My deep conviction is that infrastructure companies should not be spending a single dollar on marketing or advertising today.
Retail users simply won’t find them anymore. That’s the real madness.
People are building inside AI agents. They are building inside cloud environments, inside Codex, inside tools like Claude. Infrastructure companies now need partnerships and contracts with AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. They have little chance of surviving if they keep spending money trying to acquire customers directly, because those customers are no longer coming through traditional funnels.
The retail funnel is now in the hands of the major AI companies.
A person who wants to build a simple tourism website, for example, will do it through tools like Codex, Lovable, or Claude. They won’t know that Supabase or Replit exists. They’ll just build the site, while the infrastructure runs underneath.
And 90% of those users will never grow large enough to discover these infrastructure companies in the first place.
That’s why when Salesforce announces a strategic partnership with OpenAI, the stock jumps. Investors understand what’s happening.
We are entering a world where companies like Salesforce won’t be able to acquire retail customers through marketing alone. The funnel has shifted almost entirely toward the major AI platforms.
Ironically, chatbots have already taken control of the retail funnel.
Lately, I keep hearing the comparison that chatbots are turning into giant operating systems. And the more I think about it, the more I believe it.
Chatbots are becoming the interface, while almost the entire world of services and infrastructure sits behind them. Users won’t even know those services exist.
From a branding perspective, that’s almost suicidal. If users never see your brand, AI companies can eventually replace your service with their own.
I think we may see major regulatory changes because of this. Chatbots could end up becoming something closer to browsers.
Remember the browser wars? The debates around Microsoft, Netscape, and whether browsers should give equal access to competing services instead of promoting their own technologies. It feels like we may be heading toward a similar moment.
Eventually, brands will realize that AI companies are absorbing most of the value while the brands themselves become invisible. The brand stops mattering. What matters is having a contract with OpenAI or Anthropic.
That’s the crazy part.
My guess is that we'll eventually arrive at some kind of democratic solution to this, because the current trajectory concentrates too much power in the hands of a few AI platforms.
@br11k_dev@thdxr Ah, it might be because of my account's reputation. A month ago, I created a Hartavirus tracker and sent the link to everyone in the comments. Damn, I need to improve my account's reputation. Thanks for sharing.
@br11k_dev@thdxr I won’t miss this opportunity to show you my friend’s work on this topic.
To be clear, this is not an ad — you’re the ones who used that expression. I was simply forced to show you this website 😂😂
https://t.co/8DTlVfmLol
# on shortification of "learning"
There are a lot of videos on YouTube/TikTok etc. that give the appearance of education, but if you look closely they are really just entertainment. This is very convenient for everyone involved : the people watching enjoy thinking they are learning (but actually they are just having fun). The people creating this content also enjoy it because fun has a much larger audience, fame and revenue. But as far as learning goes, this is a trap. This content is an epsilon away from watching the Bachelorette. It's like snacking on those "Garden Veggie Straws", which feel like you're eating healthy vegetables until you look at the ingredients.
Learning is not supposed to be fun. It doesn't have to be actively not fun either, but the primary feeling should be that of effort. It should look a lot less like that "10 minute full body" workout from your local digital media creator and a lot more like a serious session at the gym. You want the mental equivalent of sweating. It's not that the quickie doesn't do anything, it's just that it is wildly suboptimal if you actually care to learn.
I find it helpful to explicitly declare your intent up front as a sharp, binary variable in your mind. If you are consuming content: are you trying to be entertained or are you trying to learn? And if you are creating content: are you trying to entertain or are you trying to teach? You'll go down a different path in each case. Attempts to seek the stuff in between actually clamp to zero.
So for those who actually want to learn. Unless you are trying to learn something narrow and specific, close those tabs with quick blog posts. Close those tabs of "Learn XYZ in 10 minutes". Consider the opportunity cost of snacking and seek the meal - the textbooks, docs, papers, manuals, longform. Allocate a 4 hour window. Don't just read, take notes, re-read, re-phrase, process, manipulate, learn.
And for those actually trying to educate, please consider writing/recording longform, designed for someone to get "sweaty", especially in today's era of quantity over quality. Give someone a real workout. This is what I aspire to in my own educational work too. My audience will decrease. The ones that remain might not even like it. But at least we'll learn something.