Always focus, but only sometimes
When I first broke ground on the codebase for Woodrow, I was terrified at the idea of doing anything devopsy. Managing machines, certificates, alerting, and the AWS interface were all the kinds of work that I didn’t want to touch with a 10 foot pole. So, I chose to start with Heroku, and it let me get going on the parts that I wanted to spend time building, quickly. In a sense, I was paying an ignorance premium to rent their competence.
Recently, I was building a little tool for myself to get better at my poker hobby, and since I was doing everything else with Codex, I asked it to put it on a Hetzner box for me. And … it just did. No fuss about it, and the whole process was waaay simpler and cheaper and under my control than using Heroku.
My fear of devops was a tax on ignorance, and ignorance just got cheap.
LLMs have made you:
A little better at what you did exceptionally
Way better at what you did pretty well
Wildly better at what you did just okay, and
Insanely better at things you didn’t know how to do
Working outside your superpowers used to be counterproductive. If your talent was building apps quickly, it made most sense for you to spend time coding, and to outsource the design to a contractor to get it to look passable. Shoring up your weakness and learning how to mess with Sketch or Figma was not worth doing. But that mental model will no longer serve you well: the cost of doing almost anything has fallen (Codex will build you something that looks more than passable), and it has fallen most severely for your weaknesses. The worse you were at a thing, the more of a gift the models have given you.
Just in time learning
Shipping a web product to a Hetzner box isn’t particularly hard even without an agent, but it is totally not something I ever wanted to spend time doing. I love making products. I hate losing time doing anything that’s not making products.
That doesn’t mean it’s perfect - I don’t know if the poker trainer is set up perfectly on the Hetzner box. But, I know it’s set up well enough for me and a few friends to use. If something goes wrong, ChatGPT + Codex¹ can teach me what I need to know in real time to fix it. It’s as if I have the skill downloader in the Matrix, without having to live in a post-apocalyptic spaceship to get it.
The catch is risk. If being wrong costs you an afternoon, you can afford to learn just in time. If being wrong leaks customer data or loses someone money, you probably can’t.
This level of risk is fine for a poker app that me and two of my buddies use, but is it fine for a real product that aspires to get real users? I argue yes: because getting real users is always harder than you think, and your success is way more dependent on the value of your offering than whether you occasionally have outages. By the time you clear those hurdles, you’ll have a lot of time to iron out the risks, too. The one exception: you have to figure out where your lack of knowledge isn’t just going to cause a bit of downtime, but irreversible damage like a data leak.
This is why the cost of not knowing has fallen so much: you can act before you’ve acquired the competence, learn what you need as problems appear, and recover from many mistakes cheaply.
That changes the economics of every product whose main job is to save you from knowing something.
The ignorance premium
AI models don’t just make doing the work cheaper. They also make the work easier to understand, inspect, and substitute for.
Heroku isn’t the only vendor that benefits from an ignorance premium. There’s a whole spectrum of vendors who can charge more because they have some competence you don’t, but sometimes sell you other things as part of the bundle too:
A tax preparer who charges you $500 to fill out forms you don’t understand, but could just upload to ChatGPT (competence). Compare with, a tax preparer who helps you figure out the nuances of a stock grant you got and how that intersects with the rest of your portfolio (judgment)
A financial advisor who sells you advice that at your age you probably should invest more in the S&P500, something ChatGPT could give you a much more coherent explanation of (competence) but also calms you down and helps you manage your emotions when markets are turbulent (therapy)
An compliance expert who tells you what the applicable rule is (competence) but also gives you a stamp of approval your customers care about (brand)
Their exposure depends on how much more than competence they’re selling in the bundle. Heroku has moderate exposure, and so do financial advisors and accountants. But simple agencies have very high exposure.
What else are you paying for?
The obvious counterargument is that most people don’t hire these vendors because they literally can’t understand the work. They hire them because they don’t want to own it. That matters. But if competence used to be one of the reasons you had to buy the bundle, making that part cheap still changes what the rest of the bundle has to justify.
Heroku’s bundle wasn’t just competence in managing infrastructure. It also sold focus. Because I used Heroku, I didn’t need to think about machines and confusing IAM policies, and I had more time to build the product. Attention is scarce, even if competence isn’t.
But, nothing is truly attention-free: with Heroku, you still worry about their breaches, their price changes, their bugs, and the priorities of the company that owns them. The capriciousness of Salesforce executives becomes your problem. And unlike the model, the cost of that abstraction does not automatically fall every few months.
The more of a product’s value comes from knowing how to do something the customer doesn’t, the more exposed it is. The more of its value comes from something that stays scarce even when knowledge is cheap, the safer it is.
¹ In this scene, I’m “helping” the way my 5 year old helps me make dinner.