10 minutes to shop online in 1996, 30 seconds in 2026 — the same shift is coming for LLMs
charliedeets · x · 2026-09-02
Charlie Deets watched a 1996 video of someone buying a 35mm camera online: nearly 10 minutes of browsing categories, minute-long page loads, and errors. In 2026 he bought the same camera on his phone in under 30 seconds.
He draws the analogy to today's agents: waiting on agents now feels like waiting on page loads in 1996 — LLM technology will get really fast, and our relationship to it and culture itself will shift. His predictions:
- Managing multiple tasks becomes uncommon when time-to-completion approaches zero, like one-tab mobile browsing;
- The shift to mobile interfaces increases;
- In a world where talking out an idea makes it exist in real time, patience as we know it may not survive.
He argues we should start designing for this future now — preserving sensibilities we value and abandoning less useful ones.
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