Notes on taking AI into production & the current state of cloud infrastructure.

If you want the reconciled invoice to carry the dimensions you bill back on, the provider has to let you attach them to the billed call. Three clouds, three different mechanisms, three different amounts of coverage, and one with no dollar figure at all.

AI made building software cheap enough that ideas no longer get killed by the cost of developing them. Every idea now survives long enough to become a real question, and someone has to decide it. Building the thing takes a weekend. Deciding whether it deserves one is the genuinely hard part, and the part that stayed expensive.

The loud objection to enterprise AI spend is that the value does not justify the tokens. The quieter one is what the spend hands over: a view of your business that took years to build, and, more slowly, the problems that kept your people engaged. Trust is a scarce resource right now, and token-maxxing spends it like it is abundant.

The models are astonishing, the buildout is the largest in history, and nobody is making money. The fashionable diagnosis is “bubble.” The situation is simpler and stranger: an industry that cannot say what its product costs, sells it in units nobody values, and is waiting — longer than it wants to admit — for the person who finally finds the price. Music once waited for the same person. And he knew exactly what to charge once he came: 99 cents.