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Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously

andonlabs.com

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Re: Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously

#611

Post by ergl »

Naru41 wrote: post #342

My definition of AGI is a computer that can support itself, just turn it on, and it'll earn enough money to pay the server's electricity bills, hire people to maintain and expand its servers, and even improve its own algorithms. I'd love to see someone try to run one that can meet 100% of the world's demand for remote works.

> I'd love to see someone try to run one that can meet 100% of the world's demand for remote works.

I, too, have infinite contempt for my fellow working class members.

Re: Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously

#612

Post by Chris2048 »

mancerayder wrote: post #589
discreteevent wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are using AI to write code. But HN is the wrong place to try to figure out how much they are using it. This site is full of bots and shills and has become a wasteland since AI. You can tell by the way they make short super confident (even ridiculous) statements in order to try to bully the insecure into buying into the hype. It matches exactly the patterns you used to see with crypto. Even the more subtle comm…

How do you know these are bots and not Redditors? There's an HN sub on Reddit, and one of the hallmarks of Reddit are the 'mic drop' big pivotal one liner comments that get upvoted or cause lots of replies or engagement. But I do feel, to reply to you, that crypto was a lot more critically received on HN than AI is right now. We're too busy debating humanity's end rather than if this crap actually works. For those of…

> one of the hallmarks of Reddit are..

and LLMs are, in turn, trained on reddit content..

Re: Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously

#613

Post by jeremyjh »

zallen wrote: post #423
jeremyjh wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They have no intelligence. These are very very very refined prediction engines. "Very refined prediction engine" is not a bad working definition for intelligence. It is not the only component you need, but it might be the most important over-all capability. If its making lots of errors, its not doing a very good job of predicting the outcome of its actions.

It's a terrible definition of intelligence. Intelligence is far more than just predicting things based on a massive set of similar things. We do do pattern recognition, but I don't need to have seen 10k dogs to be able to recognize a dog. And it's not a difference of degree, either. "Meaning" is something I am able to derive from my experiences, and it is not something an LLM does or will ever be able to do (nor is t…

I didn't say anything about training methods. I said an intelligence can predict things accurately, most particularly if it can predict the outcomes of possible actions it can take then it can do planning. Its especially important that it should be able to predict outcomes in cases that are not exactly the same as things it has seen before, but how it gets to that capability level is not important for understanding what the capability unlocks.

This is one of the most distinctive qualities of human intelligence compared to many animals - is our ability to adapt to new situations and make accurate predictions of the outcomes of our actions. Other animals can also do this but over very narrow time horizons and situations.

AI agents are better at it than any animal, and better at it than humans in some domains.

Re: Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously

#614

Post by j2kun »

idopmstuff wrote: post #227
j2kun wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From their blog [1] "I acquire e-commerce brands that sell on Amazon" Honestly it sounds like the OP is part of the machine that makes Amazon such a trashy marketplace these days. [1]: https://theautomatedoperator.substack.com/p/15-ways-im-using...

Well that's not very nice! And for the record, I only buy brands that sell high-quality products. Marketing and operations I can fix, but if the stuff they sell is no good, there's no point.

How do you inspect the quality of the products you're selling? From your blog it appears you just read through their sales information, and don't ever see or handle the product. And yet we all know Amazon sellers juice their sales metrics and ratings with scammy practices, and now I see selling their brand is part of the incentive.

And more, you are AI-generating listings and images for your acquired brands. You're filling Amazon with slop, and automating the process.

You should seriously reflect on your role in polluting these marketplaces.

Re: Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously

#615

Post by munksbeer »

discreteevent wrote: post #517
hypfer wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now it's weird if an agent isn't writing 99% of your code. It is? Are you sure that this is a representative reading that applies to more than just a tiny bubble?

People are using AI to write code. But HN is the wrong place to try to figure out how much they are using it. This site is full of bots and shills and has become a wasteland since AI. You can tell by the way they make short super confident (even ridiculous) statements in order to try to bully the insecure into buying into the hype. It matches exactly the patterns you used to see with crypto. Even the more subtle comm…

I can't remember when I started reading HN. Possibly as late as around 2017/18. I lost one account I had when I changed company, and this is my latest account. Obviously you can't tell for sure, but I know that I am not a bot and I know that every single developer in my company (only a few hundred) have agents writing almost all of their code. I'm in the fintech industry (trading side). I have a lot of connections from my long career in the industry. Everyone else is using coding agents too.

