This post from Paul Ford is an interesting perspective/thought experiment on how big AI companies may be incentivized to build more software.

Claude Design is a good example: It whips together a design in a few minutes, burning lots of tokens, but after that, you might tweak and noodle for hours, talking to the LLM much less often. During those noodling hours, you’re barely using any tokens at all. If the software is good enough and your design documents are already managed by Anthropic, you’re getting more value out of your account, and you won’t switch the moment a new, cheaper option shows up across the street. So you could think of Claude Design not as a “Figma-killer” or a “Canva-killer” but as a really cheap way to keep millions of people inside the big Claude tent.

“Cheap” is the most interesting part to me. When I look at Claude Design, I see how they took their ability to create “artifacts” and hacked together a DOM editor on top of it. It’s not a radical new step as much as a combination of different things Anthropic had already created. It probably wasn’t built in a weekend, but I’d guess the level of effort was way, way less—by an order of magnitude!—than was necessary to build Google Slides back in the day. Because of vibe coding, it’s much easier to build products than it used to be, and Anthropic already had a lot of the necessary technologies to make a “web and slide design tool.”

It’s basically a tautology that the easier software is to make, the more of it there will be. But as Paul alludes to, that doesn’t mean there’s a market, a plan to reach that market, strong differentiators, etc.

I’m not sure where it ends, but it’ll be fun to watch.