The TEMU-Fication of Software, Digital Goods and Services
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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 believe socks can be fully automated and are mostly made in china.
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:
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
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.
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.
Which pissed off American car companies so much they banned imports.
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.
My feeling during my time I have spent in most lower cost of living countries including China is that people in wealthy countries regularly get ripped off on consumer goods for the mere fact that they live in a wealthy country. For many consumer goods categories they don’t gain a whole lot of additional safety or peace of mind, they’re just paying more.
Anyone who has ever gotten prescription glasses made in the markets in China realizes how badly they’re getting ripped off.
If you actually live in China you aren’t paying $30 for a hooded sweatshirt like you do when you walk into a Target store. That price would be insane, astronomical (unless you’re just wealthier and shopping specifically at a luxury or Western brand).
Let’s take an example: a Boogie Board writing pad.
At Barnes and Noble the Boogie Board Jot Kids drawing tablet is $20.99
At Temu/AliExpress, it’s $3.50 total including shipping.
I.e., it’s easy for us to say that the “Netflix without ads experience” or the “smart TV without ads/spyware” is the experience we should all have. What’s harder is putting up the money to pay for those items when you’re working a real working class job.
I can’t blame anyone for dropping even moderately priced SaaS subscriptions for vibecoded cheap/free alternatives. I’ve done it myself: for example, why is every notes app with a decent feature set and collaborative functionality that is outside the Apple/Google ecosystem $5-10/month? That should cost $5/year.
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.
TEMU and Shein just kind of took it and ran with it by shipping $5 shirts en masse.
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This also only really happened because China's whole export oriented policy relies on keeping workers underpaid via capital control. Workers get their bank accounts at uncompetitive rates and that capital is used to fund manufacturing expansion. The normal thing that happens as a country gets richer is that workers earn more, start buying more of their domestic surplus and their export advantage goes away. However, the current thinking promoted by Xi is that consumption is just capitalist decadence, and so Chinese consumers can't buy the ever increasing goods surplus even if they wanted to. And China is also dealing with internal deflation now due to the massive confidence shock after the property bust.
We do not live in that world. We live in a world where Europe went fully neo-liberal as soon as the threat of communism was over. And the results were companies taking full advantage of labor markets with abhorrent lack of labor protections.
European regulators and politicians could have done something about this, and decided not to. And so we have TEMU.
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)
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.
Similarly, Kuhn Rikon pressure cooker: it has some parts that will need replacing every few years.
These are, probably, not the best options in terms of revenue generation, but they are options. Sometimes it's possible to sell some kind of service that accompanies the product, or maybe some accessories... However, they aren't available for all sorts of equipment. Some equipment is just too simple to try to organize it in this way.
Maybe we just need to accept that some goods will never be able to benefit from economy of scale and will have to adjust our expectations to the price? :|
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.
Of course it wouldn't land on highest quality. None of us need fans which last forever. We need fans which last long enough.
In the optimum scenario companies are able to build fans that do just that, but the quality would still not be highest quality compared to what would be possible. And nor should it, since it would force the consumer to pay for gold-plating they neither need nor want to pay for.
Doc Martens, however, are a good example of a brand/business where LTV might literally be 1, 2, maybe 5 purchases if your feet have stopped growing and you buy their Made in England boots (higher quality, but a price point that isn't LVMH territory) and want different colors -- or maybe a lot more if you buy the shitty ones (vegan leather, plastic-coated leathers) and they fall apart after 9 months and you replace them.
Regardless, a higher quality pair bought in 1994 and beat to hell and back still are very wearable in 2026, while at the same time there are junk options available too if you're so inclined for whatever reason.
I don't personally understand businesses that treat their products as disposable if the product itself isn't intended to literally be disposable by design. I get "make as much money as possible before the spigot shuts off", "endless growth is the goal", etc, but it also seems like it would create all kinds of headaches and byproducts that make operating a brand or business hell on earth (staffing otherwise-unnecessary customer service, dealing with frequent returns and liquidations, constant rebrand/brand management to deal with or paper over negative public perceptions, endless battle with knockoff competitors because your product has no differentiation in quality or value, on and on).
Temu/Shein/etc on the other hand have a distinct advantage in that they're marketplaces and aggregators of invisible brands; they shield "ghost kitchen" product producers from any kind of liability, blowback, negative attention. They're giants in a foreign land that operate with different rules, goals and incentives.
