Jay Gibb

btw

I built a Claude Code notification system that uses Warcraft III Peon voice lines. It's probably the stupidest thing I've ever shipped. And according to everybody that has used it, it's also incredibly useful. (sound on)

Every time we've made it easier to write software, we've ended up writing exponentially more of it. When high-level languages replaced assembly, programmers didn't write less code - they wrote orders of magnitude more, tackling problems that would have been economically impossible before. When frameworks abstracted away the plumbing, we didn't reduce our output - we built more ambitious applications. When cloud platforms eliminated infrastructure management, we didn't scale back - we spun up services for use cases that never would have justified a server room. @levie recently articulated why this pattern is about to repeat itself at a scale we haven't seen before, using Jevons Paradox as the frame. The argument resonates because it's playing out in real-time in our developer tools. The initial question everyone asks is "will this replace developers?" but just watch what actually happens. Teams that adopt these tools don't always shrink their engineering headcount - they expand their product surface area. The three-person startup that could only maintain one product now maintains four. The enterprise team that could only experiment with two approaches now tries seven. The constraint being removed isn't competence but it's the activation energy required to start something new. Think about that internal tool you've been putting off because "it would take someone two weeks and we can't spare anyone"? Now it takes three hours. That refactoring you've been deferring because the risk/reward math didn't work? The math just changed. This matters because software engineers are uniquely positioned to understand what's coming. We've seen this movie before, just in smaller domains. Every abstraction layer - from assembly to C to Python to frameworks to low-code - followed the same pattern. Each one was supposed to mean we'd need fewer developers. Each one instead enabled us to build more software. Here's the part that deserves more attention imo: the barrier being lowered isn't just about writing code faster. It's about the types of problems that become economically viable to solve with software. Think about all the internal tools that don't exist at your company. Not because no one thought of them, but because the ROI calculation never cleared the bar. The custom dashboard that would make one team 10% more efficient but would take a week to build. The data pipeline that would unlock insights but requires specialized knowledge. The integration that would smooth a workflow but touches three different systems. These aren't failing the cost-benefit analysis because the benefit is low - they're failing because the cost is high. Lower that cost by "10x", and suddenly you have an explosion of viable projects. This is exactly what's happening with AI-assisted development, and it's going to be more dramatic than previous transitions because we're making previously "impossible" work possible. The second-order effects get really interesting when you consider that every new tool creates demand for more tools. When we made it easier to build web applications, we didn't just get more web applications - we got an entire ecosystem of monitoring tools, deployment platforms, debugging tools, and testing frameworks. Each of these spawned their own ecosystems. The compounding effect is nonlinear. Now apply this logic to every domain where we're lowering the barrier to entry. Every new capability unlocked creates demand for supporting capabilities. Every workflow that becomes tractable creates demand for adjacent workflows. The surface area of what's economically viable expands in all directions. For engineers specifically, this changes the calculus of what we choose to work on. Right now, we're trained to be incredibly selective about what we build because our time is the scarce resource. But when the cost of building drops dramatically, the limiting factor becomes imagination, "taste" and judgment, not implementation capacity. The skill shifts from "what can I build given my constraints?" to "what should we build given that constraints have in some ways been evaporated?" The meta-point here is that we keep making the same prediction error. Every time we make something more efficient, we predict it will mean less of that thing. But efficiency improvements don't reduce demand - they reveal latent demand that was previously uneconomic to address. Coal. Computing. Cloud infrastructure. And now, knowledge work. The pattern is so consistent that the burden of proof should shift. Instead of asking "will AI agents reduce the need for human knowledge workers?" we should be asking "what orders of magnitude increase in knowledge work output are we about to see?" For software engineers it's the same transition we've navigated successfully several times already. The developers who thrived weren't the ones who resisted higher-level abstractions; they were the ones who used those abstractions to build more ambitious systems. The same logic applies now, just at a larger scale. The real question is whether we're prepared for a world where the bottleneck shifts from "can we build this?" to "should we build this?" That's a fundamentally different problem space, and it requires fundamentally different skills. We're about to find out what happens when the cost of knowledge work drops by an order of magnitude. History suggests we (perhaps) won't do less work - we'll discover we've been massively under-investing in knowledge work because it was too expensive to do all the things that were actually worth doing. The paradox isn't that efficiency creates abundance. The paradox is that we keep being surprised by it.

