Cheap Code, Scarce Attention
Writing a feature used to take all day. Now you hand a sentence to an agent and it's done in minutes.
Everyone feels the first-order effect: output got cheap. But there's a second-order effect the excitement tends to bury — when something you used to pay for suddenly becomes nearly free, that money doesn't vanish. It just moves house, onto whatever is still scarce.
Code is no longer scarce. So what is? Deciding what to build, knowing where to call a halt, spotting the problem nobody else saw — your attention.
This isn't the feel-good line that "people matter more now." It's a concrete piece of accounting: when one input becomes cheap and abundant, the value slides upstream, to whatever is still scarce and complementary to it. AI wholesales a unit of output down to almost nothing; the value migrates to what sits above it — attention.
So the claim is short: cheap code, scarce attention. But I want to state it in full. Attention is worth more because its leverage grew — and leverage is double-edged: the same multiplier that amplifies your right calls amplifies your wrong ones. Worse, the moment "attention" becomes the scarce thing we grade, it gets gamed.
Let me walk through it step by step: why this accounting holds, how big the leverage actually is (there's a blank here I have to be honest about), why it turns around and becomes the new bottleneck, and the price it makes you pay.