I don't really have a salient point, just thinking out loud. Ultimately, the article is probably correct in that the default, mainstream firehose of digital detritus will settle somewhere near "ultra-processed content", and that will be just fine for the average consumer. Not much we can really do about it with society and economies structured the way they are today. The knock-on effects of this on culture would be borderline impossible to unwind though, which is sad.
A comment found on internet has a possible explanation:
> I cannot recommend them highly enough, especially as everyday footwear because real leather should not be worn everyday as they need time to dry out
https://www.reddit.com/r/DrMartens/comments/18ygnd4/for_thos...
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.
When they invited our professors in the 80s they came back arguing China will eventually be the future. They listened to everything and started working on everything immediately.
We did the yes men privatization garage sale, gutted R&D, outsourcing, abolish education, housing, medical care. All that good stuff - but at what cost?
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."
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.
They're being subsidized? How do you explain their fat margins, $15.4B of profits on $54.0 of revenue? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinduoduo
Maybe there's some loss leader going on, but comparing it to "VC capital" (venture capital... capital?) doesn't make much sense, any more than calling costco's rotisserie chicken and hotdogs "subsidised by VC capital" doesn't make much sense.
I worked as a mailman a while back, most days there would be more packages in grey plastic wrap (from China) than actual mail. And you could tell that the stuff that was inside usually cost less than the shipping would have cost if you paid full price.
I can’t see how a market distortion is a net benefit to the importing country.
It seems self-destructive.
In practice the value flows from people who don't buy cheap crap from China to people who do.
To be clear, this is the smart thing to do—package delivery SHOULD be subsidized. Amazon should pay into this disproportionately through taxes, though.
If you're in construction then you need a quality drill that will carry you from one job to the next reliably. If you're just trying to do a one-off drywall repair in your house that you hope never to need to do again, maybe the $10 drill is precisely what you'd buy, if you could find it.
You may choose to ignore that and believe someone is selling you something for $5 but that doesn't make it true.
In the case of Temu, they're selling it for $5 of your money, and $5 of someone else's money, in order to capture you as a customer in the hope that you continue to buy things when they increase the price to $6, then $8, then $10, $15, $30 and so on in the future.
This is the Uber playbook, and if you have a solid product that people want and you can spend VC money long enough to build a trusted brand (or ideally keep prices artificially low until the competition gives up and you have a monopoly) it's very lucrative. I don't see it working for Temu myself. They sell things people don't need so as soon as the prices go up they'll probably fail. That said, Amazon see them as enough of a threat to launch Haul, so what do I know?
Sir, I suggest you use the word "sell" in its usual way, not your own definition of it. If someone takes $5 and gives you in exchange the merchandise and right of ownership on it, then that indeed does mean they "sell it for $5". The fact that something else is going on doesn't make it false.
Maybe they can capture the market for a brief moment, but if they do have a long term strategy, I’m not seeing one.
This also doesn’t work when there’s network effects at play. I believe this is why Grab (Southeast Asian Uber/UberEats) is adding social features like a whole fucking messenger into the app. Didn’t help: Bolt has launched there as well and is often cheaper and faster so I usually check both.
(Now, Grab is publicly traded, and maybe it’s profitable, which would undermine my whole argument. But I’m still getting cheap transportation and discounted food. Maybe they externalize the costs somewhere else which indeed also sucks.)
(*I poked around a bit, and this may be possible, especially in California.)
I guess the same people were surprised when Uber started raising their prices too.
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 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.
And the thing is, Temu - I was going to buy something from you. I saw an ad or whatever and thought "sure, I'll pay $13 for that keyboard." But then you get pulled into the dopamine labyrinth hell-realm and by the time you're out they've wasted 15 minutes of your time and you don't even remember what you came in for.
All that said, there have been a decent number of things that I bought from them which I've found incredibly useful. Just like, phone stands, ODBII reader, sticky notepads that look like Windows 95 Notepad windows, teeny tiny wireless earbuds I use while sleeping, etc.
Favicon can be part of the DOM ever since icons via ~~meta~~ link tags were introduced, because they can be more hi-res than the default favicon.ico file.
I've never thought about the ability to swap it dynamically though, although I've seen some site do that before.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document/vi...
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document/ti...
Same goes for the software. Before AI there were so many buggy, ugly, un-user friendly software. Remember Windows ME? Not all vibe coded software is bad, in fact I’ve vibe coded two projects and use them for free where I previously had to pay 20$ per month for the original one and both projects I vibe coded are working without any issue at all.
