Why not both? When the chat interface fails, you still need a UI to fix things.
If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true
121–130 of 166 posts
Re: If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true
#122So 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…
I agree, and a willingness to experience failure as soon as possible has always been a competitive advantage.
If anything LLM chatbots & synthetic users will make the majority of founders evermore comfortable not testing reality.
Re: If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true
#123"You better be doing something in AI" applies to Startups - businesses that are expected to spend every penny as quickly as possible, to meet the metrics needed to raise the next (bigger) round of funding. It is also not the same as, "If you want to be a profitable company...". For that you need to somehow make more money than you are spending.
> For that you need to somehow make more money than you are spending. I've had this idea of 'business as reducing entropy' floating around in my head for awhile. It's a neat way to think about the value a business offers to buyers; a washing machine manufacturer is selling reduced time to reduced entropy (clean cloths), spreadsheet software is selling reduced time to understanding (information from tabulated data), a…
I think this is application dependent. LLM's are quite good for brainstorming, even if they are not arguably creative, at least they draw from a lot of information that is already out there, which saves me time in researching and learning.
Re: If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true
#124Earlier 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.
This comment is getting punished for the incorrect timeline (I would know, I've been harping on about AI getting good at coding for ~2 years now!) but I do think it is directionally correct. Just over 3 years ago, (publicly available) AI could not write code at all. Today it can write whole modules and project scaffoldings and even entire apps, not to mention all the other stuff agents can do today. Considering I did…
I agree it's directionally correct, but only in the ways that don't matter to this discussion. If 2026->2029 AI is as much of an improvement as 2023->2026 AI, is anything we learn about how to leverage it in 2026 going to stay relevant?
Re: If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true
#125The 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…
Yeah… also, it’s just weird. Interfaces are important, they contain information and affordances, everything should not become a chatbot.
Interfaces will definitely evolve. Visual graphs and representations are useful but speaking to an agent will become mainstream as its faster than typing. Also the ability for agents to code on the fly will open up different interfaces. For instance you could say "show me the impact that our marketing campaign x over this time period" and out comes graphs that were coded. Drawing might even make a comeback for instance when designing a website you just cross out things you don't want, draw boxes of where you want things, talk at the same time saying what you want in that box. Then some people are using virtual relativity. Not everything will become a chatbot but its definitely going to evolve with chatting being an integral part of the user interface.
Re: If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true
#126The 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?
Have you ever sweat bullets at 3 a.m.? While Claude spins in circles unable to fix production without breaking five other things?
You will!
Re: If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true
#127"a pricing model based on seats, a product roadmap built around features rather than outcomes [is outdated]" I disagree with this. On pricing, I get that agents and tokens can scale in a way that's unrelated to # of users. But for much SaaS software, AI remains helpful to a human and the human remains the receiver of value. Seat-based pricing is easy to understand and you can always layer in token/agent costs thresho…
The argument against seat pricing is that companies will employ fewer people in general. So a 45 person company paying for 10 seats will become a 7 person company paying for one seat.
Not sure I agree with this train of thought, but a SaaS CEO made this exact argument to me last week.
Re: If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true
#128I think this is a lot of fluff supported by a weak anecdote.
Chris' company's assumptions are no longer true, but that doesn't apply to everyone's startup. This is mostly a Chris problem.
No, not every product can just be a chat window like in the silly little screenshot.
If the author actually wrote software they'd realize that, no, AI isn't speeding up development by any more than a modest amount. It's great that we have it and it's removing tedium but it has replaced zero engineers at my company or at any other company of anyone else I know.
And no, your company laying off some people isn't because of AI, your startup idea not getting funding is not because of AI, it's because we've been in a regular old recession which is now a developing oil crisis. Interest rates aren't 0% so nobody wants to lend money to infinite startups.
Re: If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true
#129Interestingly, this was always true, it's just made more obvious when it takes less time to bring a product to a potential customer.
Launching a product was never the finish line; it was always the start line. But technical founders could trick themselves into thinking that building a product was building a business.
The same "Lean Startup" rules apply. Build something and get it in front of real people who will pay you for the thing. If they won't, back to the drawing board.
The only real "shift" I've seen is that most startups don't actually need VC at all. That's a great thing.
Re: If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true
#130the best/worst part of this is that it is obviously not written by steve blank. it does not look, read, or track like a steve blank blog piece
he obviously generated large parts of this with claude or chatgpt or whatever.
i don't know what that means for the rest of us, but boy it's a big ole spike of signal