The Efficiency Trap - Anthony Batt
I’ve been staring at this message for ten minutes now. Not because I don’t understand what it means—I hit my Claude Code API limit while building some throwaway project for fun. But because something about it bothers me in a way I can’t quite articulate.
I started thinking about what just happened. I was coding, sure, but I wasn’t really coding alone. I had an AI pair programmer that could write functions faster than I could think of them, suggest architectures I’d never considered, and debug problems that would have taken me hours to solve. When it got cut off, I didn’t just lose a tool—I lost a collaborator that had become an extension of my own thinking.
When was the last time you built something that worked entirely on your own machine? I mean really worked, not just a hello world app, but something you could show to users? Think about it. You probably need AWS to host it, Stripe for payments, Auth0 for users, and on and on.
We’ve created this incredibly complex web of dependencies, and we call it progress. And it is progress, in a way. I can build in a weekend what would have taken a team months just a few years ago. But I can only build it if all these services are up, working, and willing to take my money.
