Comment by rdslw
10 hours ago
Congrats on the app.
I'm seeing that "great-ai-unlock" is happening. I see in last month a lot of new software being codeveloped with claude/codex/gemini/you-name it.
Before, it was too costly to do sth like the Posture app: here, you would have to know Swift and apple apis to write such tool. Would you be C# (very good) programmer with free weekend, and an idea: no cookie for ya.
These days, due to "great-ai-unlock" your skills can be easily transferred and used to cross platforms boundary and code such useful app in a weekend or so.
Jevons paradox is indeed working (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox).
Maybe this is a naive take, but I don't really think LLMs have done that much to change the actual situation around ability/outcomes. If you are actually a very good C# programmer, knowing Swift and searching some Apple documentation seems very reasonable.
It might help "unstick" you if you aren't super confident, but it doesn't seem to me like it's actually leveling up mediocre programmers to "very good" ones, in familiar or unfamiliar domains.
I don't see how the Jevons paradox would apply here. Code being cheaper and faster to produce obviously causes the demand for apps such as this one to grow. That's just supply and demand.
An example of where I think the paradox would apply might be one where LLMs made software engineers more efficient yet the demand for SWEs would grow.
Thanks rdslw. I mentioned something similar on my blog post about this app here: https://tomjohnell.com/posturr-a-macos-app-that-blurs-your-s...
I love coming up with fun ideas and only having to worry about the fun part - not the toil. I would never have made this app without llm support.
Neat app. Any tips on how you used Claude Code to develop this?
My first prompt was:
"Help me develop a MacOS app that blurs my screen the closer my mouse is to the top of the monitor"
That was my PoC to see if there's APIs Claude could find that would make this easy to do. Once I proved that worked, I asked it to instead help me devise a way to adjust that blur based on my posture. It suggested the vision framework and measuring head height.
Just kept iterating, one step at a time. Any toil I experienced, I asked it to remove or automate.
What a stupid thing to call a paradox. When infrastructure is better, you'd expect it to be used more.
It's because they're misusing the term. Jevons' paradox doesn't apply to the simple idea that "cheaper code leads to more demand for code", that's just the concept of price curves.
Instead, Jevons' paradox refers to a counterintuitive rebound effect: AI tools make engineers more productive, which you'd expect to reduce the marginal demand for additional engineers (since the same output requires fewer people). In reality, this efficiency lowers the effective cost of software development, sparking even greater overall demand for new features and projects, which ultimately increases total spending on engineering talent.