Author here. I’m building a global AI platform where users are on conference WiFi trying to pull up digital business cards. Origin server in Oregon, users in London, Dubai, Sydney. This essay started as an internal architecture doc explaining why we moved to an edge-first pattern with Cloudflare Workers, and turned into a deeper exploration of why the Origin-Edge-Client model is the next major architectural shift. The core argument: TCP recovery time is dictated by RTT, so terminating connections at the edge doesn’t just save latency on the happy path — it fundamentally changes how fast you recover from packet loss. The essay also gets into why Amdahl’s Law is a better lens than Moore’s Law for systems design, and why that maps directly onto this pattern.
More optimistic signal it’s very early innings in the architectural side of AI, with many more orders of magnitude power-to-intelligence efficiency to come, and less certainty today’s giants’ advantages will be durable.
my guess - e ink refresh rates / ghosting suck and it would be hellish hard to get an on screen keyboard with an e ink display to get anywhere the typing speed a modern touchscreen can deliver.