Ride the exponential

These days, you can pretty much solve any task by defining an eval and hillclimbing over it, instead of directly defining the deterministic/agentic workflow to solve it. The data provider companies' entire job is to define evals for all economic activity to make the frontier models capable of doing anything. Your job then becomes pointing frontier intelligence in the right direction - defining what to solve, and how to measure what good looks like. Agent application interfaces will evolve to capture this. The most complex processes will still need some sort of explicit workflow builder interface, but most tasks can be compressed into goals and eval instructions.

It is extremely obvious at this point that the vast majority of apps will be replaced by personalised, one-to-one programs that a user's AI assistant will simply build and maintain for them at will, exactly as they want, on the fly. The inversion from apps to intelligence is inevitable, because no one ever wanted an app in the first place - they wanted their problem solved as cheaply, quickly and effectively as possible. The SaaS apocalypse has barely begun. We are in the opening act.

The only jobs that are forever safe are those where the human is the entire point. This is called ESSENTIAL DEMAND. What you must understand is that the vast majority of labor is DERIVED DEMAND, meaning that the human labor input is merely incidental to the desired outcome. For instance, if you want a house built, you are not paying for humans because you want humans involved. You are paying humans because there is no cheaper, better option. That is derived demand. Essential demand, however, is when you are paying for THAT HUMAN in particular to be present or involved. There are four overarching dimensions of essential demand: 🎨 PROVENANCE Provenance is when you care that a thing was created by a human. Real art, real music, real food. That sort of thing. ✨ PRESENCE Presence is when a human is physically present, such as for childcare, massage therapy, and other immediate, embodied experiences. ⚖️ LIABILITY Liability is when you want a human to be legally accountable for something. Like the owner of a company, a CEO, a judge, a lawyer, mayor, or president. 👩‍🎤 AFFINITY Affinity is when you are paying for a specific, named person. RDJ sells movie tickets. Taylor Swift sells out concerts. If your job is not dominated by one or more of those dimensions, I've got some bad news for you.