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"The key to this sort of business model is not innovation, but instead the externalization and compression of cost. Somewhere upstream, people work seventy-five hours a week, in conditions most readers of this website would refuse to even visit, so that the rest of us can have a cheap plastic spatula at our doorstep within five business days."
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While it may be true in some rare instances, for the vast majority of products its more likely to be fantasy that exists only in stereotypes.
The truth is why American attempts to onshore manufacturing and make it even cheaper with automation have failed miserably. The truth is that Chinese manufacturing is as automated as is possible with cutting edge technology. They build cars in factory's that don't even have lighting until finished cars reach the quality control area. This is why the North American auto sector relies on crushing tariff's and outright import bans to force North Americans to buy North American autos. Without those, you could buy a Chinese car that's better than what you drive for half the price.
The factory cranking out the one-dollar-shoes Temu sells is likely entirely automated.
TEMU sells what was made with the LLM-ification of manufacturing.
I've seen many accusations and exposes of clothing brands secretly sourcing sweat shop labor, but this is the first time I've seen anyone allege that sellers are secretly hiding the fact their clothing is made in high-tech ethical factories.
I don’t know about the $10 temu drills, but Shein fast fashion is produced on the backs of a transient and insecure underclass. https://youtu.be/BeIkPqpVmE8?si=yWwKbmmcsHHHA0CY
Automation doesn't mean there are no more people working long hours for little pay. It just means that they spend those long hours operating and maintaining machines, and are producing truly tremendous amounts of stuff compared to what they get paid. Also, TEMU isn't exactly known for selling the kind of high-value, high-volume products where a fully-automated production line pays for itself, so expect some steps to be done manually still.
> for the vast majority of products its more likely to be fantasy that exists only in stereotypes
Wow. This is a sophism class in just one sentence. This is not a personal criticism to you as a person, but these "arguments" are not solid.
> for the vast majority of products
Quantifier-Shift Fallacy: from something does not exist to it does not exist for the vast majority. A much weaker assertion and not equivalent (also unsourced)
> its more likely
We are not discussing the likelihood, but the truth. You are confidently asserting something based on claimed likelihood.
> that exists only in stereotypes
It is just a stereotype, nothing to see.
Then some comments about automated factories. As if those 2 cannot be compatible (false dichotomy).
This is sophism with zero arguments, sorry.
The quote you are replying to is
> The key to this sort of business model is not innovation, but instead the externalization and compression of cost. Somewhere upstream, people work seventy-five hours a week, in conditions most readers of this website
So we are not only talking about factories (Hasty Generalization). Delivery, for example, could be considered in that quote, as well as pollution, hand-work (most clothing garments are not automated btw) or many others. I am going to recommend a great book I read on the working conditions of a delivery person in China:
Look at this Ikea sells handblown glass on industrial scale the tv program went on a research how it was done on such a scale.
I guess you’re unaware that brands like Shein effectively use slave labour then?
It’s really expensive to automate.
Talked with a guy who wanted to built automation in food industry and it turned out it was cheaper to hire a guy to push the food item into a correct position on the conveyer belt than to set up a machine to do.
I imagine Temu changes things so often they’ll never get to numbers where full automation makes sense.
Something something, why buy a robot when you can hire a guy for $10/hr
Lockheed has refused to share missile plans with Ukraine on the grounds that Ukraine could make better missiles for cheaper and ruin Lockheed's business.
If they had said national security grounds, it would be understandable. But they didn't. They said American manufacturing is too inefficient and the only moat is keeping the designs secret.
when you make assertions that can be checked, check them please. doubly check it when it's contrarian.
> Without those, you could buy a Chinese car that's better than what you drive for half the price.
That seems unlikely. Businesses usually price to market, they don't pin the price to the wholesale cost. People in higher income companies are always going to pay more for essentially the same products.
Love this writeup. The temu analogy is best to describe what is going on beyond just what llms have done to software. What's closer to question is temu could only exist in the way it did (it's fast rise mainly) because of the work done by amazon prime in making fast shipping both logistically doable and the psychological default for many. So my question is what was the "amazon prime" era of software and perhaps learning what did (and did not) occur then can better understand why AI has wrought the effects it has in less than 10 years.
Temu built out some local distribution after it had already reached a pretty high level of popularity, but Temu was enabled by regulatory and political indifference that allowed China, with an enormous GDP, to get extremely subsidized postage rates. Also, lax enforcement of import duties (do you think the declared values were accurate?), and effectively zero enforcement of any safety standards, etc., on the products sold.
So, it was less of them following a path Amazon had trod and was maintaining, and more like sneaking in a back door and trying to sell you a counterfeit purse.
But if the US and EU had been on their game, it'd of either not happened or would've at least happened much more slowly.
As much as I hate Amazon, I think there is a simpler explanation. Europe has been relaxing their consumer protection standards for the past two decades, and EU’s consumer protection enforcement against foreign tech companies is hardly ever done today. This applies to both American and Chinese companies.
