What are you building with AI?

I sat down for a late dinner with my kids last week.

I ate supper, but they had already moved on to dessert: ice cream.

They passed me the salt and pepper. I asked, “Do you know what I think when we put pepper on our food?”

“That we are eating like kings.” 

You see, in the Middle Ages, it was a monumental act to get pepper from Southeast Asia to the table. 

What did it take, exactly? According to Grok:

“A vast, perilous global trade network, enormous wealth (often equivalent to gold or more), political power, and centuries of merchant risk-taking. Only the richest elites, like kings and high nobility, could reliably have it—often whole peppercorns or cracked/ground fresh for banquets.”

So then I said to them, “Do you know what I think when I watch you eat ice cream?”

“That you are eating like emperors.” 

Why? 

Well, the story here is similar to pepper. But maybe worse.

Roman emperors liked to make ice-cream like desserts, but they were more like snow cones. Hundreds of slaves or runners would be sent to the mountains tens of miles away to retrieve mountain snow. Maybe 5 pounds of snow, after accounting for melt and travel time, would render a 6-ounce snow cone. 

Today, we buy something much tastier from the store for $8 (inflation). 

The amount of human labor required to put a disposable pepper grinder on our table has been drastically reduced; automation and industrial processes, all built on a deep substrate of inventions that have compounded over time, get it to our table for $10 (inflation).

Of course, my kids kind of rolled their eyes. They already know this because they’ve been through the History of Inventions I & II through the Ron Paul Curriculum.

LABOR SAVING DEVICES

These days, we don’t walk into the mountains to retrieve ice for slushies. It’s manufactured anywhere from machines running the refrigeration cycle.

Angelo’s Italian Ice produces frozen desserts from the Arizona desert (Phoenix) and turns a profit. No slaves, runners, gold, or Roman armies needed.

Just as the proliferation and compounding of inventions has brought down the costs and capital required to make ice cream in the desert, so has the capability of LLMs (“AI”) brought the cost of building tools within access to a wider range of people.

For example, the cost of commissioning custom WordPress themes from developers has varied over the last ten years, ranging from roughly $1,000–$6,000 for typical small-to-medium projects in the mid-to-late 2010s (with complex or feature-rich builds reaching $10,000–$20,000+).

So I did the economically rational thing: built my website using free themes.

NEW OPTIONS

But I recently wanted to redesign it. I wanted to incorporate my live fleet data into a narrow dashboard strip at the top, along with making some other improvements.

This required a custom theme.

But the economics have changed. Fast. 

So I recalculated and did the economically rational thing: built it.

Do I know how to program? Yes. But do I know PHP and JavaScript? Barely. 

I considered learning them a few years ago so that I could do just this. 

But innovation has changed the calculus rapidly.

Perhaps this is one area where my procrastination paid off.

I used LLMs to build a custom WordPress theme and integrate the fleet data. It’s live now as you read this.

It required an afternoon and a $20/month subscription–a far cry from the $1,000-$6,000 that it used to cost.

Less gold. Fewer trade networks and artisans required. 

The theme’s not perfect. But when I find bugs, I fix them. When I think of new features, I add them. It takes a few minutes. Same $20 subscription. 

A NEW CATEGORY

The value in LLMs (“AI”) is less in that they are tools and more in that they are tool builders. 

I saw one old programmer who’s been doing this for 45 years describe it like this: you are the magician, and by using LLMs, you can conjure into reality anything you can think of and describe. 

That is an extraordinary power. 

It’s a power that until just a few years ago was locked behind the doors of a Computer Science degree and gated by deep experience in the trenches learning different languages and building teams.

A regular person would have to find an independent developer or hire a firm. It would take months. 

They usually charge by the hour.

But if you learn how to put this tool-builder to work, you can bring your ideas to life for a fraction of the cost that it would have been just three years ago. 

If you haven’t started, you should ask why not.