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AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era

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Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era

#61

Post by rahimnathwani »

delusional wrote: post #55
rahimnathwani wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I'm buying soup, I'd prefer the manufacturer, the retailer, and any other part of the supply chain to be as efficient as possible, so they can compete in the market to offer me soup of a given quality at the lowest possible cost. An individual consumer doesn't derive any benefit from companies missing out on automation opportunities. Would you prefer to buy screws that are individually made on a lathe?

You're picturing a utopia at the limit of some idealized world. Try and take a second to return to planet earth. There will not be a "quality" dial that you get to tweak to decide on your perfect quality of soup. There will be graduations, and you will be stuck with whatever the store provides. If you want medium quality soup, but the store only carries 3 brands of soup (because unlike in your utopia somebody actuall…

You describe three potential undesirable outcomes:

- consolidation, such that there are only a few different choices of soup

- a race to the bottom in quality

- poisoning

These are all possibilities under our current system, and we have mechanisms (laws and market competition) which limit the extent to which they occur.

What is it about extreme automation technology that you think will increase these prevalence of these issues? By what mechanisms will these issues occur more frequently (rather than less frequently), as production technology becomes more capable?

Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era

#62

Post by john2x »

delusional wrote: post #57
spacemadness wrote: post #45

I think we’re going to have to deal with the stories of shareholders wetting themselves over more layoffs more than we’re going to see higher quality software produced. Everyone is claiming huge productivity gains but generally software quality and new products being created seem at best unchanged. Where is all this new amazing software? It’s time to stop all the talk and show something. I don’t care that your SQL qu…

This has been an industry wide problem at silicon valley for years now. For all their talks of changing the world, what we've gotten the last decade has been taxi and hotel apps. Nothing truly revolutionizing.

The revolution is happening at the top.

Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era

#63

Post by cartoonfoxes »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #42
haiku2077 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Extremely strict linting and formatting rules for every language you use in a project. Including JSON, YAML, SQL. - Using AI code gen to make your own dev tools to automate tasks. Everything from "I need a make target to automate updating my staging and production config files when I make certain types of changes" or "make an ETL to clean up this dirty database" to "make a codegen tool to automatically generate lib…

I worry that once I've done all that I won't have time for my actual work. I also have to investigate all these new AI editors, and sign up for the API's and work out which is best, then I have to learn how to prompt properly. I worry that messing with the AI is the equivalent of tweaking my colour schemes and choosing new fonts.

Some of what I learned from a decade of keeping up with the perfusion of JS libraries and frameworks seems relevant to AI:

- anything with good enough adoption is good enough (unless I'm an SME to judge directly)

- build something with it before considering a switch

- they're similar enough that what I learn in one will transfer to others

- everything sucks compared with 2-3 years from now; switching between "sucks" and "sucks+" will look silly in retrospect

Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era

#64

Post by eCa »

stephen_g wrote: post #49
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A while back, someone here linked to this story[0]. It's a bit simplified and idealized, but is actually fairly spot-on. I have been using AI every day. Just today, I used ChatGPT to translate an app string into 5 languages. [0] https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/superhuman-what-can-ai-do-i...

Hopefully it’s better for individual strings, but I’ve heard a few native speakers of other languages (who also can speak English) complaining about websites now serving up AI-translated versions of articles by default. They are better than Google Translate of old, but apparently still bad enough that they’d much rather just be served the English original… I guess similar to my experience with the AI voice translatio…

> they’d much rather just be served the English original

Yes. And the sites that gives me a poorly translated text (which may or may not be translated by ai) with no means to switch to English is an immediate back-button.

Usually, and especially technical articles, poor/unreadable translations are identifiable within a few words. If the text seems like it could be interesting, I spend more time searching for the in-english button then I spent reading the text.

Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era

#65

Post by ricw »

neom wrote: post #59

One area of business that I'm struggling in is how boring it is talking to an LLM, I enjoy standing at a whiteboard thinking through ideas, but more and more I see push for "talk to the llm, ask the llm, the llm will know" - The LLM will know, but I'd rather talk to a human about it. Also in pure business, it takes me too long to unlock nuances that an experienced human just knows, I have to do a lot of "yeah but" wo…

Just do both? Need an adequate network for that though which new school ai vibe entrepreneurs might lack…

Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era

#66

Post by [deleted] »

WXLCKNO wrote: post #8

I'm working on a bunch of different projects trying out new stuff all the time for the past six months. Every time I do something I add another layer of AI automation/enhancement to my personal dev setup with the goal of trying to see how much I can extend my own ability to produce while delivering high quality projects. I definitely wouldn't say I'm 10x of what I could do before across the board but a solid 2-3x ave…

[deleted]

Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era

#67

Post by neom »

ricw wrote: post #65
neom wrote: post #59

One area of business that I'm struggling in is how boring it is talking to an LLM, I enjoy standing at a whiteboard thinking through ideas, but more and more I see push for "talk to the llm, ask the llm, the llm will know" - The LLM will know, but I'd rather talk to a human about it. Also in pure business, it takes me too long to unlock nuances that an experienced human just knows, I have to do a lot of "yeah but" wo…

Just do both? Need an adequate network for that though which new school ai vibe entrepreneurs might lack…

Both indeed. I'm older, I do consulting, often to the new school AI CEOs and they keep thinking I'm nuts for saying we should bring in this person to talk to about this thing...I've tried to explain to a few folks now a human would be much better in this loop, but I have no good way to prove it as it's just experience.

I've noticed across the board, they also spend A LOT of time getting all the data into LLMs so they can talk to them instead of just reading reports, like bro, you don't understand churn fundamentally, why are you looking at these numbers??

Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era

#68

Post by WJW »

ujkhsjkdhf234 wrote: post #35
WXLCKNO wrote: post #8

I'm working on a bunch of different projects trying out new stuff all the time for the past six months. Every time I do something I add another layer of AI automation/enhancement to my personal dev setup with the goal of trying to see how much I can extend my own ability to produce while delivering high quality projects. I definitely wouldn't say I'm 10x of what I could do before across the board but a solid 2-3x ave…

Instagram was 13 employees before they were purchased by Facebook. The secret is most employees in a 1000 person company don't need to be there or cover very niche cases that your company likely wouldn't have.

Don't fall for the lottery winner bias. Some companies just strike it rich, often for reasons entirely outside their control. That doesn't mean that copying their methods will lead to the same results.

Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era

#69

Post by WJW »

john2x wrote: post #62
delusional wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been an industry wide problem at silicon valley for years now. For all their talks of changing the world, what we've gotten the last decade has been taxi and hotel apps. Nothing truly revolutionizing.

The revolution is happening at the top.

Top of what? It seems to be the same few people at the top for decades now.

Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era

#70

Post by [deleted] »

mechagodzilla wrote: post #11
ryandrake wrote: post #7

It seems like a more and more recurring shareholder wet dream that companies could one day just be AI employees for digital things + robotic employees for physical things + maybe a human CEO "orchestrating" everything. No more icky employees siphoning off what should rightfully be profit for the owners. It's like this is some kind of moral imperative that business is always kind of low-key working towards. Are you ri…

If anyone can pay-as-you-go use a fully automated factory, and the factories are interchangeable, it seems like the value of capital is nearly zero in your envisioned future. Anyone with an idea for soup can start producing it with world class efficiency, prices for consumers should be low and variety should be sky-high.

[deleted]
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