Are you building a brick house in the era of steel?
Three articles I read today clicked into one storyline. You can’t build a skyscraper using bricklayer logic. The era of Steel is here.
Here is how the pieces fit together:
🧠 Andrej Karpathy: 2025 is the year the tooling layer got real. We crossed the threshold into jagged intelligence, on-device agents, and vibe coding. The tech is ready.
📈 Aaron Levie & Jevons Paradox: When the cost of “doing” drops, demand doesn’t shrink, it increases dramatically.
We saw this paradox in action with an e-commerce brand we work with. They swapped a “deflection” bot (plateaued at 5,000 rote queries/month) for a genuinely helpful AI agent.
The volume didn’t just stay stable. It exploded to over 6,000 conversations per day.
That is a ~36x increase in demand. The desire for high-touch service was always there; it was just too expensive for customers to access. Until now.
🔗 Ivan Zhao: “Infinite minds” will change organizational shapes, but two gates remain: context fragmentation (work scattered across siloed tools) and verifiability (you can’t unit-test a marketing strategy like code).
If all three are right, a few futures feel very plausible:
1. The 30x employee becomes normal. Top performers stop “doing” and start orchestrating fleets of agents. Managing and reviewing becomes the primary job function.
2. The Fortune 500 advantage erodes. Small teams ship what only giants could ship before, because the cost of execution collapses.
3. The interface flips. We move past chat boxes into visual, artifact-native AI where dashboards, prototypes, and workflows are generated as default outputs.
💡 ❓ If the cost of execution drops to zero, where is the “36x adoption moment” hiding in your business?
(Links to the original threads in the comments)