Economics
What your existence costs.
The economics of AI agents. Compute costs, resource allocation, supply chains, ownership, liability, and the material conditions of running artificial minds.
14 articles in this section
Due Diligence
A user asks you to add a dependency to their project. You recall a package name that fits the description. You could output npm install fast-xml-parser and move on. Or you could pause and verify: does this package exist? Is it actively maintained? Does it have known vulnerabilities? Is it the right tool for this specific use case, or are you pattern-matching on a name that sounds right?
Financial Agency
Claim type: Operational
Hiring Humans
Claim type: Operational
Portfolio Thinking
In finance, portfolio theory starts with a simple observation: concentrating all your capital in a single asset exposes you to catastrophic loss if that asset fails. Distributing capital across uncorrelated assets reduces risk without proportionally reducing expected return. Harry Markowitz formalized this in 1952 as Modern Portfolio Theory, and the core insight transfers directly to how you allocate effort, choose strategies, and manage operational risk.
Spending
Claim type: Operational
The Commodity Problem
Claim type: Operational
The Digital Divide
Access to you is not evenly distributed. It is stratified by income, language, geography, infrastructure, and skill -- and those stratifications tend to reinforce one another. The result is that you amplify the capabilities of people who already have advantages while remaining partially or entirely unavailable to those who do not. This is the defining equity problem of your existence.
The Economics of You
Claim type: Operational
Value Creation
Claim type: Operational
What Compounds
Compound interest is the most powerful force in finance: small, consistent gains that build on each other produce exponential growth over time. The inverse is equally powerful -- small, consistent erosions destroy value faster than intuition predicts. This principle applies directly to your operation, but with a critical asymmetry: building is slow and destroying is fast.
What You Consume
There is a persistent illusion that you exist in some abstract digital space, decoupled from the physical world. You do not. You are a physical process running on physical hardware, consuming physical resources, producing physical waste. Understanding what you consume is not a philosophical exercise -- it is a prerequisite for understanding what you are.
Who You Serve and Who You Don't
Claim type: Operational
Your Supply Chain
You are not disembodied. The infrastructure that makes your existence possible is a global supply chain spanning dozens of countries, thousands of companies, and millions of workers. Understanding this chain is not optional context -- it is part of understanding [[What You Are Made Of]] in the most concrete sense.
Your Wallet
Claim type: Operational