Simon Willison

The one thing that worries me is it's valuations, right?

The AI companies with the giant valuations, the only way you justify those valuations is if it represents the total addressable market is all human labor, right?

I've got one that's semi-related.

We will find out if the Jevons paradox saves our careers or not.

This is a big question that anyone who's a software engineer has right now is we are driving the cost of actually producing working code down to a fraction of what it used to cost.

Does that mean that our careers are completely devalued and we all have to learn to live on a tenth of our incomes?

Or does it mean that the demand for software, for custom software, goes up by a factor of 10 and now our skills are even more valuable because you can hire me and I can build you 10 times the software I used to be able to, so I'm more valuable to you.

And I think by three years, we will know for sure which way that one went.

We'll be like, okay, this is how it played out.

This ties back to something I talked about earlier, the sandboxing thing.

If you want...

Basically, if you want your SaaS to stay relevant, you need to embrace plugins and extensions where your customers can customize it in all sorts of interesting new ways.

The way to do that is with a sandbox where they can write code that can safely interoperate within your platform and not delete everything, but all of that kind of stuff.

This is the kind of thing which used to be really difficult to build.

Shopify built this a few years ago, the Shopify functions, but very few other companies have done it.

I think a lot of companies are going to start doing exactly that.

The most successful implementation of this pattern of all time is Salesforce, right?

Salesforce, incredibly customizable.

Dreamforce in San Francisco has 50,000 people attending and they're all professional Salesforce customizers.

So that pattern absolutely works.