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An interesting consequence of productivity gains as a result of newly introduced agentic tooling is that it seems to invert the standard time discount on labor. The typical assumption is that an hour today is worth more than an hour a year from now. But, if the hour a year from now is 10x more productive, the discount flips and the future hour is much more useful. Rationally, one might expect to stop spending the hours of today on work that becomes much cheaper, redirecting that time towards accumulating durable, compounding assets that aren't subject to the time discount inversion (e.g. capital, trust, mindshare).

Consider Brunelleschi and the Duomo of Florence. If Brunelleschi learned that within the year, a crew of engineers equipped with hydraulic cranes would magically appear, he'd be likely to stop laying bricks. He may spend more time refining the dome's geometry or thinking about how to best change the dome's design to accommodate these new tools.

There's probably two caveats here – firstly (and most obviously), this only applies where productivity is compounding fast enough to flip the discount. Furthermore, this is hard to project–certain spaces may incur this inversion only some N% of the time–and experimenting may not be viable when the penalty of an undershoot or miscalibrated prediction has exponential downside.

Secondly, some games are Red Queen's Races. Failing to produce in the short-term would foreclose the long-term payoff. Consider Brunelleschi, who's now competing with the hypothetical, equally-acclaimed renaissance architect Ihcsellenurb. Brunelleschi and Ihcsellenurb are competing for a grant from a wealthy patron who's unaware of the incoming cranes, instead intending to award the grant based on visible quarterly progress. Brunelleschi might know the cranes are coming, yet still be forced to lay bricks, as without this grant, he'd be unable to pay the crane operators when they arrive.

Seemingly, this model only works when an actor can afford short-term output illegibility in pursuit of a better long-term output. My sense is that the distribution of these actors is barbelled. On one hand, entrenched incumbents with reservoirs of trust and capital are able to absorb quiet quarters (Apple, for instance). On the other hand, small players can afford illegibility simply because nobody cares enough to punish it.

It seems the losers of this game sit in the middle of the barbell; this makes sense, given it's the only segment where short-term legibility is (1) required and (2) existential. Incumbents and upstarts alike can absorb misses in a way that the squeezed middle can't. Private markets will see two middle-of-the-barbell companies, where one is externally missing whilst the other seems to just keep winning, and reward the one with the legibly positive result. So, the middle must survive by laying soon-to-be-obsolete bricks, simply to keep up in the Red Queen's Race.

A solo indie developer like a327ex sits firmly on the small-player end of the barbell. No investors, no employees, no quarterly legibility tax. The runway from SNKRX provides roughly 5–10 years of financial buffer, and there are no competitors forcing short-term production. This is close to the maximally advantaged position for the deferral strategy — the ability to absorb a quiet year or two without external punishment.

Given this, the time-discount inversion argument applies directly. If AI tools become substantially more capable over a 5-year horizon, hours spent today on work that will soon be cheap are hours partially wasted. The rational allocation tilts toward compounding, durable assets — tooling, engines, craft — rather than grinding out output that will be trivial to reproduce later.

But the time-discount inversion assumes gains of roughly 10x across the relevant work. This assumption is weakest in game development and creative projects, because AI's productivity contribution is highly uneven across the pipeline.

Where gains are large and likely to grow further:

Where gains are small, and the ceiling is uncertain:

Kessler's Red Queen race is framed externally — grants, patrons, competitors. But a parallel version of it runs internally: a327ex vs. xe723a.

The naive deferral strategy taken by xe723a — wait until tools are 10x better, then produce — assumes the he arrives at that future moment with the same taste and design instincts they have today. This is not how creative skill works. Taste atrophies without use. The intuition for "this scene needs to breathe" or "this encounter isn't teaching what I want it to teach" is built by making things, shipping them, getting feedback, and iterating.

