A second day of consideration and posting
Weblog notes from May 31, 2026 that were compiled and shared.
Today is the second day in a row of my kickstarted writing adventures. Right now I’m thinking about how the back of my MacBook Air is increasingly covered in stickers. That seems to be what happens and now I’m starting to get it. I’m still struggling with switching between Windows and macOS during the course of my weekly workflows. I’m now more comfortable within the Apple ecosystem which is something I was not expecting to have happen. Getting back into the swing of daily writing is about channeling focus and staying on topic to drive the narrative forward a few blocks of writing at a time. Right now I’m interested in posting to the Functional Journal on a more regular cadence. That method of distribution does not kick off a large series of emails like the Lindahl Letter and it’s a little easier to write and post without that consideration. Okay – maybe it is a lot easier to write without the expanded distribution.
I’m still learning how to use Substack effectively after 5 years of being the platform. It feels like the social aspects of Substack are now more forward compared to the pure writing elements. Sometimes essays really do break out on Substack and go wide, but for most writers the process of building a larger community and grid of connections is what drives the conversation in a more deeply and ongoing way. I’m interested in zooming back out on all the AI we are seeing in our daily lives and the rise of the agent integrations is probably the right place to reconsider what we are getting out of the great AI bargains we are making. A lot of what people use and consume in terms of LLMs is just being passively used in search or maybe basic Copilot within the Microsoft ecosystem or Gemini within the Google ecosystem. A much smaller population of the AI user base is paying the larger subscription costs to code, build, or manage larger workflows. Right now the question and answer format of request and callback is still the largest use case within the entire AI space.
We are seeing the deeper coding based use cases pick up in speed and quality. It feels like Google is pivoting into competing with Anthropic’s Claude and other players have decided to put a lot of effort into advancing coding efforts. Those efforts are not going to end up being all you can eat free token buffets and we are going to see real limits or even caps on usage. Sam Altman has suggested it might go an entirely different direction and AI consumption will end up being metered like electricity or water [1]. Having a pay as you go framework for metered AI usage could be interesting, but at the same time some of these coding adventures could end up creating some very expensive bills within that cost framework. Certainly AWS found success in selling infrastructure and web services using very direct costing that avoided base monthly subscriptions. I’ll admit that I’m more willing to pay a small monthly fee to try out OpenAI’s ChatGPT or the Google AI Pro to utilize the Gemini ecosystem. It’s unlikely I’ll want to pay as I go with Sam Altman’s desired plan for my weekend coding projects. That seems like a path to ending up with a large unplanned bill and regret for letting a swarm of agents work on something that does not end up panning out.
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