Generation Got Cheap. Judgment Didn't.

My field, computer systems, has a creed: talk is cheap; show me the code. For thirty years it was right. Ideas were easy to narrate and hard to build, so we trusted the people who built. Doing was the proof; talk was suspicion. That creed is exactly what AI is now inverting—and it is why I have started blogging again.

The two reasons I didn’t

I avoided blogging for most of my career, for two reasons that were both true. Writing well is expensive: not one article, but the years of apprenticeship behind it, and then the hours of drafting and polishing per piece. And my culture rewarded doing over saying—the person who quietly ships beats the one who narrates brilliant ideas and finishes nothing. Underneath, those were the same reason: words were costly to produce and cheap to fake, so words were a bad signal.

What changed

AI broke the first reason outright. The draft-check-polish loop that used to cost me hours is now something I hand off and supervise—the post you are reading was built that way, and so was the one beside it, figures and all. My job in that loop was not the prose. It was deciding what the argument should be, and killing the three versions that were wrong.

Execution is going the same way, slowly and only in parts. An agent will implement and test a well-specified idea while you watch. It will not, yet, do the part of my own research that is actually hard: the long tail where the code runs, passes the happy path, and is wrong in the way that matters. (I spend my days in that gap.) Cheap for the routine; still dear at the frontier. But the direction isn’t in doubt.

Ideas got cheap too

Here is the part the optimistic version of this essay skips. If AI makes prose and code cheap, it makes ideas cheap too—a model will brainstorm a hundred directions before you finish your coffee. So “have ideas” cannot be what saves us. Idea-generation deflates along with everything else.

What doesn’t deflate is judgment. Which of the hundred directions is worth a week. Which clean result is actually a measurement artifact. When to kill your own favorite. The faucet is open for everyone now; what stays rare is the taste to know which drops to keep. Generation got cheap. Selection didn’t.

Why that means writing

And judgment has a visibility problem. It used to ride along with the work: ship something good and the quality vouched for the taste behind it. When the work is cheap to produce, the work stops vouching for anything—and no one can read your mind. The only way to show judgment is to externalize it: to argue, in public, for this and not that. That is what a blog is. Not talk instead of doing; the record of the choices the doing no longer reveals. It is this blog’s motto, and I mean it now as an argument: code is cheap; show me the thoughts.

When the idea becomes runnable

A thought you write down need not only be read. For an idea that carries a cheap test—a benchmark, a small system, a clean experiment—I can already picture handing a blog post to an agent that builds it and reports back: works, or doesn’t, and here is why. Not every idea; the ones whose proof is expensive are exactly the ones that stay human. But for the rest, a written idea stops being a promissory note and edges toward something runnable. The oldest line in my field—show me the code—starts to fold into show me the thought, because the thought, increasingly, runs.

The part that’s still mine

So I am blogging again. Not to talk instead of build, but because building no longer shows what I think. The labor is getting cheap. The judgment is not. A blog is where I keep the part of the work that is still mine.