TEMU only exists because they simply neglected quality of their products which their competitors were required by law to have. And then they were not punished for it as they should have been.
In other words, TEMU only exists because Europe has turned into a deregulated neo-liberal paradise.
Quality products are amazing but I do get the downside of building very durable products.
For example, we have a Vornado fan in my house that is probably from the early 2000s. It still works perfectly even though we've left it running 24/7 for weeks in humid or dusty environments (e.g. to help air dry a wet basement). In terms of money paid/hours used, we got an amazing deal on the purchase.
From the manufacturer's perspective, the life time value (LTV) of us as a customer was basically just one fan + the free marketing of folks like myself writing this kind of post. It reminds me of the joke "Did you hear about the company that made lightbulbs that lasted 30 years? They went out of business!"
It makes sense that manufacturers would start to lower quality at a slightly faster rate than they lower the price as this means that folks still feel happy with the purchase. Sure, the fan doesn't last as long due to what is essentially planned obsolescence but the company does get to stay in business.
Temu/Shein etc are just the logical endpoint of this line of reasoning. If you are going to wear a shirt for the one summer where it's in style, why would you spend a large amount of money on it? And in turn, why would the company selling it spend a lot of money making it?
(I should add, this is purely an economical argument and ignores the working conditions/health effects/etc)
Seems to me that the TAM for a fan is basically infinite for any single company, therefore making a product that is too high quality or long lasting could still get you growing yoy sales for a long time and stay in business.
But you’re probably right that vs competition lowering prices (and quality) they’d lose.
There’s probably an optimum for maximizing sales/growth that doesn’t land on highest quality products in the real world, with non rational consumers, imperfect information etc… sadly.
> From the manufacturer's perspective, the life time value (LTV) of us as a customer was basically just one fan + the free marketing of folks like myself writing this kind of post.
Given there's zero barrier to substitution + the TAM for fans and lightbulbs is huge as sibling comment mentioned, there's no reason for the LTV to meaningfully exceed 1 puchase and the value of that free marketing could be higher than the EV of purchase N+1
E.g., if my name-brand turd wears out unreasonably, I don't replace it with the same name-brand turd; instead I replace it with an ephemeral Chinese brand turd which is just as likely to have similar build quality and features.
The US has been exporting Treasury bills and digital hot air for quite a while.
LLMs are the logical conclusion of this scam, until other countries stop gambling on the US stock market with fake $1 trillion corporations.
It works because the whole world's media is captured, owned and censored by US platforms and amplifies the US messaging.
> A 2025 Veracode report found that approximately 45% of AI-generated code samples failed security tests and contained critical vulnerabilities
Co-worker of mine who was excellent at both system design AND coding and I were chatting about LLMS:
Him: "I guess coding will just be a hobby now"
Me: "Coding def feels that way but software engineering as a profession is still alive and well."
A few years ago I would have laughed at anyone telling me that there is a serious market for ten-dollar drills, two-dollar dresses, and one-dollar pairs of shoes shipped from a warehouse on the other side of the planet.
TEMU doesn't sell those things. They're more expensive than that, but subsidised by VC capital from PDD Holdings, Blackrock, Vanguard, etc. It's a very boring 'spend the VC bucks to get the customers' play, and when they've got the customers they'll jack up the prices and lose the customers again. It's Uber-for-cheap-stuff basically.
Thought-provoking article, makes sense on some levels but it cuts too broadly.
For physical goods (clothes, purses,..) most buyers can discern high quality goods from bulk manufacturing with cheap materials. When it comes to digital goods, for movies, songs, books, etc. the buyer can discern a clear difference between AI- and human-generated, so the TEMU-fication argument is valid.
But for software engg, design, etc., I suspect that very few people can (or will be able to) discern the difference. There may be people who care about manual output, but then you have to come up with proof of manual work. Something like "prove to me that you have coded this application or designed this site without using AI". I don't see that happening.
I have another weak correlation to TEMU to add.
I have never, ever, bought anything on TEMU, because anytime I open the website it gives me a gambling roulette for some supposed discount thing. I hate gambling, so everytime I see the roulette I just close the webpage and go do something else.
Well, the whole cheap-generated content craze feels basically like gambling to me to this point, too. Folks are just randomly generating content: books, videos, articles, even applications, and gambling that something will pay for itself.
So now we have Enshitification, Eemufication and Gamblification of the Human Society. Damn I might write something on Substack about that.
Wow, what the hell was that javascript tab change ? Not sure if I hated or loved it, but that was the first time I have seen that.
I think what you call “TEMU-Fication” is more widely and classically known as “commoditization”.
The article was a nice read, but I was having a hard time understanding why attempt to coin a new word when the exact phenomenon is already (very very) well known.
We need to get commerce out of social media.
Anything "social" should not have to do with commerce.
There are no billboards in a church, so why should there be ads in places where people socialize? Having ads on sports fields is bad enough already.
The whole premise of the post is that if something is cheap, then it has to be of bad quality. However, that’s not the case most of the time. One example is the knock off luxury bags made in China. Even the original ones are actually made in China, but people pay a premium for the brand name, but quality wise both are same.
