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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

#71

Post by sheepscreek »

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…

I know what you mean. Also, the more niche your topic the more outright wrong LLMs tend to be. But for white-boarding or brainstorming - they can actually be pretty good. Just make sure you’re talking to a “large” model - avoid the minis and even “Flash” models like the plague. They’ve only ever disappointed me.

Adding another bit - the multi-modality brings them a step closer to us. Go ahead and use the physical whiteboard, then take a picture of it.

Probably just a matter of time before someone hooks up Excalidraw/Miro/Freeform into an LLM (MCPs FTW).

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

#72

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#74

Post by raincole »

apical_dendrite wrote: post #3

When I worked at a startup that tried to maximize revenue per employee, it was an absolute disaster for the customer. There was zero investment in quality - no dedicated QA and everyone was way too busy to worry about quality until something became a crisis. Code reviews were actively discouraged because it took people off of their assigned work to review other people's work. Automated testing and tooling were minima…

So did revenue per employee increase?

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

#75

Post by handfuloflight »

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…

With the LLM, you're free to ask any question without worrying about what the other party might think of you for asking that question.

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

#76

Post by PixyMisa »

handfuloflight wrote: post #75
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…

With the LLM, you're free to ask any question without worrying about what the other party might think of you for asking that question.

Whereas with humans, you'll get valuable pushback for ideas that have already failed.

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

#77

Post by heraldgeezer »

nemothekid wrote: post #12

I'm not entirely convinced this trend is because AI is letting people "manage fleets of agents". I do think the trend of the tiny team is growing though and I think the real driver were the laysoffs and downsizings of 2023. People were skeptical if Twitter would survive Elon's massive staff cuts and technically the site has survived. I think the era of the 2016-2020 empire building is coming to an end. Valuing a mana…

So I can't hide in the masses watching Netflix anymore?

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

#78

Post by handfuloflight »

PixyMisa wrote: post #76
handfuloflight wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the LLM, you're free to ask any question without worrying about what the other party might think of you for asking that question.

Whereas with humans, you'll get valuable pushback for ideas that have already failed.

The wisdom to know what to ask humans and what to ask the machine.

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

#79

Post by aussieguy1234 »

" Do what you do best, and let AI do the rest".

Exactly the approach I'm taking with Tunnelmole, which as of right now is still a one person company with no investors.

I focused on coding, which I'm good at. I'm also reasonably good at content writing, I have some articles on Hackernoon before the age of AI.

So far AI has helped with

- Marketing ideas and strategies

- General advice on setting up a company

- Tax stuff, i.e what are my options for paying myself

- The logo. I used stable diffusion and an anime art model from CivitAI, had multiple candidates made, chose one, then did some minor touch ups in Gimp

I'm increasingly using it for more and more coding tasks as it gets better. I'll generally use it for anything repeatable and big refactors.

One of the biggest things coding wise working alone is Code Review. I don't have human colleagues at Tunnelmole who can review code for me. So I've gotten into the routine of having AI review all my changes. More than once, bugs have been prevented from being deployed to prod using this method.

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

#80

Post by andy99 »

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…

It's not quite the same but since the dawn of smartphones, I've hated it when you ask a question, as a discussion starter or to get people's views, and some jerk reads off the wikipedia answer as if that's some insight I didn't know was available to me, and basically ruins the discussion.

I know talking to an llm is not exactly parallel, but it's a similar idea, it's like talking to the guy with wikipedia instead of batting back and forth ideas and actually thinking about stuff.

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