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- Simplifying, Trade-Offs, and Tokenomics
Slow start to the new year.
Which isn’t such a bad thing.
Plenty to plan for, but still reflect back on.
Topics for this week:
Keeping it Simple
Looking back at 2025, I realized I was trying to do too much.
So one goal of 2026 will be to try to keep things simpler.
And ironically, AI can help with that.
AI loves to tell you what you want to hear, but really AI will do you whatever you tell it to do.
So I’ll be using AI to push back more and help me keep things in check.
Given a standard prompt with enough context about the ultimate goal, I can use AI to make sure that any new business venture or change in process lines up with that ultimate goal, and have it question whether something is worth the effort or not.
“Here’s the goal, here’s the new idea, ask 3-5 targeted questions to make sure any new approach actually helps accomplish the goal. Accomplishing the goal is the highest priority, pushback if this idea doesn’t directly improve progress toward the goal.”
If you tell AI to pushback, it can be very critical if you want it to.
It can also be questioning while still remaining constructive.
The here would be to help full flesh-out any new ideas before completely diving or switching gears.
Have AI make sure any changes actually align with the ultimate goal, or at least justify the change.
With the right prompt and context, AI should be able to provide just the right amount of pushback to keep things simple and focused for 2026.
Trade-Offs
The last 2 years have been a good lesson in the classic trade-off.
Money now or money later.
There’s 2 popular approaches in the software world currently, according to all the online gurus.
Make money upfront with an agency, or make money later with software.
And both are gambles.
Agencies are hard to scale because most of the work is manual or custom, and requires people to do the work.
Sign up for too many clients, and an agency can pay well, but also become way more than a full-time job.
Software, on the other hand, is easy to scale.
Built correctly, it costs basically nothing to add 100+ users overnight.
But if nobody wants that software, then all that building is a waste of time and money.
So the common suggestion is to balance both.
Start an agency to make money upfront, and use that money to build software.
When done properly, it’s a lower risk approach.
Balancing trade-offs.
A regular income and the ability to build without the pressure of instant success.
It makes sense to me.
And it’s possible to really simplify things using that model.
Swap out the agency with a job.
Less flexibility in a full-time position, but more stability.
And still the ability to build on the side without needing financial results.
A different set of trade-offs but a similar outcome.
And surprisingly simple…
Daily Useful Ideas
I’m still keeping an eye out for “micro-saas” ideas that could be fun to run on the side, despite my efforts to simplify things.
Small and manageable is fine, if it ends up being fun projects or things I’d want to use, especially things that would be useful daily.
I have small list at this point, most of which lend themselves to Chrome Extensions.
One of which I was reminded of today.
The “Political Filter”
I’m on X just about daily, but I’m no means a power user.
I follow a good amount of accounts, mostly tech related, and tend to stick to my “Following” tab.
Granted, the “For You” tab has gotten much better lately, it seems much more relevant and much less school fights, but I still try to avoid it.
But even within the “Following” tab, there’s an issue.
I follow some smart people, but half the time they are rage posting about politics, and that’s not why I follow them.
I frequently get the urge to unfollow but I usually don’t because I want to stick with the bigger picture.
A happy middle-ground, though, could be a simple Chrome Extension that uses GPT or some other model to quickly scan the post and semi-censor it.
Read the feed quickly and swap the post content out with “politics blah, blah, blah”.
They still get their freedom of expression, and I get to gloss over it.
I’m really only on X for tech so that’s really all I need to see.
If I’m feeling political, then the feature could be turned off or back on with the click of a button.
And this could probably extend to other features like “spoiler filter”, “language filter”, etc, but politics filter is the most relevant for me right now.
This is one project that’s high on the list for an AI agent to work on in the background, but let me know what you think.
What other are some other tools that are really simple but would also be really useful every day?
Quiet Updates
Seems like the LLM world has calmed down with the recent holiday stretch, which is probably a good thing.
With rumors of the “996” work schedule (9 a.m. to 9 p.m., 6 days per week), I’m sure there are some very tired engineers that needed time off.
But one update slipped through with MiniMax’s M2.1.
This is another open source model that could be run locally, or used for very cheap in the cloud.
It’s joining a list of open source models that generally perform well, including Kimi K2, GLM-4.7, and Qwen Coder.
These are really great for when you hit your Claude Code or Cursor caps, you can switch to running locally, or super cheaply through a service like OpenRouter.ai, only costing $.30 in and $1.20 out.
We may already be at the point where it’s getting difficult to even distinguish between these models any more.
The reasoning models will be a little different but as far as chat and code generation goes, it could be pretty easy to rotate between all these cheap or free models and drop the crazy expensive monthly subscriptions.
And MiniMax M2.1 is another one that could be in that rotation.
AI Tokenomics
Looking back at last year, I knew AI news was a regular thing for me, but there was one particular aspect of news that stuck out to me.
I’ve been tracking pricing longer than I realized.
Token prices are a core component of AI decisions, and it’s something I’ve been paying attention to for a while.
Maybe not a shock since I’ve talked about needing an LMArena Leaderboard for AI pricing before, but thinking about it more, just that one facet alone could be a pretty valuable thing to focus on.
AI pricing is really it’s own field.
Cryptocurrency coined the term “tokenomics” but it’s surprisingly fitting here since all AI models are priced per 1 Million tokens in and out.
I mocked up a landing page idea for tracking AI tokenomics, but nothing officially released yet.
It’s one idea that’s stuck with me for a while recently, and seeing that it’s been on my mind for a while is a good sign.
If I had to simplify down to just one particular thing, this could be one thing that could lead to enough news and change to not get bored.
Also need a good alternative term if “Tokenomics” has already been taken by crypto…
And that’s it for this week. Let the simplification begin.
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Let me know what else I missed! I’d love to hear your feedback at @jaypetersdotdev or email [email protected].
Thanks for reading!