Using LLMs to monetize every keypress

The article Adding AI-generated descriptions to my tools collection by Simon Willison includes the following snippet,

“I decided that the descriptions were too long, so I modified the script to add “Keep it to 2-3 sentences” to the end of the system prompt. These new, shorter descriptions are now live—here’s the diff. Total usage was 283,528 input tokens and 6,010 output tokens for a cost of 94 cents.”

First of all, I’m not surprised that he asked it to shorten its descriptions. The initial versions were typically and unbearably wordy.

That he noticed and fine-tuned the generated output to waste less of his readers’ time is less interesting for me[1] than that he, once again, wrote about how much it cost to run the tool. I think it’s great that he explains how much it costs. At the same time, I take it as a sign of how quickly we acquiesce to sea-changes in our lives without even noticing that anything has changed.

Before these cloud-based tools, I have never once had to think about how much using a tool costs me past the initial purchase or annual subscription cost. The brave new world of cloud-based coding assistants has now increased the billing granularity to commercialize individual keystrokes.

In the good old days, we used to buy a tool and use it. It didn’t phone home. You got an update when you bought it in a store or when you downloaded and installed it. The next step was automated but optional updates. Some tools had automated and non-optional updates. After that came subscription-based licensing, where you rented rather than owned software.

In this next phase, you will neither own nor rent software; instead, you will pay for each move of your mouse. This is, of course, a coup for the companies running the software. It is a downgrade for a way of life that was heretofore more decoupled from immediate and constant monetization.

This is the same type of change that came for blogging and creation and run online many years ago. That’s why many people no longer do anything for free; instead, they funnel their “content” through official monetization platforms or include links to monetization platforms. The system commercializes and marketizes more of what we do every day.

Some technological changes were empowering, e.g., releasing filmmakers from the burden and cost of obtaining film. Now, those same filmmakers—or the next generation of them—will once again be yoked to a finite resource for which they will have to pay as they go.

The hope is that everyone will integrate these subscription-based, per-resource cloud resources into all of their creative workflows. In the programming world, this pattern has heretofore been the domain of B2B cloud services. Now it’s coming for everything. Everything will be a subscription. You’ll be dinged at every possible juncture.

You can either ignore the price as you work and be surprised by the bill at the end of the month … or you can start changing your work patterns to accommodate the way the tools want you to work. We’ve seen this pattern before, and it can be (relatively) benign. It’s how electricity works—but electricity is largely state-controlled and the prices are set at a point where most people hardly ever need to think about it.

Even for electricity, though, this is the case for some but there are an increasing number for whom this is not the case, for whom electricity has largely been privatized and subjected to the whims of flash commodity pricing. There are people who turn off their air-conditioners because they can’t afford to run them.

Do we want to use this same pattern—privatizing and unit-pricing essential
commodities to gate access to creation and innovation tools to those who can afford them? I personally don’t think so.