What was your win this week?

I wasn't a programmer. With Claude, I built ad software with paying customers for $10,000 and 2,200 hours.
My day job is making wood finishes. My business sells them on Amazon, Shopify, Walmart and through wholesale reps. Nobody would have picked me to build software.

I built it anyway. RedHen Labs is Amazon advertising software with paying customers. It tracks profit by campaign, automates bids and harvests keywords from search-term reports. It charges a flat monthly fee instead of a percentage of ad spend, which is how most agencies bill.

What it cost

• $10,000
• About 2,200 hours, roughly one full-time working year

A few years ago, competing with Helium 10 and the big Amazon ad agencies took a development team and a couple of million dollars.

What AI changed, and what it didn't

AI didn't make this easy. 2,200 hours is a year of work.

It changed which barrier stands in the way. The old barrier was money and connections: you had to raise capital and hire developers before you could even find out whether your idea worked. The new barrier is time and stubbornness. Most people will never have $2 million, but a lot of people can find the hours.

Access, not ability

Daniel He4rt recently wrote "You're not an impostor, you just started from a different line". His argument is that many developers who feel like impostors are up against unequal access, not a lack of ability. I think AI is starting to close that gap, including for people like me, who weren't on any starting line at all.

Anthropic just launched a $200 million fund to study AI's economic effects. It only funds institutions, and every research priority assumes AI will leave ordinary people behind. I wrote them an open letter. Here it is in full.

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The Real Crisis Is Access, and AI Is the Cure, Not the Cause

An open letter to the Anthropic Economic Futures team

Your new $200 million fund starts from the assumption that AI's big economic story is disruption: displaced workers, weaker safety nets, jobs to replace. All five of your research priorities are about cushioning the losses.

I think you're studying the wrong crisis.

The crisis of our time is not AI taking jobs. It's wealth piling up with the small group of people who have always had access: to capital, to developers, to expertise, to education and to the right networks. For generations, that access has been the dividing line between people who build wealth and people who work for it.

AI is erasing that line.

I make wood finishes in central Pennsylvania, and I'm not a programmer. A few years ago, competing with Helium 10 and the big Amazon ad agencies took a development team and a couple of million dollars. Working with Claude, I built RedHen Labs, an Amazon advertising platform with paying customers, for $10,000 and about 2,200 hours of my own time, roughly one working year. I'm not telling you this to sell anything. I'm telling you because it would have been impossible for someone like me five years ago.

And I'm not unusual. Picture the man who paints lines on city roads, sick of sitting in the traffic his crew creates. Tonight, with a $20 AI subscription, he can build a small tool that predicts traffic from public data and schedules the work around it. Five years ago, that idea died in his truck. Someone with no degree and no connections can now dig into ideas deep enough to redefine how distributed systems work. And AI is becoming the teacher Google never quite became: patient, personal and available to anyone for twenty dollars a month.

This isn't redistribution by taxes or programs. It's redistribution by competition. When the barriers fall, markets locked up by a few players open to millions of people with good ideas. That is capitalism working the way it's supposed to.

Which is why your fund's design is so troubling. It takes no individuals, funds nothing under $1 million, and routes every dollar through institutions. It predicts that AI will leave ordinary people behind while building a fund that leaves them out. That's the old model of access, the very thing AI is dismantling.

Anthropic, of all companies, should want the other side of this story studied: where AI is creating new owners, not just displaced workers, and how fast wealth moves when access stops being scarce. That research doesn't exist yet. The evidence for it is being created right now, by people your fund can't hear from.

I'd like to talk about what that research could look like. Let's change the conversation from doom to access.

A. Smith
Rowdy Rooster Woodworks · RedHen Labs · Pennsylvania
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