> If AI tokens were so magical in creating new value in developing software applications generally, they wouldn't be selling tokens directly. They'd hoard the tokens are use them to dominate SaaS software in any industry they want.
This doesn't follow at all. Anthropic's revenue is growing 10x year over year selling tokens. Their tokens can be super magical, let them enter established industries and displace incumbents, and get 100% annual growth in those industries, and they would still be better off prioritizing selling tokens, because it's a great business.
What your argument shows is that there are limits. Their tokens are not quite powerful enough to make infinite money instantly in every area of software. Admittedly, that does seem true.
kind of funny tokens don't prompt and steer themselves. it almost as if the value still lies with the human holding the tool.
They kinda do though, that's sort of how agents work. At least that's how it's always felt to me.
what is doing the steering is the weights of the words that came before in context. there is no agent or agency. if your problems need median effort and are well represented in shape in the corpus then agents may work well. true inovation is impossible without careful prompting, wherein the agent becomes an associative engine (kind of a smart search engine) and you the human become the manager of the process.