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  beloch
  "The key to this sort of business model is not innovation, but instead the externalization and compression of cost. Somewhere upstream, people work seventy-five hours a week, in conditions most readers of this website would refuse to even visit, so that the rest of us can have a cheap plastic spatula at our doorstep within five business days."--------While it may be true in some rare instances, for the vast majority of products its more likely to be fantasy that exists only in stereotypes.The truth is why American attempts to onshore manufacturing and make it even cheaper with automation have failed miserably. The truth is that Chinese manufacturing is as automated as is possible with cutting edge technology. They build cars in factory's that don't even have lighting until finished cars reach the quality control area. This is why the North American auto sector relies on crushing tariff's and outright import bans to force North Americans to buy North American autos. Without those, you could buy a Chinese car that's better than what you drive for half the price.The factory cranking out the one-dollar-shoes Temu sells is likely entirely automated.TEMU sells what was made with the LLM-ification of manufacturing.
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  tolugenius
  Love this writeup. The temu analogy is best to describe what is going on beyond just what llms have done to software. What's closer to question is temu could only exist in the way it did (it's fast rise mainly) because of the work done by amazon prime in making fast shipping both logistically doable and the psychological default for many. So my question is what was the "amazon prime" era of software and perhaps learning what did (and did not) occur then can better understand why AI has wrought the effects it has in less than 10 years.
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  onion2k
  A few years ago I would have laughed at anyone telling me that there is a serious market for ten-dollar drills, two-dollar dresses, and one-dollar pairs of shoes shipped from a warehouse on the other side of the planet.TEMU doesn't sell those things. They're more expensive than that, but subsidised by VC capital from PDD Holdings, Blackrock, Vanguard, etc. It's a very boring 'spend the VC bucks to get the customers' play, and when they've got the customers they'll jack up the prices and lose the customers again. It's Uber-for-cheap-stuff basically.
• RigelKentaurus
  Thought-provoking article, makes sense on some levels but it cuts too broadly.For physical goods (clothes, purses,..) most buyers can discern high quality goods from bulk manufacturing with cheap materials. When it comes to digital goods, for movies, songs, books, etc. the buyer can discern a clear difference between AI- and human-generated, so the TEMU-fication argument is valid.But for software engg, design, etc., I suspect that very few people can (or will be able to) discern the difference. There may be people who care about manual output, but then you have to come up with proof of manual work. Something like "prove to me that you have coded this application or designed this site without using AI". I don't see that happening.
• alexpotato
  > A 2025 Veracode report found that approximately 45% of AI-generated code samples failed security tests and contained critical vulnerabilitiesCo-worker of mine who was excellent at both system design AND coding and I were chatting about LLMS:Him: "I guess coding will just be a hobby now"Me: "Coding def feels that way but software engineering as a profession is still alive and well."
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  sajithdilshan
  The whole premise of the post is that if something is cheap, then it has to be of bad quality. However, that’s not the case most of the time. One example is the knock off luxury bags made in China. Even the original ones are actually made in China, but people pay a premium for the brand name, but quality wise both are same.Same goes for the software. Before AI there were so many buggy, ugly, un-user friendly software. Remember Windows ME? Not all vibe coded software is bad, in fact I’ve vibe coded two projects and use them for free where I previously had to pay 20$ per month for the original one and both projects I vibe coded are working without any issue at all.
• iugtmkbdfil834
  I personally keep going back and forth on this, partially because I am seeing examples that cut both ways. On the one hand, I am mildly concerned a seemingly permanently raised floor, because I can already see ( and I already heard once or twice ) how now I should have x amount the output. I am saying seemingly, because we just had a meeting where higher ups are clearly concerned about the token cost so some form of 'more with less' is coming.I am not saying some variant of temufication won't happen. If you look at openai's build week projects, you will see a fascinating array of things, but, also otherwise familiar patterns not completely dissimilar to 'calculator plays yankee doodle(but now llm interprets your next move)'. I guess what I am saying is that some things won't change: interested people will remain interested and use new tooling to its limits.The question to me is what happens in the middle.
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  239182
  The US has been exporting Treasury bills and digital hot air for quite a while.LLMs are the logical conclusion of this scam, until other countries stop gambling on the US stock market with fake $1 trillion corporations.It works because the whole world's media is captured, owned and censored by US platforms and amplifies the US messaging.
