2026-09-24 08:00:00
AI has removed the typing from software engineering & left the system design. DHH told Rails World that writing code by hand is no longer economically productive ; Artemis engineers merged 16 pull requests per day by August, & Lauren Tan ships 2,000 a month. The craft of fitting code together by hand is over ; what remains is designing the loop that decides whether the output is right. Donella Meadows's three properties of great system design, resilience, self-organization & hierarchy, describe how those loops are built. The architect's drafting table was always scarce because the foundation was scarce, not the talent.
2026-09-23 08:00:00
AI prices are collapsing, but the competition is not at the frontier. Anthropic held the Opus line at $5 & $25 across five releases while OpenAI cut Luna 80% then 50% again, & open models now run a majority of token volume at an 86% discount to closed models. The most capable model, Fable 5.1, commanded only 3.7% of gateway spending in its first twelve days. Demand is a normal distribution with a fat middle, & as intelligence per dollar explodes the tokens may shift to commodity. Whether that happens will determine the economics of the AI market.
