Time’s Arrow. Energy can only change phase in one direction without needing physical work. I.e a cup of coffee cools down when left in room temperature. You will need to actually heat it up, perform work, for the cup to be hotter. A tidy room left alone will get messy until you apply work to organise it, et cetera.

I think we see the same thing happening more broadly in society. Like the iPhone killing the luxury phone market. Perhaps you do not recall it, but there briefly existed niche providers selling phones and laptops covered in gold and diamonds, aimed at the Gucci customer base to ostentatiously signal wealth, but that market is dead, and the flashiest you can get is an iPhone Pro Max Mega Ultra or whatever the latest is – which are far cheaper than those old blinged-out flip phones were.

Music was immensely valuable back in the day, and of course – a proper experience like being in the room with a chamber orchestra is pretty full on, no CD or MP3 can ever compete. Even the much less refined form of music, getting a couple of lads in a room and attempting to play an old song at roughly the same time is an incredibly rewarding experience.

Now people stream all kinds of music with ease. You start getting things like “functional” music for concentration, workouts or relaxation. Music that people don’t really care about, it’s like morning TV was, just a bit of pleasant noise in the background that fulfils a specific purpose.

Just like with the iPhone 1 – it being “good enough” for a lot of people, destroyed an entire market – I think this is what is happening with music, video, and software with the advent of AI.

Why get a tool for something when you can just tell Cursor to sort you out? It’ll push back and argue cost of maintenance versus a more high-level script, but it’ll write things for you. Python, Rust or something else? You decide. Whatever you say, the sycophantic AI will tell you it was a brilliant choice. If you have a well defined problem space and clear acceptance criteria, you can create code you only have passive knowledge of – i.e. can read and understand, but not a solid awareness of how to construct idiomatic code in it – without the perhaps hundreds of hours of googling for documentation you used to have to go through. For a singular problem ( e.g. “I need to test a development website for 123 specific scenarios listed in an excel file…”) it makes perfect sense, and after you’ve validated your results, you can keep the evidence and throw the code away.

Entropy.

Things devalue as tooling becomes more competent. Like people don’t need to know how to adjust carburettors anymore just to own a car.

The lowest bar gets higher, but also the highest bar gets lower.