@vgr: rethinking "it's time to build" and the myth of builders

vgr@vgr

I liked the “it’s time to build” pmarca essay when it came out, in a very different era, but now I think the underlying idea is incoherent. Builder, unlike destroyer, is an aptitude, not a role anyone can play. And since building is a “creative destructive” process that you might naively assume can be unbundled into pure “creation” and pure “destruction” what general calls for a society-wide period of building do in the best case is try to elevate builders in status, but in the worst case simply unleash a wave of pure destruction much larger than any wave of building. And the building itself ends up being mostly naive “pure creation.” Ie doomed first-principles Xanadu projects. What’s the alternative? Recognize that “building” is just one aptitude and personality among many. The real challenge is recognizing that a finite game is ending and figuring out how to continue the infinite game by improvising a new finite game. And that comes from play-testing, not slogan-led missions.

farcaster.xyz
by rvolz.eth1470 🥝 • 2y • warpcast.com
AI summary of the linked article

Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) argues that the idea behind Marc Andreessen's "it's time to build" essay (pmarca) is incoherent, because building cannot be cleanly separated from the destruction it involves. He says a society-wide call to build would at best raise the status of builders and at worst unleash destruction far larger than any building, with the building itself mostly naive "pure creation," such as doomed Xanadu-style projects. His alternative is to recognize that building is only one aptitude among many, and to treat the end of a finite game as a prompt to improvise a new one through play-testing rather than slogan-led missions.

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The "just build" motto from previous bear cycles is also under fire from the AI side (of course):

With AI, the value of "being the first" may increase exponentially.

The general wisdom has been: "being the first is not important, being the first to execute well matters."

But in a world where execution can be copied much more easily, being the first may become more valuable.

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I got to admit, I have no idea what vgr wanted to say here 😂

But since I'm already in the comments section I may as well share my two cents. I think that "just build" approach makes sense in a world where the "land" to build things is practically infinite.

We know that in physical world it's not the case, but it is in the digital world - you building an app doesn't block me from deploying mine.

But... since in the digital world the land is not scarce, people build more things. This leads to a situation where you have millions of apps competing for the attention of the same userbase. And this competition gets even more intense, thanks to AI that made building easier.

So I think figuring our distribution - whether it's because you're first and you get tons of attention thanks to that, or because you just know how to promote your product, is going to be key.
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From his cast:

Builder, unlike destroyer, is an aptitude, not a role anyone can play.

Actually, is it an aptitude, or a role?
I used to think that it was a talent and not a role. Sure, some people believed it was a role to take on, but these people are ultimately failing at building because they're LARPs and building is hard so faking it until you make it doesn't work.

Also: I've seen many more people become builders after the advent of LLMs, because now that talent is accessible to more. Priorly, e.g., it wasn't accessible to those who weren't talented enough to learn to code.

And since building is a “creative destructive” process that you might naively assume can be unbundled into pure “creation” and pure “destruction”

Doesn't compute for me, sorry.
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