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My thoughts on the current state of AI driven software development, why I'm no longer concerned about a runaway intelligence explosion, and what I think is a far worse outcome we could be walking into maevyn.codes/decoherence

I've been wondering about the impact of AI dev tools on standardization for a while. A lot of what you talk about echoes the tensions between different pace layers in an evolving system.

It's pretty normal for fast-moving unstable systems to be built atop a slow-changing, more stable layer. Examples abound in economics, biology, and of course software.

AI looks pretty normal through this lens, with the main concern being that AI vacuums up investment from all over the economy, starving other industries.

Which recasts your question of the decoherence trap in economic terms: If the least coherent businesses absorb (nearly) all economic power, what then?

Normally they would become inefficient and get outcompeted, but we're entering a new market in which investor story time is often a better business model than selling products and services, since investors have most of the money.

Looking forward to it! Feel free to ping me when you post it. Price signals aren’t magic, they all come from people spending money, and I’ve been thinking about how much of the money is controlled by a few tech billionaires with founders’ shares…who all know each other and bandwagon together.

Price signals don’t come from people spending money. They come from coherence—people paying the same price. The “tech problem” for markets is not in tech itself, it’s in the ability to usefully price discriminate. That’s the *why* of surveillance capitalism from the capitalists’ pov.

Coherence isn’t really directly related to prices like that, prices are neither coherent nor decoherent. They are just data. Systems are coherent or decoherent, and prices influence the systems we build and how we build them.