Listening Nate B Jones here¹ to the end. Thought I heard him refer to productivity gains. Had to rewind that to hear it again.

every single agent you can run in parallel, multiplies your productivity.

But does that translate to value?

Recently, I’ve been reading the Healthcare Handbook², where I (re)learned that “productivity” has a specific meaning to labor economists. Productivity is your output given your input. HH authors further cite this piece⁴. But informally, “productivity” is just, “hey I got more stuff done”, “I checked off more to-do list items!”

Intriguingly, w.r.t. healthcare, the price of professional services has tripled since 1950. Healthcare providers are seeing fewer patients, on average, per day. On the other hand, manufacturing productivity has outpaced services, and prices of goods have gone down. There is a deeper point in this so called Baumol effect, which I have not digested yet. And these observations do not imply causality necessarily.

But the reason bring this up is two-fold: the output of agents still needs validation, plus we don’t really know the cost–here “cost” is the “input”.

It is sounding like we can do more up-front validation, by way of the so-called spec-driven-development.

But for the most part we have all been insulated from the real price of LLM compute.

Benefit short falls

Personally, I’m excited by getting to side projects I wouldn’t have had time for. If they are only slightly useful, hey hopefully I had fun and learned something. Businesses are more conservative, understandably. AI companies have to eat their own dogfood, which is honorable and expected.

Everyone becomes a product manager?

Good taste and design sense take time to curate, but they are not rocket science, right?

Maybe Mike Judge was right about Idiocracy, as being where we are heading, even without knowing the exact path.

References

1. https://youtu.be/dZxyeYBxPBA , https://www.natebjones.com
2. https://www.amazon.com/Health-Care-Handbook-Concise-United/dp/1975200020/ref=pd_lpo_d_sccl_1/139-2436000-5679337
3. https://michal.piekarczyk.xyz/note/2026-01-01-notes-healthcare-handbook/#health-care-productivity-has-gone-down
4. https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/helland-tabarrok_why-are-the-prices-so-damn-high_v2.pdf
5. https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF10557 , productivity
6. Idiocracy