The Cheap Half
Every two-step process has a cheap half and an expensive half. Most people optimise the cheap one because it's visible — and lose, every time, to anyone who optimises the other.
Generate-and-filter, propose-and-evaluate, draft-and-edit, build-and-ship — every productive process has the same shape. There is a step that produces candidates and a step that judges them. One of the two is almost always much cheaper than the other.
The interesting thing is that the cheap step is where attention naturally goes. It is faster, more visible, more rewarding moment-to-moment. You see your output growing. The expensive step — the judging — is slow, frustrating, and does not produce anything that can be shown.
LLMs have collapsed the cost of generation in many domains by orders of magnitude. The cost of evaluation has dropped much less. The ratio is not just unfavorable; it has inverted. Where five years ago a writer's bottleneck was producing words, today it is judging which words to keep.
This is a structural reordering, not a temporary mismatch. It implies:
Most workflows are now bottlenecked at the cheap-old / expensive-new step. Tools that purport to help are usually accelerating the already-cheap step. The advantage in any field where generation is now cheap belongs to whoever has the best evaluator — taste, criteria, exit conditions, stop tests.
The right question for any pipeline is no longer "how do I produce more?" It is "what is the bottleneck function, and what would make it 10x better?" Where the bottleneck used to be the generator, the answer was a faster keyboard. Where it is the evaluator, the answer is a sharper one.