Attention is all you need

No - not that one. One thing I think the eruption of LLM-assisted development has done is make it painfully clear that human attention is the real currency that matters, and it isn’t becoming more abundant.

An Example

There’s a subreddit that focuses on FIRE (financial independence, retire early) and over the years the ‘meta’ posts associated with the subreddit have changed. Every time the stock market goes up, there are lots of ‘milestone’ posts sharing new milestones hit. Every time the market goes down there are “hold the course” messages. Leaks about the Government’s budget get endlessly scrutinised. And perhaps once every year, somebody would build a new tool (often in Excel) for calculating some aspect of financially modelling the journey to an early retirement.

Now, there’s a new post in town.

“Does anybody want to check out my FIRE calculator app I built?”

LLMs have made spinning up a repo tailored to your financial position trivial. It can do modelling, forecasting, and offer sage advice that’s perfectly personalised. A natural extension: I built this thing and it’s useful to me…maybe this is my side project?

Of course, the answer is no. I don’t want to check out your FIRE calculator. Why would I? It’s trivial to build my own and mine is tailored to me and infinitely extensible.

The bar has moved - I don’t know that it was ever true that you could “build it, and they will come” but it’s less true now than it ever has been. The barrier to “build it” has been falling and LLMs have dropped the bar further still.

If building isn’t the barrier, what is?

Your ability to find a human to pay attention is the barrier.

Zero Sum Games

Unfortunately for you, somebody got there before you. Unlike building things, human attention is a zero sum game. Facebook. Netflix. TikTok. Youtube. More than a decade ago, the massive tech companies were learning everything they could about how to get and hold attention online. Some of what they learned has made its way into public consciousness: infinite scroll, subtitled short video, feedback mechanisms, notifications. You can get better at extracting attention - LLMs will help you build a growth plan, content, SEO, marketing copy…but they’ll help the other guy do exactly the same. A zero sum game where all parties have access to the same tools only helps the maker of those tools.

What about in the real world?

If LLMs (or anything else) allows us to do things in the real world that we previously couldn’t have, that’s a net win and can lead to genuinely improved outcomes. Net good for humanity. Probably not so good for you if you’re competing against somebody else with the same tech.

The Solution for that FIRE calculator

Build for yourself. Build offline. Don’t imagine that any tool is anything more than the few prompts you put into it, no matter how pretty it looks and how hard it would have been to build a decade ago. ou can build amazing things with LLMs, but you are the person who is going to find them most amazing. Don’t conflate building something with having a side project.

Conclusion

Attention is all you need. Now you’ve got the ability to build whatever you can dream of in a matter of days, a product isn’t a barrier. The ability to claim a small slice of somebody’s attention? That’s where the game is now.