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  alexpotato
  Quality products are amazing but I do get the downside of building very durable products.For example, we have a Vornado fan in my house that is probably from the early 2000s. It still works perfectly even though we've left it running 24/7 for weeks in humid or dusty environments (e.g. to help air dry a wet basement). In terms of money paid/hours used, we got an amazing deal on the purchase.From the manufacturer's perspective, the life time value (LTV) of us as a customer was basically just one fan + the free marketing of folks like myself writing this kind of post. It reminds me of the joke "Did you hear about the company that made lightbulbs that lasted 30 years? They went out of business!"It makes sense that manufacturers would start to lower quality at a slightly faster rate than they lower the price as this means that folks still feel happy with the purchase. Sure, the fan doesn't last as long due to what is essentially planned obsolescence but the company does get to stay in business.Temu/Shein etc are just the logical endpoint of this line of reasoning. If you are going to wear a shirt for the one summer where it's in style, why would you spend a large amount of money on it? And in turn, why would the company selling it spend a lot of money making it?(I should add, this is purely an economical argument and ignores the working conditions/health effects/etc)
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  Dependance
  Wow, what the hell was that javascript tab change ? Not sure if I hated or loved it, but that was the first time I have seen that.
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  guhcampos
  I have another weak correlation to TEMU to add.I have never, ever, bought anything on TEMU, because anytime I open the website it gives me a gambling roulette for some supposed discount thing. I hate gambling, so everytime I see the roulette I just close the webpage and go do something else.Well, the whole cheap-generated content craze feels basically like gambling to me to this point, too. Folks are just randomly generating content: books, videos, articles, even applications, and gambling that something will pay for itself.So now we have Enshitification, Eemufication and Gamblification of the Human Society. Damn I might write something on Substack about that.
• chachra
  True only if the end-product is better in some way. A gourmet meal is better than Chipotle. A handmade leather bag is better than the Temu version. In software, it's harder to make out the difference; of course, better UX, faster APIs etc. can all affect the end-user experience. But who is to say that AI-generated code can't do all of that (and more!)?
• m3047
  "Please disable JavaScript by default and only enable on websites you trust. You have been warned." Random overlays if you click away.Edits:"two-dollar dresses": read that as "two-dollar diseases". Hrm.Regarding the books on AWS, this has been a recognized money-laundering conduit for a number of years now.
• amelius
  We need to get commerce out of social media.Anything "social" should not have to do with commerce.There are no billboards in a church, so why should there be ads in places where people socialize? Having ads on sports fields is bad enough already.
• mhitza
  Thanks for the laugh with the netflix logo. I feel that is very apt when all their recent shows I've glanced at seem to have their scripts brought from Temu or from a genai prompt.
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  matheusmoreira
  "Human made" is not automatically better and we need to stop pretending that it is.Here's an example:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941
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  opengrass
  Why does Temu take the heat when Aliexpress has been around for years?
• Sarkie
  First unicode hostname I've seen?
• anon
  undefined
• uglysnowcone
  I agree with some points, but I don't like the take that AI/LLMs also aren't built on the backs of underpaid workers. While a lot of the training for LLMs may be unsupervised, we wouldn't have gotten to this point in AI without the support of data labelers. And on the hardware side, how many factory workers operate in unsafe conditions on a daily basis?
• ragall
  Consider that it used to be said that nowadays there is not much class difference in consumption between low, middle, and upper clases in the US, in that the same items are practically available to all. Well, that won't be true shortly, and when only a minority will be able to afford "real" items, made exclusively and entirely by humans, I doubt that democracy will be able to survive, because contempt and animosity between the two groups will inevitably ensue, and democracy can't survive that.
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  ls-a
  I'm glad AI exposed so many software engineers who are trying to protect manually writing code by coming up with such ridiculous analogies every day. AI pulled the rug from underneath all these "code worshipers".
• nubg
  good article, mostly because i have a feeling it was 100% hand written. thanks for not using ai. makes it much more authentic
• cynicalsecurity
  The article makes absolutely no sense. AI works better than humans. The quality of AI output depends on request. Higher quality request produces high quality output and vice versa. The article completely misses the point.Beware of the TEMU-fication of AI requests. Some crappy services like Loveable are the violators here.
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  seki285
  You choose to consume bad media, not my problem.
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  andai
  > A hypothesis on the not-so-distant future ... in which most of what we consume gets cheaper, more abundant, and noticeably worseIsn't that just true about most things over the past century or so? They left out "staggeringly uglier" though.
• Magicrafter13
  One of the only people I've seen who gets it, and has a sane take on the matter. I've been trying to write my own article on a very similar subject for a while now, and it's always hard to put these things into words.I yearn for humanity to stop being so greedy and always looking for the cheapest crap they can get, so they can pretend to be rich by having a lot of stuff. Particularly people in countries like America (where I live), are too comfortable, and pretend to live above their means (not necessarily consciously) by partaking of low quality mass produced goods.