Should you give the scarcest things to the fastest coders?
Lately, I’ve been thinking about a warning I read over a decade ago. It was in the course registration system at Carnegie Mellon University, and it said this:
Warning: No Automated Requests
Please be responsible when accessing the registration system. Attempts to inundate the system with automated requests to register for a course will be logged and result in your being denied access until AFTER the entire registration period.
CMU is a place where most students learn to code. But registering for courses is not supposed to be a high-stakes coding exam. I appreciated that the official policy did not give the best classes to the fastest coders.
But here we are in 2026, and tons of businesses have effectively decided to give their scarcest resources to the fastest coders. First-come, first-served is a classic way to reward people who show up early. But online, it just rewards the best automation.
People automate the buying of concert tickets, restaurant reservations, even the timeslots for tennis court reservations - and they use them, resell them, or no-show entirely. As consumer-focused AI agents like Instinct and Muse gain adoption, this devolves into a latency lottery where only those agentic users have a chance to win.
For businesses, I ask: is this what you want to support?
I recognize this is a hard problem (and I work on the related bot and fraud prevention for my job, though everything I write on this blog is my own). A few alternatives to first-come, first-served that are less vulnerable to scalping:
You can have privileged early access for known users, like “verified fan” programs. This rewards their loyalty (and now you have the burden of tracking that).
A random lottery leaves things entirely up to fate; the problem is that now you have to administer some kind of waitlist and decide when to resolve it.
Or let’s be real: one problem with scalping is that scalpers get the money instead of the business. With an explicit auction, you can collect that money from buyers directly. I am a fan of the second-price/Vickrey auction, though there are plenty of options here.
These all have their downsides. So does bot protection, ID verification, strict cancellation fees, and other anti-scalping measures. But moving away from first-come, first-served makes the game more explicit - like knowing that haggling is an option for personalized pricing.
Last Friday, I saw dozens of people queuing outside a Best Buy before the store opened. Was that fair? Not if you need to work a 9-5. But everyone knows what it means to physically wait in a line. That’s not so true online.