The growing attention deficit

Everyone is out for our attention, more than ever. And I think we're all just disengaging with it all as a result...

App releases are up 180%. App reviews and significant usage are down.

A new MIT/Wharton study tracked 100,000 developers across three generations of AI tools. Autonomous agents drove a 741% increase in lines of code written. By the time you get to actual shipped releases, that's down to 30%. By individual developer impact—10%.

But then the confusing part is that the flood of new software isn't finding users. It's just sitting there.

The same pattern keeps showing up everywhere;

• AI lowered the cost of making things.
• Books tripled.
• Average quality dropped.
• Recommendation systems got harder to navigate.

Perhaps, one person's time saved quietly became several people's time spent finding the good one.

AI removed the constraint on supply. It didn't touch the constraint on attention.

We seem to be measuring the wrong output. Lines written, releases shipped, content produced; all up. Value consumed, discovered, actually used; flat or falling.

Curious on how we are going to adapt to this. In this ever-pressing attention economy, what happens now that we're completely stretched thin on what we give our attention to? How do we move forward and adopt new things when our attention budget is nearing 0?