komorama's weekly: the AI Peter Principle—first 90% never faster, second 90% never slower
lennysan · x · 2026-10-21
Lenny Rachitsky shares komorama's latest weekly reflections, a dense essay on AI-era software dynamics:
- The AI Peter Principle: You'll bite off more work than you can chew—"the first 90% has never been faster; the second 90% has never been slower." The bottleneck used to be scoping; now the chew is what remains hard, landing you in scenarios barely manageable even with agents.
- Free tokens as bait: A consumer service giving free tokens is a trail of gold coins luring you into a cave that gets a lot less friendly deeper in.
- Software pyramids and AI-made sandcastles: dead-end software, tokens as opex vs capex, the Reset Nexus.
- A nightmare: dreaming software got 1000x harder—every detail agonizingly specified and bickered over with an exponential set of people—i.e., what building software was like less than a year ago.
Also covers Goodhart's law, the Lethal Trifecta Gordian Knot, linearized writing costs, and chats as a junk drawer.
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