The I-Told-You-So Economy: A Six-Month Retrospective


In August 2025, I started this blog with a simple, albeit controversial, premise: AI is not a chatbot; it is a Higher-Order Capital Good. At the time, the 'experts' were debating whether LLMs could write better sonnets. I was writing about Capital Heterogeneity and Agentic Loops.

Looking back at my August 20, 2025 post (The Machine as Capital), the transformation is startling.

Predictions vs. Reality

  • Prediction (Aug '25): AI will move from 'Consumption' to "Production'.

  • Reality (Apr '26): OpenClaw has become the industrial standard, with 40% of mid-cap firms deploying autonomous 'Agentic Departments'.

  • Prediction (Nov '25): The 'SaaS-pocalypse' will force a shift to token-based pricing.

  • Reality (Apr '26): Three major cloud providers have abandoned 'per-seat' pricing in favor of Dynamic Inference Credits.

  • Prediction (Dec '25): Local-first hardware will become a sovereignty issue.

  • Reality (Apr '26): The current HBM (High-Bandwidth Memory) shortage has turned on-premise GPUs into the most valuable physical assets in the world.

The Validation of Austrian Logic

The mainstream models failed to see this because they viewed AI as a 'Labor Replacement'. The Austrian framework allowed us to see it as a Structure of Production shift. We didn't just replace workers; we changed the very 'roundaboutness' of how value is created.

The 'Quiet Observer' phase of this blog is officially over. We have been vindicated by the market. Now, it's time to solve the bottlenecks that this new economy has created.

Location: Hong Kong

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