Writing on democratization.

When the cost of building software collapses, markets too small for a software vendor become worth serving, and the scarce input moves to the person who owns the problem and a place to run the software every day.

When the cost of building software collapses, more niche markets become worth serving, not fewer — the outcome is more builders and more products, not a shrinking industry.

A tool built to fit one specific workflow gets worse, not better, as it's made more generic — which is why domain expertise resists the centralization that swallowed the open web.

On-device inference is a second democratization of AI: the first put models in the cloud for everyone, this one removes the internet connection and subscription as prerequisites entirely.

Across past technology waves, the most economic value went to whoever adopted a breakthrough intensely and applied it to unserved industries, not to whoever invented it.

Every past democratization wave — YouTube, podcasting, blogging — handed everyone a fixed medium to fill; AI removes the medium constraint entirely.

Some tasks suit AI that runs locally better than AI in someone else's cloud — not because it's smarter, but because it doesn't depend on a connection or a usage policy it doesn't control.

The half-life of acquired skills is compressing fast, and that isn't a crisis — it's the biggest democratization of opportunity in a generation.

Local-first AI assistants — ones that run on your own hardware rather than routing through someone else's cloud — are viable to build today, not just a privacy ideal to wait for.