Wrong.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Isn't that just true about most things over the past century or so? They left out "staggeringly uglier" though.
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.
We went from "shorts" to movie "shorts", its going to be a dire decade for attention spans
Beware of the TEMU-fication of AI requests. Some crappy services like Loveable are the violators here.
Western brands outsource production to China to maximize profits -> less jobs, stagnating job market -> depressed wages across the board -> people no longer able to afford paying a premium for buying a Western brand (still made in China) -> TEMU comes and offers comparable quality at a fair price -> Boo hoo! TEMU bad! Evil China!
Simply FINDING good media becomes the problem. I have no interest in AI slop, but it's everywhere.
I don't choose to consume bad media, but finding good media is getting harder and harder.
I still feel bad for what is happening though, it's wrong and anyone with our best interests in mind would agree generated content needs to be firewalled from the human internet.
Log in, pay for premium, and use the like and subscribe buttons liberally. Use the downvote button too. It learns.
My feed is really fantastic. Once a month or so I notice some AI slop (usually with a handful of views - clearly the algo testing something out). Thumbs down, problem solved.
Here's an example:
Based on what I've seen in industry, I think the answer could be very likely worse. They'll generate bad code at an even faster rate, and very quickly nobody in the company will have any idea how anything works.
What this proves is that "human made" is not automatically good. Better is a complex question. LLMs have a magnifying affect on the quality of human decisions.
Codebases degenerate when the authors do not understand the system in which they operate and make changes that degrade the cohesion of the system as a whole. Humans do this all the time; at my company we had a 10k line lua function (within a 250k loc lua service) that grew through ten thousand point modifications. It's bad and humans caused it. Now, it's 15k lines of code and 10k lines of misleading slop comments.
LLMs do not go through the struggle of understanding and don't experience the distress of "wtf am I reading?" and don't experience the drive to make things less horrible for the next person. That suffering loop is how many codebases halt degradation and in the absence of suffering LLMs will pile bugs and rot endlessly.
> It's bad and humans caused it.
LLMs do the same thing. I review the code and interrogate the model about the bandaid fix it applied until the proper architectural solution becomes clear. Then the model implements the correct solution which usually involves some major refactoring.
> LLMs do not go through the struggle of understanding and don't experience the distress of "wtf am I reading?" and don't experience the drive to make things less horrible for the next person.
Of course not. That's the human's job.
And it's not every human either. Way too many humans are actually quite content to ship whatever works then go the hell home. Just a job after all.
- 30+ committers on <5K LOC
- software is robust/rock solid but the code is essentially unreadable
- changes take a long time b/c there are no tests
Whenever folks mention that LLMs write buggy code I think of the above.
I come across this fairly frequently. I think it's because the code has simply been tested into submission. So it works for that particular set of use cases, but the instant you try to add a feature, it all falls apart.
> all held together with thousands of flags
> ridden with mysterious macros that one cannot decipher
> needs to understand the values and the effects of 20 different flag
> Sometimes 100s
> only reason why this product is still surviving and still works is due to literally millions of tests
> The fact that this product even works is nothing short of a miracle!
Sorry, but I can't think of any adjective for this mess other than just "bad". That's some truly industrial grade slop, and I hope whoever worked on that got paid handsomely for it.
I don't like the stigma towards AIs and the people who use them, which is what a post titled "TEMU-Fication of software" is ultimately all about. Call me a misanthrope if you want, as some people have done in the past.
Since I don't like it, I go out of my way to post counterexamples whenever I think people are deluding themselves into thinking human work is somehow magically guaranteed to be better. I cited that example specifically so you wouldn't have to take my word for it.
Working product? With this argument, you're basically admitting that it's all fine as long as it works. What does it matter if the database needs a billion special case flags not to fall apart? What does it matter if it's some AI slop? So long as it ships and people get paid, it's all fine.
I mean seriously, would you work on that Oracle thing if they weren't paying you serious money as compensation? You can literally feel the suffering through that person's words. Whoever they are I hope they're doing alright now.
And it is equally shocking to me that people think it's fine to thoughtlessly generalize and dismiss projects that use AI as slop and AI users as incompetent vibecoders.
So I don't think I'm generalizing at all. I'm trying to dismantle people's generalizations. People act like every human programmer is a deeply caring code artisan or something. Reality is far more cruel, of course.
Asking an AI to create a database or something similar would not match the difficulty level of adding new features to Oracle.
These flags are needed because your many versions need to be supported combined with many configuration options. This is true no matter if the code is written by humans or AI.