Escaping the LLM Coding Rat Race – Aaronontheweb

July 27, 2026 •

9 minutes to read

Escaping the LLM Coding Rat Race

Software Development

LLM

AI

Software 2.0

There's only one winner in the AI coding rat race: your inference provider.

Customers and Consumers: Still HumanSelf-Published Books<br>Apple App Store

“Escaping the Permanent Underclass” is Marketing

I experienced a type of AI psychosis, but not the one everyone else is talking about - in my case it was a need to “keep my agents busy” at all times or I was “falling behind” relative to everyone else using large language models to move “faster” in the software industry.

I’ve recently concluded that this fear is nonsense and, like most other things you read online, is manufactured to sell something. AI inference probably.

Since the start of 2026 I’ve basically not spent any time playing video games or doing much leisure activity outside of spending time with my kids. I diverted all my cycles towards keeping my agents busy at all times. This has produced some great results, like launching TextForge.

It’s worth noting though that shipping TextForge has been a lot easier than marketing it, which I essentially have not done. It’s very unpleasant to relearn lessons you already knew you knew, but here we are: “distribution is more important than production.”

The lessons I’ve learned and codified into my “Software 2.0” series are very useful, because coding with LLMs is obviously a huge source of productivity improvement for software engineers. Knowing how to wield agents effectively is still a fantastic use of your time.

The real question though: are you going to become part of the “permanent underclass” and become unhireable if you don’t launch an automated Claude-powered software factory that runs 24/7?

Customers and Consumers: Still Human

If the point of running full speed with AI agents is to create new offerings and new products in market that you couldn’t do before because of the sheer amount of effort involved, what does the market have to say about the quality of products being produced by AI-heavy authors?

Self-Published Books

To answer this, let me direct you to NBER’s working paper from January to May of 2026: “AI and the Quantity and Quality of Creative Products: Have LLMs Boosted Creation of Valuable Books?”

The first thing LLMs could really produce at scale was prose, in English and many other languages. Given how much models have advanced since ChatGPT was introduced in 2022, surely someone has prompted the Great American Artificially Generated Novel into existence by now.

What do the numbers say?

The chart counts every book whose 1,000-word Amazon Kindle preview trips Pangram’s AI detector as an “AI book.”1

Moreover, let’s call a spade a spade here: what could possibly cause the number of monthly book releases to triple between July 2021 and January 2026? Obviously, large language models are responsible for this.

In 2023 Amazon had to limit the rate at which authors could self-publish books on their platform, just to help stave off the waves of AI slop crowding up the Kindle bookstore.

AI has obviously been a great productivity boost for publishers, just like it is for software developers. But, what are the results with actual consumers? Who’s buying these AI-generated novellas, cookbooks, and so on?

What you’re seeing above is a chart of “adjusted usage” of these books on the Kindle store - a rough engagement proxy2. Human-authored books have a fairly consistent log-adjusted usage both pre- and post-ChatGPT; AI books have been improving alongside model quality but still lag far behind human-authored ones. This data is not adjusted for category - AI generated fiction, technical manuals, and cookbooks are all grouped in together here.

Being “fast” and “shipping” LLM-authored books hasn’t had a material impact on the economy, other than degrading the overall quality of adjusted ratings in the Kindle store.

Apple App Store

The Apple App Store has also surged with excess supply of new app submissions, to the tune of new app store releases growing by 30% in 2025.

And how did consumers react to all of their new AI-coded options?

But Apple can’t take its cut if consumers don’t download and buy things from apps — and downloads from the App Store haven’t taken off. Last year [2025], they grew 3 percent to 35.4 billion, according to Sensor Tower. In the first half of this year [2026], downloads grew 2 percent to 17.6 billion.

30% increase in total supply; 3% growth in utilization: this does not sound like customers clamoring for more LLM-authored applications.

For as “fast” as large language models have made authors of both software and English, it hasn’t resulted in happier customers or made the operators wealthier. So what’s the point in tokenmaxxing 12-16 hours a day to ship slop?

“Escaping the Permanent Underclass” is Marketing

I spent the last few weeks going all out: working on weekends, missed Church a couple...