👇 Check the thread — full post also attached in Paragraph. paragraph.com/@superearn/int…

We are entering the era of Fintech 3.0. Regulatory clarity, growing consumer adoption, and low-cost chains have paved the way for a golden age of building in crypto — and at YC, @base and @coinbase we want to fund builders to seize this moment. @harjtaggar and @jessepollak sat down to discuss what kinds of companies they're most excited to see, why this is such an exciting time, and what the future could look like onchain. 00:00 – The Golden Age of Crypto 02:00 – Jesse’s Path to Coinbase & Base 04:00 – From Fintech 1.0 to Fintech 3.0 07:00 – Why Lowering Costs Changes Everything 10:00 – L1 vs. L2, Simply Explained 13:00 – How to Build Your First Crypto App 16:00 – Regulation: Bottleneck or Unlock? 19:00 – Stablecoins as the Killer Use Case 23:00 – Beyond the Dollar: Local Stablecoins 27:00 – Tokenization of Assets 31:00 – New Asset Classes & the Creator Economy 35:00 – What Coinbase Looks for in Founders 39:00 – The Future of Crypto in 10 Years

It's not Bithumb it's Hwangthumb