311–320 of 524 posts
Large companies can navigate the waters with teams of lawyers and accountants.
I don't think it will be possible to run a small business without AI in the near future, as the complexity of the law will increase beyond any comprehension.
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> Shitty will be the new normal. I’ve heard the same from the best devs, and some who thought themselves to be the best, I’ve known long before LLMs were ever a thing. I’m sure others heard the same when JavaScript and Python became near ubiquitous. When PHP emerged. When C supplanted Fortran and COBOL. When these two took over from Assembly. When punch cards went the way of the dodo. There’s always someone for whom…
"With a punchcard at least, I can verify what the input is! Unlike those new 'transistors' that are so unreliable!"
These "people" fundamentally misunderstand how tech illiterate the average person is and don't care about AI outside it appearing in their search results as an occasional convenience. My Mom (in her 50s) heard about ChatGPT for the first time this month and doesn't care about it, nor eager to figure it out.
Small business owners are not going to put their life's work in the hands of AI, they don't even trust the most basic versions of it and they're certainly not going to use "agents", and the ones that do trust it are naively going to overly trust it because the faulty marketing from these companies and very bad things are going to happen.
I'm increasingly convinced that there's a killer app waiting for whoever can come up with a UI that makes claude code or codex accessible to the average user. Onboarding my non-software engineer teammates to it has super-charged them and essentially given them all their own personal developer that can automate tasks for them. Managing codebases, etc. is still a hassle though. 90% of the power of Excel was that it was…
I really thought Airtable would take off because it was even more of a "database that a normal person could actually use".
> PayPal powers settlements, invoicing, disputes, and refunds inside Claude. > Intuit QuickBooks handles payroll planning, the monthly close, and cash-flow, along with tools to help businesses prepare for tax season, and reconciliation work that touches every other system. I can't wait for the horror stories, this is going to be fun. Remember last month when Anthropic was like: no, we're not going to refund you even…
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>Every executive/leader I've shown Claude Cowork to has gone from 'what is AI' to 'vibecoding whole apps' in weeks. [0] I think this is where we have the issue in my tone and approach to my comments. My response was based off of the OP stating that the people who they were introduction were 'executives/leaders' and not 'friends', which has a very different connotation when it comes to information security, liability,…
Stop digging.
But I appreciate you trying to police the expression of my deeply held beliefs, but, like, nope!
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I suspect that the time spent on accounting or the money spent on accountants will influence decisions made by small-small business owners (1-5 staff range), in that some will take these risks. Admin is a huge pain for very small businesses.
Accountants can be expensive, especially if your books are messy, or have poor accounting practices from the start. Systems like quickbooks, hubspot, payment processors all have tiers where yes on paper they make it easy to properly setup good accounting practices, but you’ll spend an additional 500/month+ to get those features. Hiring an accountant to clean up the books and do quarterly book keeping is equally as ex…
I think, without much doubt, that AI will be most positively impactful on small business owners. My experience running a few LTDs is that there is a gap between the accountants and what you need, and running an SME business means you are too busy not to do stupid things and the net effect is lost productivity, less entrepreneurial activity and less growth overall. Dealing with VAT, PAYE, and a million other stupid sm…
These takes are so uninformed. We live in a country completely captured by the multi-million dollar advertising campaigns that are meant to make us behave in whatever way makes the 1500 richest people the most amount of money possible.