The Information Machine

Quoting Andrej Karpathy

Simon Willison · Simon Willison · 2026-06-09

Simon Willison quotes Andrej Karpathy's reaction to Claude Fable 5, in which Karpathy invokes Jevons paradox to argue that AI-generated software arriving cheaply on demand dramatically amplifies rather than satisfies demand for software.

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Extraction

Topics: ai-productivityjevons-paradoxfrontier-modelssoftware-development

Claims

  • Karpathy argues that AI-generated software is now effectively available on tap, radically lowering the marginal cost of software creation.
  • Karpathy applies Jevons paradox to AI-generated software, arguing that cheaper and easier software creation increases total demand rather than reducing effort.
  • Karpathy lists custom dashboards, bespoke single-use apps, 10x test suites, and large research projects as examples of software now accessible on demand via AI.

Key quotes

I feel a lot of things changing as working software increasingly comes out on a tap. The Jevon's paradox kicks in and I feel my own demand for software growing substantially.
You can ask for anything - explainers, visualizers, dashboards, bespoke single-use apps (e.g. a full wandb that is hyper-specific just for your project), you can 10X your test suite, auto-optimize code, run giant research projects with custom HTML for the results, anything!