I don't think I could find a job in my industry if I tried that didn't want me to write code using coding agents.

Obviously I can't prove any of this, so try emailing a recruiter and test it for yourself.

From what I can tell, a lot of newly registered users are equally as vehemently against AI as there are those that are pro. I guess we see things through our own personal filter.

Re: Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously

#616

Post by SyneRyder »

darkwater wrote: post #601
SyneRyder wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the startup, though the SF market store is still running and open. It looks like their AI-run cafe in Sweden is still running for now as well.

well, not THAT well https://andonlabs.com/cafe

Kind of interesting just how much they're getting crushed with token API pricing. Right now the revenue isn't even covering their token costs. But if they were able to run on subscription (probably against ToS) or use Deepseek V4.1 Flash or GLM 5.3 Flash, they'd at least be "profitable" before the costs of paying human salaries & rent comes in.

I'm also surprised that Gemini actually seemed to do the best (though it may have benefited from the initial store opening enthusiasm), and that Claude has not been given any chance to run the cafe yet.

Re: Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously

#617

Post by iforgotmypasswo »

iforgotmypasswo wrote: post #579
nullbio wrote: post #400

Meanwhile, I can't even get Astra to consistently re-use the same font-size across all of my HTML page headings+subheadings. There's just no world where this actually results in a stable, respected business. It will be death by a thousand bad impressions, mistakes and oversights. Yeah, you can automate everything. That doesn't mean it's being done well. That's not to say this might not be something feasible in 2-3 ye…

That’s a user error. Tell it to utilize a UI component library to separate styling from feature implementation and add tests which fail any feature level component outside of the UI component library which directly specify style. As a bonus, you can now easily reskin and maintain dark and light modes. I agree with your main point though. AI isn’t trained to run a company, it’s trained to solve complex puzzles. We’ll…

I’ve gotten down votes on this comment, but this is the kind of work we have PMs doing now. We don’t even have dedicated frontend developers anymore. Continuing down this path is how you lose your job when someone who understands how to use the new tool comes along.

You can either keep filling up your context window with thousands of instructions and hoping the AI will listen, or you can use AI to fix the problem permanently with automation that runs in CI and allows you to correct everything before a PR gets merged.

Unless we’re training these systems on “solve this problem while following hundreds of arbitrary rules”, loading all your wants and needs into the context window is bound to fail. It’s not what the AI was built to do.

Building tests to catch specific issues and transforming code to better architecture are tasks that AI is good at. You can mistakenly expect the tool to operate like a human, or you can understand what the technology was trained to do and build around that instead.

I am doubling down here. This isn’t a real issue if you’re treating AI like any other tool and understanding how and where to apply it.

Or you have no autonomy to mold the code base to AI. If so, that’s unfortunate.

Re: Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously

#618

Post by archagon »

munksbeer wrote: post #615
discreteevent wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are using AI to write code. But HN is the wrong place to try to figure out how much they are using it. This site is full of bots and shills and has become a wasteland since AI. You can tell by the way they make short super confident (even ridiculous) statements in order to try to bully the insecure into buying into the hype. It matches exactly the patterns you used to see with crypto. Even the more subtle comm…

I can't remember when I started reading HN. Possibly as late as around 2017/18. I lost one account I had when I changed company, and this is my latest account. Obviously you can't tell for sure, but I know that I am not a bot and I know that every single developer in my company (only a few hundred) have agents writing almost all of their code. I'm in the fintech industry (trading side). I have a lot of connections fr…

God, that’s depressing. The mass suicide of an entire trade.

Re: Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously

#619

Post by jamilton »

KPGv2 wrote: post #404
jamilton wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For anything visual, they are still effectively blind, right? Still just working off the image embedding, sometimes using scripts to actually inspect individual pixels.

no. I just used Gemini to update a website I'm managing for a charity, and one of those steps involved Gemini, on its own, offering to scan the website for one of our beneficiaries, specifically the header images, to see if there was more information to include in our writeup about the beneficiary. And it did it quite well.

Right, I forgot that they also read and parse text in images well.

Re: Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously

#620

Post by _zoltan_ »

SpikeyCoder wrote: post #535
_zoltan_ wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it is a waste of time right now not to use AI to write code. It's the same category of "artisan code" like "artisan cheese": you can do it if you have a ton of free time as a hobby but other than a hobby? Not worth it.

It’s not a waste of time when usage limits are hit and changes need to be shipped

buy another sub.
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