July 13, 2026
You essentially pay for intelligence twice, once with money, and again with something even more valuable: the proprietary knowledge you must reveal to make that intelligence useful. The better you want the model to perform, the more of that knowledge you have to feed it!
Over time, the information asymmetry becomes increasingly skewed. The seller learns more and more about you as you use what you purchased, while you learn very little about what the seller is learning in return.
July 6, 2026
A lot of getting value out of agents seems to be having some kind of understanding of their failure modes and then working around them. Earlier in the post, we noted that people aren’t really going to be left behind if they’re not using coding agents now and get started in M months because they can be at most M months behind, but will likely be much less behind than that because of how quickly things are changing. A major reason for this is, AFAICT, a lot of the skill involved in using agents is working around their failures. Of course AI labs want to fix these failures, which means new releases are designed to obsolete these skills as much as possible. This is possible to observe directly, in some failure modes that were quite common a year ago are now much rarer.