The Coasian theory of the program: what is the ideal size?
- The Coasian theory of the program: what is the ideal size?
- The equilibrium size has to do with:
- 1) Difficulty of producing effective code.
- 2) Difficulty of distributing the software to users.
- Historically an app must be somewhat big because software is hard to write, and apps are hard to distribute (on the order of $10 per consumer install).
- An app has to be big enough to contain within itself a viable business model.
- But LLMs can produce code cheaply.
- They are willing to produce itsy bitsy pieces of code that no human would have bothered with if it couldn't be distributed.
- The code is conceivably correct and useful–but you don't know if it's actually useful to a real human in a real situation yet.
- The question is what level of program is worth it to bother actually showing to a user to see if it's really useful.
- If it's useful, it's worth investing resources into distributing to other users.