AI reduces the cost of implementation. It does not reduce the cost of knowing what to implement. As implementation gets cheaper, the bottleneck shifts further toward taste, vision, and directorial judgment — the exact skills that require active practice to develop. A developer who spends five years building tools and deferring creative work arrives in year six not as a 10x-tooled version of their current self, but as a rusty-taste version with powerful tools they don't yet know how to use well.

a327ex has been developing a seven-story transmedia project combining books and games. More recently, as image and video generation tools have progressed — UNI-class models for stills, Seedance-class models for short video — expanding that project into visually told narrative formats has become more realistic for a solo creator. These expansions allow experimenting with visual storytelling forms, including ones that do not cleanly match any existing category. Testing what new forms of sequential visual narrative become possible when a solo creator has access to AI-generated imagery and motion — and which of those forms feel compelling enough to incorporate into the larger project — is an ongoing parallel track.

With this in mind, the robust version of the deferral argument distinguishes between two kinds of work:

Given the project context, this suggests a specific allocation:

A prompt like "make a good visual narrative of this story" will fail on any current or near-future model, regardless of whether the target form is manga-adjacent, anime-adjacent, or something new. The same prompt against a detailed scene-by-scene storyboard, consistent character sheets, and explicit directorial notes might succeed. The design scaffolding is the thing that must exist for future tools to be usable at all. Design work done now is what makes deferred production feasible later — and because the specific visual form has not yet been chosen, the scaffolding work is also what will determine which forms are feasible when the time comes.

This reframes deferral from "wait and do nothing" to "sequence the work such that the taste-dependent scaffolding is ready when the production-dependent tools arrive."

"AI will be better in 5 years" is always true. In 2030, 2035 tools will look equally promising. Pure deferral has no termination condition — each year of waiting strengthens the case for another year of waiting, and project ambition can scale with perceived future tool capability until the project never ships.

A related failure mode: tooling as indefinite preparation. Capable people often rationalize tool-building as preparation for creative work that never arrives — the engine-builder who never ships the game, the framework author with one more abstraction to add first. A 5-year horizon makes this easier to justify, since tooling is intrinsically compounding and each additional refinement is defensible in isolation. For a327ex, the in-progress tools — the Anchor engine and the Anchor app — are mostly not avoidance, because they have what could be called triple use: anything added to them benefits the dev environment itself, the games and books that ship through them, and the website which will also run inside the app. That structural leverage justifies substantial investment. The risk is still at the margin: tooling work that does not serve at least one of those three uses becomes hard to distinguish from procrastination dressed as preparation.

Two fences mitigate both failure modes:

A shipping commitment on some subset. Pick one format — for a327ex most likely games — that will ship regardless of tool progress. Everything else becomes upside. If the stories happen, great. If only more games ship, that's still great progress. Without a committed subset, deferral becomes indefinite.

A cadenced tool reassessment. Rather than ambient "keep an eye on tools," a concrete protocol: every 6 months, pick one specific component (e.g. a short visual prologue in whichever form currently feels most promising) and test it against current tools. If the output is shippable, start that piece. If not, defer another 6 months. This gives deferral a testable termination condition and prevents the "tools always look better next year" bias from going uncontested.

The time-discount inversion argument is sound, and a solo indie developer with a 5–10 year runway sits in one of the most advantageous positions to act on it. But the argument applied without qualification produces a brittle strategy that risks skill atrophy, tooling-as-avoidance, and indefinite deferral.

The robust version:

  1. Defer asset-heavy production work where AI tools are improving fastest.
  2. Do design and taste-level scaffolding now, in forms that will be directly usable by future tools — storyboards, character bibles, world design, book manuscripts.
  3. Release smaller projects continuously, chosen to exercise specific skills the big project will require.
  4. Enforce scope discipline on those projects to keep the release cadence real.
  5. Reassess tools on a fixed cadence with concrete tests, not ambient observation.

The core reframe: the question is not "produce now or defer," but "which specific parts defer well and which do not, and what work done now makes the deferred parts feasible when the tools arrive."