Development speed is not a bottleneck

> Because just developing the variations would be faster than all of the debate. So the amount of time you waste in meetings and deliberation goes down as well.

Thank you for articulating something I knew but haven't been able to express as eloquently.

It frustrates me to no end to watch half a dozen non-technical bureaucrats argue for days about something that can be tried (and discarded) in a few hours with zero consequences.

"Let's write a position paper so that everyone involved can agree before we do anything."

Noooo! Just do it! See if it works in practice! Validate the marketing! Kick the tyres! Go for a test drive. Just. Get. Behind. The. Wheel.

> so the anti-vibe-coding people feel like they need to claim that development speed has no impact at all

Strange, I'd been more of the impression that this is an argument from pro vibe-coders. As more data comes in, the "productivity increases" of AI are not showing up as expected. So as people question, how come things are not getting done faster even though you say you are 10x faster at coding? The vibe-coders answer by saying that coding isn't the bottleneck, as opposed to capitulating and saying that maybe they're not that much faster at coding after-all.

> and they're allergic to automation, hiring higher quality engineers, and hiring more engineers to improve velocities

I think there's another issue, but it could relate to your first two statement here. Even to try ideas, to explore the space of solutions, you need to have ideas to try. When entering development, you need clarity on what you're trying. It's very hard to make decisions on even a single attempt. I see engineers working task the entire time simply not sure what really the task is about.

And in a way, the coding agents need even more clarity in what you ask of them to deliver good result.

So even inside of what we consider "development" or "coding", the bottleneck is often: "what am I supposed to do here?" and not so much "I don't know how to do this" or "I have so much to implement".

This is obvious as well, once you throw more engineers, and you can't break up the work, because you have no clue what so many people could even all do. Knowing what all the needed tasks even are is hard and a big bottleneck.

Im not a scientist, just a freelancer (kind of) and its similar for me. I know probably only 2 langauges fluently enough that i could write in them without constantly checking for syntax/docs, but over my whole programming journey i got to know multiple languages with different syntaxes, coding styles and patterns, so i can easily read code written in multiple languages and know whether given code will do what i want (and even if i wouldn't, LLM can explain the code for me and in the worst case send me to the documentation to validate it by myself).

Asking LLM for a code and then read/review it is a huge speed up for me in a lot of cases comparing to when i would need to write the same thing by myself (but i agree it may not work well in a big/complex systems... yet).

The last YC batch was like ~170 companies, correct? Each year, there are like 150 million startups. So let's not take YC stable for the whole startup ecosystem.

And I'm with you with a critical view on their all-in move toward AI. It's just what all the VCs do, and it's hard to say who's parroting who in this setup (I think that others are parroting YC, but feel free to challenge me on that).

Having said all that, I wouldn't be surprised if a couple of companies from this year's cohort made it big. If you look at YC's biggest successes year by year, you will often (but not always) find a household name.

Was there anyone who predicted these would be the greatest hits? Of course not! That's the whole point of having an investment portfolio. You can be wrong a lot of times if you secure an early investment in a unicorn every other year or so.

Also, "one recent example" of poor investment decision doesn't invalidate 2 decades of rather successful investment portfolios (as a whole, not individually).

In no way is it a YC defense. I'm very critical of the whole startup funding ecosystem, and they are a prominent player. Yet, if they were consistently stupid with their decisions, they wouldn't exist, let alone be the most desired accelerator out there.

Also, if it's that simple to copy what they do and what the companies in their portfolio do, why wouldn't Google et al. take their almost infinite funds and get the competing offers for non-BS ideas up and running in no time?

I bet that if you had an idea that could pay off thousandfold, you'd get enough eager ears to hear you out in any big tech. And still, it's the makeshift mass of startups that come through with new products.

One has to wonder why things like Shopify, Stripe, Zapier, or Figma did not come from the big tech. Each would have an ideal match. Even if you look at the AI landscape, how come Lovable made such a career? After all, they repackage the AI capabilities rented elsewhere. Somehow, with all the ingenuity of building ChatGPT, OpenAI and the rest didn't get it.