The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 25 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Ross: Zero full-time engineers at Coverage write code manually anymore
“Not a single one of our full-time engineers right now writes code anymore. They do everything through Codex, Cloud Code, or Cursor.”
Ross: In five years, workers will one-shot custom software, making SaaS worthless
“If you take the five year view, kids who are in college today who come out and start working in a construction company or something are going to look at every problem they're paying for software and say, this doesn't do exactly what I need. And I can one shot …”
Ross: Market speculation creates real business value by attracting top talent
“I think the funny thing about America is that we love speculation and speculation actually creates real value. People think of speculation as this bad thing, but in the case, in this case, we sort of got really lucky in that there was this meme stock moment fo…”
Ross: Mid-market SaaS will be worthless in five years due to AI
“I think it's a barbell thing. Like, the large AI companies are gonna eat the top end of value, and everyone in the middle is gonna just commoditize, or people who aren't even in the software business. Like, in the next two or three years, this isn't true, righ…”
Ross: The cost of building new software is asymptotically dropping to zero
“I think right now, like the cost of software is just asymptotically dropping to zero, a building new software, which means that the way you build a company completely changes.”
Ross: Foundation models will build apps targeting high-volume token usage
“Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, they're all gonna, in the same way that you probably don't want to build an email company while Google's on its arise, because they're gonna come and eat that, like, every one of these companies is looking at, where are our tokens be…”
Ross: Most US homes are commodities accurately valued sight-unseen
“Most homes are not like pieces of art. Most homes in the country are not like your home. They're sort of commodity. They're closer to like a standard skew than a kind of one-off thing. And so you can value them sight unseen much more accurately than someone wh…”
Ross: Zero WithCoverage engineers write code manually, relying completely on AI
“Not a single one of our full-time engineers right now, writes code anymore. They do everything through codex, cloud code, or cursor.”
Ross: Cost of building new software is asymptotically dropping to zero
“The cost of software is just asymptotically dropping to zero of building new software, which means that the way you build a company completely changes.”
Ross: Cheaper AI-assisted development increases demand for software engineers tenfold
“On engineering right now, I was happy to spend, call it a 100,000 dollars to build this feature. Now it costs 20,000 dollars. I don't want less engineers. I want 10 times as many engineers, because I've actually, the set of features I would want for 20,000 dol…”
Ross: Coverage uses automated AI agents to one-shot PRs from Linear tickets
“Cole, who runs our engineering team, has like six agents that are running at once at all times. Just doing different kinds of projects. When we create a new ticket in linear, it automatically kicks off this thing that basically creates a dev environment, which…”
Ross: Coverage built and shipped a custom enterprise feature in one day
“Like we can now have an enterprise customer come up who says, oh yeah, this is so close, but we actually need it for is X. We can build X in one day, ship it live and close that deal. We did this last week.”
JD Ross: Foundation model labs will attack vertical professional services software
“And I think over time I would be surprised if more of that doesn't get attacked by The large AI foundational companies.”
JD Ross: Enterprise absorption will bottleneck AI adoption for years
“The ability to absorb and adopt the tools is going to be the limiting factor for years to come. And I think that the capabilities of these models is already so far ahead of our ability in most enterprises to just absorb and adopt change that that is like the w…”
Ross: Foundational AI labs will attack vertical AI players like Harvey
“And there's, you know, there's companies like Harvey who are going in saying we're going to be the ones who win on professional service, you know, AI for Legal or for accounting and things like that. Yeah. And I think over time, I would be surprised if more of…”
Ross: AI puts new career entrants on equal footing with industry veterans
“And this is the second time in my career where everyone's sort of kind of getting back to equal footing, and so young people who are just getting into their careers just starting are on equal ground with people like me, people like you who have spent 10, 2030 …”
Ross: Software development has fundamentally shifted from writing to editing
“If the job like in the past was writing, now it's editing and shifting from being a writer to an editor is a very I think for some people they're thriving in it and some people are really shocked by it.”
Ross: Model companies are determined to capture software development tooling
“The first one obviously is anything that's adjacent to software development. They're like, they've decided that they're going to war to win that. And I think that's a really hard place to, you have to be.”
JD Ross: Traditional insurance brokerages pay a third of revenue to producers
“One is, like, a third of their revenue up front is just going to this producer who owns the relationship.”
Ross: AI has shifted software development from a writing to an editing job
“If the job like in the past was writing, now it's editing and shifting from being a writer to an editor is a very I think for some people, they're thriving in it, and some people are really shocked by it.”
Ross: Enterprise capacity to adopt tools is AI's primary limiting factor
“I think right now the ability to absorb and adopt the tools is going to be the limiting factor for years to come.”
Ross: Context provision, not model power, is the bottleneck for AI
“Cause right now I think like the models are already so good that the constraining factor is actually your ability to provide them the context information to win.”
Ross: AI will scale automated cold calling to hundreds of thousands
“So, if it works for humans, it's going to work with AI, and so you're going to get not one or two or five calls, it's going to be 10,000, a 100,000.”