Five Things Tech: AI Economy, New SDLC, AI Design-Aesthetic, Smartglasses, Tech Disruption
This is everything you should read about Tech right now.
Technology never lands where you are looking for it. The ATM was built to automate the teller and did not. The iPhone, which had nothing to do with banking, quietly gutted the job a decade later. That sideways logic runs through everything below. The AI economy is real and scaling three times faster than the mobile or internet waves, but the disruption keeps showing up off the roadmap: in how software is assembled, where context becomes an architectural decision you version like code. In design, where a twenty dollar subscription does the job we used to hire for. On our faces, with smartglasses arriving whether we asked or not. The pattern: the headline technology rarely causes the headline change. The real shift comes in from the side, one step removed from wherever everyone is looking.
Here are five things tech worth your attention.
The state of the AI economy
These revenues are growing faster than previous IT-oriented waves, roughly three times more rapidly than the mobile or Internet waves.
While many companies have moved beyond occasional pilots, they are still in the early stages of scaling and deepening. In conversations Azeem has had with senior execs across a range of industries in Europe and the US (from industrials to insurance, from finance to pharma), the consistent message is that they intend to invest more heavily in AI in the coming years. Companies are also becoming more vocal about the impact of AI on earnings calls, with the caveat that half of the surveyed CEOs believe their jobs depend on getting AI right.
I don’t think this AI thing is going away anytime soon.
The New Software Lifecycle
Static context is loaded on every turn, so it’s reliable and expensive. Dynamic context is loaded on demand, so you only pay for what a task needs.
Static context is loaded every turn: system instructions, rule files (
AGENTS.md,CLAUDE.md,GEMINI.md), global memory, core guardrails. It’s reliable, and it’s expensive, because you pay for it on every single call. Dynamic context is loaded on demand: skills that fire when a task matches, tool results, documents pulled from RAG. You only pay for the bits a given task touches.Get that balance wrong in one direction and you burn tokens and bury the signal. Wrong in the other and the agent forgets the rules that keep it safe. The paper’s advice, which I agree with, is to treat the boundary as a real architectural decision: reviewed in a pull request, versioned like code.
The trick that makes dynamic context scale is Agent Skills with progressive disclosure. The agent sees a little metadata at startup, loads the full instructions when a task matches, and only pulls in the heavy reference material when it actually needs it. That’s how one agent can carry dozens of skills and still only pay for the one it’s using.
We truly live in interesting times. I am constantly revising my setup and while it is getting more complex every week, the tools to manage the complexity are also getting so much better. Some I even write myself, or at least tell the agents to write them…
The A.I.-Design Aesthetic That’s Taking Over the Internet
The advent of A.I. has caused Silicon Valley types to fixate on the concept of “taste”; when machines can spit out images and words instantaneously, the thinking goes, humans must be discerning enough to separate the quality output from the slop. Ström-Awn described Claude’s default design choices as a mark of complacency, “a filtering mechanism” that exposes “people who didn’t spend the time” creating something unique. Nguyen brought up a credo of the mid-century American designers Charles and Ray Eames that defined the ideals of modernism: “The best for the most for the least.” What Claude Design offers, Nguyen said, is “the pretty good for the most for the least effort, and pretty low cost.” She continued, “You’re just paying a twenty dollar a month Claude Pro subscription instead of hiring a designer. Is this the modernist world we wanted?”
I actually think that this phenomenon is nothing new - we have a new wave in design and soon we will see the next wave and then everything will be a bit more sophisticated. The really cool thing is: even people like myself (I called myself web-designer 30 years ago just because I could do very basic website design) can now create pretty complex websites with good UX/UI.
Smartglasses Are Inevitable. But What—or Who—Are They For?
Since the start, the idea of a face-worn computer has garnered skepticism, even hostility, and it’s understandable.
When most of us are trying to reduce our time in front of screens, it seems absurd to mount them right in front of our eyeballs. And why should we be OK with everyone we meet pointing internet-connected cameras at us? It feels like an assault on what little privacy we have left.
Then there’s the built-in AI. Artificial intelligence lets these glasses identify objects in our field of view, like a ficus tree or a Southern African meerkat. But there’s a growing unease with companies sticking generative-AI features into any and all products, and having a little AI djinn always whispering in our ear seems like a cautionary tale—or a “Twilight Zone” episode.
And yet there will be smartglasses, and you and I might even choose to wear them. They’re a technological inevitability, a new consumer-tech arms race for the last and best real estate on our bodies.
I will buy smartglasses as soon as they get progressive lenses, automagic shading and, most importantly, will be self-cleaning.
Why ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did
So what happened to bank tellers? Autor, Bessen, Vance, and the like are right to point out that ATMs did not reduce bank teller employment. But they miss the second half of the story, which is that another technology did. And that technology was the iPhone. The huge decline in bank teller employment that we’ve seen over the last 15-odd years is mainly a story about iPhones and what they made possible.
But why? Why did the ATM, literally called the automated teller machine, not automate the teller, while an entirely orthogonal technology—the iPhone—actually did?
Technology hits differently. But it brings constant change and disruption - yet we are still not getting used to it.
That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:
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— Nico