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wiki/concepts/make-more-cheap-code.md

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 - **Exploration patterns:** slop-port a service to another language just to benchmark it; test 3 theories of an ambiguous PR in parallel; **use dumb-model agents as API usability testers** — if a weak model can't build on your SDK, that's a UX bug in the SDK.
 - **Reading economics.** Reading still costs attention (the human-side analog of [[context-as-scarce-resource]]): don't read faster, read *only what's worth reading* — every signature and API always, function bodies rarely, per-file agent summaries instead of giant diffs (via Dax). Have AI review code before humans do.
 - **What this is not:** a license to merge unreviewed slop. Theo explicitly keeps hand-verification of shipped code unchanged and disowns vibe-coders who ship slop ("I hate them too").
+- **Variations, not answers** (added 2026-07-28). [[thorsten-ball]] extends the same economics past code into *design decisions*: ask for 10–15 variants and pick one. His orb icon came from 15 AI-generated versions across styles and 18 palettes; AMP's news imagery from turn-by-turn Midjourney rounds. Generation is cheap, so the human's job moves from producing the artifact to **choosing among artifacts** — taste at AI speed, which is his answer to the slop objection ([[code-as-throwaway]]). The webinar-relevant part: this is the version of "make more cheap code" that needs no codebase, so it transfers directly to a non-engineer ([[2026-07-24-non-engineer-throwaway-verification]]).
+- **Ask for proof, since you're waiting anyway.** Screenshots, benchmarks, dark-mode and light-mode variants, fifty tests in parallel — cheap generated artifacts whose only job is to make a claim checkable. See [[async-by-default]], where the practice belongs to delegation rather than to reading.
 
 ## Evidence
 
 - All claims, ratios, tier table, slop patterns, Dax/Shao citations — [[2026-07-24-youre-reading-way-too-much-code]].
 - Groundwork (code disposable, kill without guilt, G-brain markdown tier) — [[2026-07-14-everything-we-knew-about-software-has-changed]].
+- 15 icon variants, Midjourney rounds, "ask the agent for proof" — [[2026-07-28-agentic-engineering-10x-developer]].
 
 ## Related Pages
 
-- Concepts: [[code-as-throwaway]] (parent claim: cost → zero; this page is its *discipline* — what cheap code is actually for), [[think-wider-not-bigger]] (same breadth logic applied to generation volume rather than ambition), [[product-ownership]] (verifying as the human's remaining job), [[solve-first-then-skillify]] (contrast: slop is frozen into nothing; skills freeze the procedure), [[leave-less-room-for-imagination]] (tension — see below), [[context-as-scarce-resource]]
-- Entities: [[theo-browne]], [[eugene]]
+- Concepts: [[code-as-throwaway]] (parent claim: cost → zero; this page is its *discipline* — what cheap code is actually for), [[think-wider-not-bigger]] (same breadth logic applied to generation volume rather than ambition), [[product-ownership]] (verifying as the human's remaining job), [[solve-first-then-skillify]] (contrast: slop is frozen into nothing; skills freeze the procedure), [[leave-less-room-for-imagination]] (tension — see below), [[context-as-scarce-resource]], [[async-by-default]] (proof artifacts as the delegated form of the same move)
+- Entities: [[theo-browne]], [[eugene]], [[thorsten-ball]]
 
 ## Contradictions / Uncertainty
 
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 ## Next Questions
 
 - What does the throwaway-verification bucket look like in a non-engineer's workflow (the webinar audience) — is there an HR/BA analog of "10,000 lines of slop to verify one line"? *(Answered by synthesis 2026-07-24: generated checks, not generated content — fresh-agent misread tests, parallel interpretations, checker skills, synthetic-candidate simulations. See [[2026-07-24-non-engineer-throwaway-verification]].)*
-- Does tier-A slop generation stay cheap once context is accounted for — or does reviewing *agent behavior* replace reviewing code as the attention sink?
+- Does tier-A slop generation stay cheap once context is accounted for — or does reviewing *agent behavior* replace reviewing code as the attention sink? *(Sharpened 2026-07-28: [[async-by-default]] multiplies parallel agents without multiplying review capacity, and Thorsten names **token budget** as a winner/loser variable — so the honest answer may be that cheap code is cheap in money and expensive in attention, which is precisely the resource this page says is binding.)*
+- Does "15 variations, pick one" hold where the choice needs a criterion rather than taste? Picking an icon is judgment you already have; picking among 15 candidate job descriptions or architectures may require the analysis the variations were supposed to replace.