What I don’t understand is that how is this automatically good for startups?

Say I have a startup that vibe codes “AI for real estate”. What about customer acquisition?

On the other hand, if I’m Zillow, why can’t I just throw a developer on the same feature and automatically have a customer base for it?

If you look at most of the YC funded startups these days, they are just prompt engineers with no go to market strategy and some don’t even have any technical people and are looking for “technical cofounders” that they can underpay with a promise of equity that will statistically be meaningless.

Technology has always been deflationary. But you don't put off buying a computer because it will be cheaper next year. Nobody seems to be putting off buying GPUs despite scary depreciation and a blistering pace of new product introductions that are ever cheaper faster and better.

I'm still ahead of a company starting later:

I have the legal structure, i know my collegues, i have potentially employees and more capacity.

The problem is not that a startup is starting after you but you do not give yourself time to keep an eye on AI and not leveraging it when its helpful.

We leverage AI and ML progress constantly and keep an eye on advances. Segment Anything? Yepp we use it. Claude? Yes Sir!

The impulse to make the comparison makes sense. The reality is a bit different, probably leans in the right direction but is buffered by learning. I’ll explain. There is no upside to delaying purchasing if you think things will get less expensive. There is however upside in building today even if you have to rebuild tomorrow, and that upside is in learning the problem space. Specifically, what is likely to be trivialized and what truly requires domain knowledge. Horizontal apps? Little domain knowledge to encode. Vertical app? More domain knowledge to encode. Separately, there are more ways to differentiate than distribution alone, see verifier’s law. Problems that are challenging to verify are challenging for AI to trivialize.

> when prices go down instead of up. It is generally considered harmful: both because it is usually brought on by something really bad (like a severe economic contraction)

Or, you know, technological improvements that increase efficiency of production, or bountiful harvests, or generally anything else that suddenly expands the supply at the current price level across the economy. Thankfully, we have mechanisms in place that keep the prices inflating even when those unlikely events happen.

There’s a fun version of this in futurist space travel speculation.

Let’s say you have the a fusion rocket and can hit 5% the speed of light. You want to migrate to the stars for some reason.

So do you build a generational ship now, which is possible, or… do you wait?

Because if you build it now someone with a much better drive may just fly right past you at 20% the speed of light.

In this one the answer is to plot it out under the assumption there is no totally undiscovered major physics that would allow, say, FTL, and plot the curves for advancement against that.

So can we do this with software? We have the progress of hardware, which is somewhat deterministic, and we know something about the progress of software from stats we can make via GitHub.

The software equivalent of someone discovering some “fantasy” physics and building a warp drive would be runaway self-improving AGI/ASI. I’d argue this is impossible for information theoretical reasons, but what if I’m wrong?

"One of the main problems is that if people expect prices to keep going down, they'll delay purchases and save more, because they expect that they'll be able to get the stuff for less later."

That is why we are all waiting to buy our first personal computers and our first cell phones.

Economists have managed to be ludicrous for a very long time and yet we still trust them.

Does anyone else agree with this the premise of this article? Is it sensible to put off building things now because it will get even cheaper and faster later?

Maybe the time value of time is only increasing as we go.