My 16th Century mouse prototype finally arrived at the Kunstsammlungen der Veste Coburg museum in Germany today to start its two year exhibition. It will be shown alongside a one of a kind suit of armour from the period that was built for a dwarf. #jeffdeboer #mousearmour

JUST IN: Jack Dorsey’s Bitchat becomes the 2nd most downloaded app in Jamaica as Hurricane Melissa knocks out communications across the Caribbean 📡 Bitchat enables peer-to-peer messaging without relying on centralized servers 📱

"The Debasement Trade" since COVID: In USD: NDX up 165%, SPX up 102%, Home prices up 56%. In gold: NDX up 7%, SPX down 18%, Home prices down 37%. In BTC: NDX down 78%, SPX down 84%, Home prices down 87%.

Play the game or the game plays you. Watch the New Trailer for The Running Man – Only in theatres November 14.

@businessbarista Planning is the new coding

It took 70 years but it finally happened

At @Google, we are moving from a writing‑first culture to a building‑first one. Writing was a proxy for clear thinking, optimized for scarce eng resources and long dev cycles - you had to get it right before you built. Now, when time to vibe-code prototype ≈ time to write PRD, PMs can SHOW not tell. Role profiles are blurring, creativity and building are happening in parallel.

If you are Pre-Seed, do these things before you pitch VC's and you will be 10x more successful at fundraising: 1. build an MVP and get it in hands of customers. have a clear product wedge. 2. talk to 50-100 customers, have all notes in an AI chatbot, summarize customer pain points, extract a couple "if you build i will buy it" quotes, have 3-5 potential customers ready or reference calls. Validate product wedge 3. find a list of who tried to solve this problem in the past, even tangentially. Call them, talk to them, summarize why prior things failed. Get all current competitors on list, know how / why you are better. 4, summarize all above in a great "why now? Why us?" slide. Why Now? and Why US? are the primary questions for Pre-Seed VCs, get that one nailed.

Here's my 6 hour conversation with @dhh, a legendary programmer, creator of Ruby on Rails, author, and race car driver. This was a fun and inspiring conversation on everything from the future of programming & AI to the nature of happiness & productivity to the value of family, getting married and having kids. X limits video length to 6 hours. So this full convo doesn't fit (by a few minutes). So, the first 6 hours are here on X. The full version is up everywhere else (see comment). Timestamps: 0:00 - Episode highlight 1:21 - Introduction 2:32 - Programming - early days 19:57 - JavaScript 30:16 - Google Chrome and DOJ 38:03 - Ruby programming language 45:14 - Beautiful code 1:03:15 - Metaprogramming 1:06:36 - Dynamic typing 1:13:55 - Scaling 1:26:47 - Future of programming 1:44:18 - Future of AI 1:50:13 - Vibe coding 1:58:45 - Rails manifesto: Principles of a great programming language 2:23:11 - Why managers are useless 2:32:32 - Small teams 2:38:39 - Jeff Bezos 2:53:57 - Why meetings are toxic 3:01:43 - Case against retirement 3:09:00 - Hard work 3:14:38 - Why we left the cloud 3:17:48 - AWS 3:27:07 - Owning your own servers 3:33:19 - Elon Musk 3:43:01 - Apple 3:54:48 - Tim Sweeney 4:06:22 - Fatherhood 4:32:04 - Racing 4:59:08 - Cars 5:04:26 - Programming setup 5:19:35 - Programming language for beginners 5:32:53 - Open source 5:41:46 - WordPress drama 5:53:03 - Money and happiness 6:01:56 - Hope

TIL PageRank was named after Larry Page. Not webpage 😆 H/t @AcquiredFM

After a 20-year sleep, he has awoken. Welcome back Jeremy, and happy Canada Day n00bs! 🇨🇦 youtu.be/mZOSd74CHQ0

Kitty Olympics 🐈🐈‍⬛ 🤯1.5M views in just 5 hours between my Instagram and TikTok — all thanks to the new model from @Hailuo_AI : the Hailuo 02. The physics are insane. I have to say that not every video came out perfect on the first try, but I still got great results really easily. The way cats jump is just… perfect 😻 By the way, which cat won the competition? 😼🏅

«Remember this video next time you're arguing with someone on the internet»

Photographer Sam Davis captured the incredible moment a snake eel escaped from heron’s stomach while the bird was still in flight.

@RayDalio Visit wtfhappenedin1971.com to better understand

My friend Tin made me a video for my birthday, show him some love. Push ups for Jay's Birthday youtube.com/shorts/mBMUJXO… via @YouTube

jeremy returns june 30 n go hug ur mom lol