Same goes for the software. Before AI there were so many buggy, ugly, un-user friendly software. Remember Windows ME? Not all vibe coded software is bad, in fact I’ve vibe coded two projects and use them for free where I previously had to pay 20$ per month for the original one and both projects I vibe coded are working without any issue at all.
I'm pretty sure the "temu-fication" of software happened in 2007 when the iphone came out.
Software used to cost $39.99 or $199.99 or more.
then the app store.
...and small crappy phone apps drove quality software away from 9.99 to 4.99 to 99¢ to free (with ads, and under-the-covers theft of your contacts, your photos and bookmarks and eventually every possible other thing)
The real punchline here is saved for the end of the article. It has nothing to do with Temu and everything to do with dumbing-down the population.
If people get used to relying on free or cheap AI-generated content, their overall intellectual capacity and ability to act in the world will be lower.
Thanks for the laugh with the netflix logo. I feel that is very apt when all their recent shows I've glanced at seem to have their scripts brought from Temu or from a genai prompt.
"Please disable JavaScript by default and only enable on websites you trust. You have been warned." Random overlays if you click away.
Edits:
"two-dollar dresses": read that as "two-dollar diseases". Hrm.
Regarding the books on AWS, this has been a recognized money-laundering conduit for a number of years now.
I personally keep going back and forth on this, partially because I am seeing examples that cut both ways. On the one hand, I am mildly concerned a seemingly permanently raised floor, because I can already see ( and I already heard once or twice ) how now I should have x amount the output. I am saying seemingly, because we just had a meeting where higher ups are clearly concerned about the token cost so some form of 'more with less' is coming.
I am not saying some variant of temufication won't happen. If you look at openai's build week projects, you will see a fascinating array of things, but, also otherwise familiar patterns not completely dissimilar to 'calculator plays yankee doodle(but now llm interprets your next move)'. I guess what I am saying is that some things won't change: interested people will remain interested and use new tooling to its limits.
The question to me is what happens in the middle.
Why does Temu take the heat when Aliexpress has been around for years?
One of the only people I've seen who gets it, and has a sane take on the matter. I've been trying to write my own article on a very similar subject for a while now, and it's always hard to put these things into words.
I yearn for humanity to stop being so greedy and always looking for the cheapest crap they can get, so they can pretend to be rich by having a lot of stuff. Particularly people in countries like America (where I live), are too comfortable, and pretend to live above their means (not necessarily consciously) by partaking of low quality mass produced goods.
I agree with some points, but I don't like the take that AI/LLMs also aren't built on the backs of underpaid workers. While a lot of the training for LLMs may be unsupervised, we wouldn't have gotten to this point in AI without the support of data labelers. And on the hardware side, how many factory workers operate in unsafe conditions on a daily basis?
True only if the end-product is better in some way. A gourmet meal is better than Chipotle. A handmade leather bag is better than the Temu version. In software, it's harder to make out the difference; of course, better UX, faster APIs etc. can all affect the end-user experience. But who is to say that AI-generated code can't do all of that (and more!)?
> A hypothesis on the not-so-distant future ... in which most of what we consume gets cheaper, more abundant, and noticeably worse
Isn't that just true about most things over the past century or so? They left out "staggeringly uglier" though.
I agree with the article, and it's something that I've been thinking for a while now as well.
I think however that the article is missing a big point, and that is that the cheap manufacturing from Temu/Shein work greatly because the steal and copy design from other people. So it's not just that AI will make production very cheap, it's that it's making it quite trivial to copy design and ideas from others at almost 0 cost.
So it's not just the product market that gets spammed by slop. It's that new creative human designs get hindered because anything great that you create, will be instantly stolen and copied.
First unicode hostname I've seen?
The netflix example hits hard. I don't want to advertise the chinese pendant to it, but basically it has 2 minute "movies" with AI generated scenes that you can scroll like netflix. The amount of raw energy that went into producing this slop is just insane.
We went from "shorts" to movie "shorts", its going to be a dire decade for attention spans
The article makes absolutely no sense. AI works better than humans. The quality of AI output depends on request. Higher quality request produces high quality output and vice versa. The article completely misses the point.
Beware of the TEMU-fication of AI requests. Some crappy services like Loveable are the violators here.
Consider that it used to be said that nowadays there is not much class difference in consumption between low, middle, and upper clases in the US, in that the same items are practically available to all. Well, that won't be true shortly, and when only a minority will be able to afford "real" items, made exclusively and entirely by humans, I doubt that democracy will be able to survive, because contempt and animosity between the two groups will inevitably ensue, and democracy can't survive that.
Americans will do and say literally anything to avoid admitting capitalism was a horrible, terrible mistake.
good article, mostly because i have a feeling it was 100% hand written. thanks for not using ai. makes it much more authentic
You choose to consume bad media, not my problem.
"Human made" is not automatically better and we need to stop pretending that it is.
Here's an example: