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If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true

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Re: If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true

#91

Post by PaulHoule »

karolist wrote: post #20

The post reads like written by someone who read too much about AI rather than tried to build a startup with the help of AI that they advocate so much. I'm still bounded by system design, UX, pricing and feature decisions, if not by the speed of code output, by the review time for sure. Yes, iterating is faster, but we're nowhere near agentic AI loops spitting out working products. Technically it's possible, but then…

I think the AI backlash is strong enough that "AI-Free" might be a powerful marketing tool, whether that is fair or not.

Re: If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true

#92

Post by andai »

So previously the bottleneck was production. I'd wager now the bottleneck is willingness to test your hypotheses. The willingness to experience failure as soon as possible. To test and iterate.

As technology brings the cost of everything else to 0, psychological costs will predominate.

Reality testing is ultimately unavoidable, of course, but I'd guess most people still lean away from that rather than into it. (Our whole culture is set up that way, and most of us get like two decades of Pavlovian conditioning in that direction.)

Edit: Expanded here: https://nekolucifer.substack.com/p/willingness-to-fail-is-no...

Re: If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true

#93

Post by tinkelenberg »

PaulHoule wrote: post #91
karolist wrote: post #20

The post reads like written by someone who read too much about AI rather than tried to build a startup with the help of AI that they advocate so much. I'm still bounded by system design, UX, pricing and feature decisions, if not by the speed of code output, by the review time for sure. Yes, iterating is faster, but we're nowhere near agentic AI loops spitting out working products. Technically it's possible, but then…

I think the AI backlash is strong enough that "AI-Free" might be a powerful marketing tool, whether that is fair or not.

Another option I like: organic.

Re: If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true

#94

Post by wavemode »

> https://i0.wp.com/steveblank.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/...

The author didn't spend more than, maybe, 30 seconds thinking this through? Information I could've gotten in 3 seconds by opening a screen and looking at a line item, I now have to extract by writing a paragraph to an AI agent (and cross my fingers that nothing I said was ambiguous or misunderstood). And that's supposedly an upgrade?

Re: If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true

#95

Post by nateburke »

andai wrote: post #92

So previously the bottleneck was production. I'd wager now the bottleneck is willingness to test your hypotheses. The willingness to experience failure as soon as possible. To test and iterate. As technology brings the cost of everything else to 0, psychological costs will predominate. Reality testing is ultimately unavoidable, of course, but I'd guess most people still lean away from that rather than into it. (Our w…

Add on the compounding effect that "QA" or "test" in someone's job description was viewed as a synonym for "less-highly compensated" over the past few decades, and you have an entire generation of mid career devs with poorly adapted instincts regarding what is valuable in the process of shipping working product.

The bottleneck was never coding...

Re: If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true

#98

Post by detourdog »

alex_c wrote: post #82
jnovek wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you familiar with Steve Blank? What you’re describing really isn’t his MO at all.

I have a lot of respect for Steve Blank, but my heuristic by now is to ignore any breathless posts that state “teams are doing X with AI, if you are not doing the same you’re behind”. The much more useful posts are “my team and I are doing X with AI”. Of course, the challenge there is that the ones who are truly getting a competitive edge through AI are usually going to be too busy building to blog about it.

I really enjoyed reading his articles a while back. He wrote an article about about silicon valley's roots in microchip development. I can't remember the details but I reached out to point out how important Autonetics was to chip development and that was based in Los Angeles. From my perspective what made Silicon Valley significant was it's connection to wall street. I wanted to engage on the topic of Venture Capital might be the real product of silicon Valley.

He could have ignored the email or engaged on the topic I introduced. Instead he sent me a wikilink to Autonetics. I was left with the feeling that he had no real interest in the topic he wrote about. It was really no big deal. He is a busy guy and doesn't need to engage with strangers. I never read anything by him again because I was left with the feeling he is just phoning these posts in.

Re: If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true

#99

Post by dfdsjsdklfjs »

kokanee wrote: post #60
dist-epoch wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are assuming a linear future while we are in an exponential. One year ago models could barely write a working function.

One year before 1969 we had never been to the moon. In the 70s credible scientists and physicists predicted that large martian colonies would exist before the year 2000. If a metric goes from 0 to 2 it doesn't mean it's on a long-lived exponential trajectory.

[flagged]

Re: If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true

#100

Post by marcus_holmes »

ryandrake wrote: post #52
karolist wrote: post #20

The post reads like written by someone who read too much about AI rather than tried to build a startup with the help of AI that they advocate so much. I'm still bounded by system design, UX, pricing and feature decisions, if not by the speed of code output, by the review time for sure. Yes, iterating is faster, but we're nowhere near agentic AI loops spitting out working products. Technically it's possible, but then…

It's gotten to the point where, when I see yet another Thought Leadership article about software development, I search the page for the word "will". If I see unqualified predictions of the future (AI will change this and Agents will do that and developers will need to do thus), I think I can safely ignore the article. Who has the hubris to make such strong and unwavering statements about a future nobody can see?

A local "thought leader" wrote a ridiculous piece about software leadership in a post-LLM world, when clearly they'd never actually used an LLM to build anything, or actually led a team using LLMs. Lots of hand-waving but obviously no real experience.

As gp says, there's a big difference between theory and practice here, and a lot of the things we needed when we weren't using LLMs are still needed when we are, but it takes a bit of actual practice to work this out. It's still not at the stage where an Ideas Guy can make a real working product without someone on the team actually knowing how to develop software.

At least in my experience, so far. But the world is changing fast.

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