On the 2026 All-In Predictions episode, I made a simple point:
We are still completely underestimating how short we are in terms of the global demand and supply dynamics of a handful of critical minerals that we need.
What Are Critical Minerals
The U.S. defines critical minerals as materials that are essential to national security and economic stability, yet vulnerable to supply chain disruptions.
To build the 2025 critical list, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) modeled more than 1,200 supply-disruption scenarios, ranking minerals by how severely a cutoff could hit the U.S. economy.
This list grew from 35 minerals in 2018 to 50 in 2022 …
If AI lives up to the hype, it will erode the traditional long term moats of technology companies. As a result, no one with a brain wants to pay for cashflows far in the future.
These multiples cannot come back unless AI turns out to be a toy.
This is really accurate.
As much as we all want to drink the vibe coding kool-aid, the reality is that 90%+ of all code in a company is maintaining and migrating existing stuff that is complicated and messy. You can definitely vibe code the remaining 10% but unless there is a working example of how to reinvent the 90%, AI will not live up to its potential.
We started 8090 and built Software Factory to focus on the 90%.
Many large enterprises now rely on us to help them migrate complex systems, rewrite old systems and maintain existing decisions.
Cheaper, faster and better.
Please consider trying it and seeing what it can do.
Try it here…
Heading back to Stanford next Monday to talk with the AI Club about building real companies in this new era.
If you're a strong software engineer who wants to ship high-quality enterprise software at a completely different pace, we’re hiring at @8090Solutions right now. Please, come and say hi after the talk!
Here is a very detailed walkthru of Software Factory. This is best suited for PMs and Engineers who want to start tinkering with a potential new control plane for how software is made...
...we've made a lot of inroads into establishing this pattern into large Enterprises.
Please give it a try if you want to see what its all about.
ummm so tokenmaxxing didn't increase operating margins?!?!?
of course it didn't. its just that the cto of uber had the courage to say the quiet part out loud.
I struggle to see a transient explanation - meaning some temporal reason that won’t be here at some point soon.
I think AI is causing a structural reset to how risky assets are priced.
A digital super-god means both that you can disrupt someone else but that, in short order, someone else can disrupt you.
As a result, you don’t want to pay a large premium for the future.
A sustained repricing has huge implications for tech companies’ debt loads and SBC.
The Democratic establishment probably hates Matt Mahan:
1) he’s a competent mayor
2) he’s against waste and fraud
3) he is against asset taxes
4) he actually reduced homelessness vs fund the grift machine
5) they don’t have kompromat on him like they did Swalwell
He and Steve Hilton are the two most competent people left in the Governors race.
I think AI has also become the “plausible deniability” to streamline organizations that grew amok during the past two decades.
I see more orgs simply recalibrating. The AI use is hi on an individual level in some places but by no means has the overall productivity skyrocketed.
You only need to look at the operating margins of the companies cheerleading AI the loudest to see it’s still mostly a talking point and tokenmaxxing.
It’s not in the numbers.
Creating fear porn and crying wolf does not serve the AI industry well.
Maybe Anthropic actually believed what they were selling, in which case the naivety, if you can charitably call it that, is astounding.
At a minimum, they need a few circumspect adults in the room that are detached enough from the financial outcome to help make these decisions in the future.
If the leadership in the AI movement doesn’t step up quickly, organize around the right “go to market” and create incentives to align everyone, this will be a generational fumble.
It is, sadly, happening before our eyes.
Generating useless tokens and giving half answers IS THE FEATURE (see most recent trend on hallucinations).
This is so you need to keep prompting it, thereby using more tokens and consuming just enough time as to not use other ways of getting to the answer.
When your working life rewards you, it’s easy to ratchet up the complexity: homes, cars, travel, possessions etc.
I have found that all that complexity comes at the sake of your most fleeting asset: your time. Instead of building things, all of a sudden you’re dealing with minutiae and logistics. Instead of talking mostly to engineers, you’re talking mostly to non-engineers. The building stops…the business of managing self inflicted complexity begins.
It’s worth noting that the best players in the game (Buffett, Elon) have kept their life extremely basic, almost monastic/nomadic, as success ratcheted them ever higher.
I think it’s the bigg…
You have two choices:
1. This is the beginning of the end of the AI replacement cycle. Everything up until now was false alarms and mis/disinformation. You can start to scale back into these companies because, once the noise subsides, these companies are durable and will be around roughly in the same or better position in 10 years.
2. This is the beginning of the beginning of the AI replacement cycle. Customer churn slowly ticks up. NDR slowly ticks down, RPO begins to be discounted - initially by a little, then by a lot. SBC gets minimized, FCF gets maximized. Valuations become exercised in seeing which assumptions are reliable and which a…
This isn’t just a $META issue. It’s increasingly an issue for all of Tech. Because even within Tech, there is an emerging divide between AI-superpowered engineer/PM/sales folks and everyone else.
And we know how that will end: Smaller orgs, bigger payoffs but then the riches distributed across even fewer players that it is today. And everyone sees it coming. Hence the rot from the outside and, now, the inside.
To my peers and to the super entrepreneurs who are far more successful than me:
This is why elites in tech that “have made it” are increasingly the ones that EVERYONE hates. We’ve not distinguished the difference between luck and ski…
It’s just so awesome to make things that people find useful.
This is a great testimonial for 8090’s Software Factory. I’m so excited for the next few months - tons of stuff coming…
Please try it!
https://t.co/UAxNYUWgf0
This is a long but important article that brings up a lot of points worth considering.
One antidote to the bear case painted below is that by documenting your expert and tribal knowledge in the right agent harness, you control the agents vs the other way around.
The big risk for most companies is leaking all of their edge into a model under the guise of “an AI strategy” only to be confounded when umpteen competitors are enabled to nibble away at your business.
But the right control over your “secrets” can allow you to ge the most of AI without giving up control.
This concept inspired many of the core flows and features of Software Factory…
If Martin is right, he also just wrote the product spec for open source + distributed compute where broad swaths of groups, individuals and organizations contribute their compute resources to training runs for large param open source models.
There are lots of issues in figuring this out: homogeneity vs heterogeneity of the training clusters, orchestration, financial incentives etc etc etc but some early projects are good signal as to where this can go and that these limitations can be overcome (folding@home, Venice, Tao).
An attempted oligopoly on intelligence is the perfect boundary condition for a bottoms up uprising of fully open, fully …
AI is stripping companies down to three key elements:
1) Expert Knowledge - this is the vertical specific understanding of what to do
2) Tribal Knowledge - this is knowledge of the fuzzy grey details that are poorly document and is what creates a dispersion in performance in companies doing roughly the same things
3) Hardware and Software - this is the glue that humans use to stitch Expert and Tribal Knowledge in order to perform
If 1 and 2 are documented well, it allows you to rebuild how you do work. This isn't about replacing humans - in fact I think it allows you to grow faster and hire more people because with a great understanding o…