AI, Ashby Engineering, and the future

I'm sure the engineering teams of every company in the world is just "good enough engineers" and not, you know, regular devs who ship bugs at the same rate that has been now. And I'm sure your personal anecdote of "I saw a bug" shows that there's more bugs being shipped now.

“What happens to the SaaS markets when the cost of code approaches zero?” … “Few people truly grasp how hard bringing a software product to market is.”

Are these related? The difficulty of bringing a software product to market has never been that it takes time to produce code. We’ve had the concept of MVPs for decades and pre-AI companies have raised hundreds of millions off of no code prototypes.

YC has always preached that you launch. Launch today. Launch as soon as is humanly possible. And learn. And iterate. You get something into the market as soon as possible. Spending years building the perfect software has never been the strategy pursued by technology startups, and not because of the time it takes, but because you need users to know what to build.

I think we could even go as far as to counter your argument. We know that constraints are powerful. Constraints force us to focus. Imagine you decide to build an ATS. You spend a bunch of money on Claude Code to generate hundreds of features, every little idea you can think of, you include it. You launch with the most complete ATS on the market. Ashby can’t hold a candle to the depth of your software. Do you have a better chance of success than if you had launched with a much smaller surface area, experimented, found the right area of focus, and iterated according to user behavior?

I encounter a lot of vibe coded software products that people are launching and I am not precious about code, a good product is a good product whether it was hand crafted over a decade by a thousand well paid programmers or generated in an afternoon by Claude Code from a laypersons prompt. I can name one single vibe coded product I pay for that is genuinely good software. All that the AI age has done is show that most of us absolutely suck at building products, and that even with free code, what we produce is garbage.

“How could the market afford to build and sustain each offering?”

I think you’re conflating build and sustain here. Nothing fundamental about business has changed. Sustaining a business isn’t about being able to generate code. Even in a world where code is free, how could the market sustain 10,000 Ashbys? Where are the customers coming from?

As a concrete example: how many customers does Jira have despite Linear being better software in every single way? Would generating 1,000 more Linears change Jira’s market position? Or Microsoft Teams, Teams is awful, there are so many better options. Will generating 1,000 more better options change Microsoft Teams’s position?

The P&L of every software company has an R&D expense (R) in a total cost (T). We can debate what R is, and R might be approaching 0, but it is not 0.

This does not mean that R is on the only cost (T-R grows over the life of the company). It does not mean that, even if R were 0, you could launch a product. But R is a real cost.

To me, if "you are responsible for what you write" is to mean anything in an org, it needs to come with teeth. If you are demonstrably _not_ responsible for what you write, that needs to be recognized and treated as underperformance. I've seen a couple orgs who had some flavor of "you are responsible for what you write" guidance, and they mostly fail to follow through on it. People who ignore that guidance and ship a lot of low quality stuff (code, design docs, PRs) survive perf cycles and tend to get shout outs from management for moving quickly. People who take it to heart will tend to look slower by comparison (their work may be better, but often not in ways that are legible or compelling to management), and may be less favorably viewed when it comes to raises, promos, and so on.

I have no reason to doubt the sincerity of the authors of that post (and enjoyed reading it), I just hope they have a good sense of how they're recognizing responsible and irresponsible use and taking that into account in a perf process.