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Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously

andonlabs.com

621–630 of 648 posts

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

#621
post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How are people getting this "waste of time not to use AI" and "generates 99% of my code" level of code quality? They don't know what n+1 problem is and they don't know about long-term maintainability.

tbf many human devs I've worked with don't think about n+1 and similar issues and need constant reminders. overall software quality seems largely unchanged

>tbf many human devs I've worked with don't...

OTOH, if someone insists on writing bad code—even after being advised otherwise—then they should expect to be out of a job.

Doesn't seem like "terminated junior developer" is the level of quality we should be accepting or promoting for AI.

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

#622
post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s the story of how open AI and Anthropic were founded: “AI is probably going to destroy humanity, so we must be the ones to develop it because we’ll do it safely”. Edit: Which makes their “someone hold us back!” calls even more ironic.

I think it's a legal issue. If you don't develop killer AI then no one will legislate against it and someone else will create it and do evil. If you create killer AI you can try to instigate legislation, but the legislators may not agree to help. Necessity is the mother of invention, or you know, all of our laws and regulations.

On the bright side, once you have created killer AI you probably have a path to replacing the legislators.

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

#623

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…

> feasible in 2-3 years from now

> long ways away

I'm constantly amazed by what people think is "long-term" on HN.

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

#624
post #518

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.

I agree that it's a waste of time, but I started to realize that doing it a) puts be ahead of those people who don't, yes b) but also diminishes my technical skills if I don't actively try to engage about what I'm "vibecoding" and proactively trying to understand it.

for your point a: writing code by hand puts you ahead of the people who don't write code by hand, eg, the people using LLMs to generate code? that doesn't make much sense assuming both of those personas are senior SWEs.

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

#625

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.

Not the best metaphor, artisan cheese is something highly sought after. Go to France, there's a lot better cheese than Kraft singles.

I don't need to go that far, living in Switzerland. I don't know why you'd assume I'm in the US, or somehow that I regard Kraft as great cheese.

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

#626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the best metaphor, artisan cheese is something highly sought after. Go to France, there's a lot better cheese than Kraft singles.

I don't need to go that far, living in Switzerland. I don't know why you'd assume I'm in the US, or somehow that I regard Kraft as great cheese.

It's called a joke, but surely you recognise that there's an enormous market for artisanal cheese?

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

#627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I own a bookstore and about 90% of back office work is automated by software and AI. Probably most fulfilling project I've worked on in the past few years after taking a long break from tech.

interesting....i didn't know people still bought books from bookstore when they compete with Amazon, who are your demographics? I really do love the bookstores but haven't been in one in ages

Do you really live in a place that does not have independent bookstores? The market is a little more niche, but they still exist and can do well.

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

#628
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention CONNECTIONS, of which LLMs will start with 0 and never acquire more.

Not sure why the downvotes… my company solely survives on the connections and trust made over time . Real human connections, face to face. This in turn established a reputation .

But for a lot of companies, all the connections in the world won't mean shit if someone else can offer a lower cost with a better lead time.

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

#629

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…

[flagged]

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

#630

There was surprisingly little information on how they actually do this, but we run our business with a large number of, what we call "AI employees" in addition to regular employees, and they act in interesting ways. We've been building out orchestration tools to handle this, and we'll probably do a write-up or blog post on it soon. May even open source some of it. The preview is that the problem with most agents (and…

What worries me most are questions like this: these autonomous AI employees or automations - it doesn't change the essence - consume a lot of LLM tokens. Please tell me, how do you pay for this? Do you use, for example, the Anthropic or OpenAI API directly, or do you connect, for example, a Codex subscription?

I've been spending all my time recently thinking about LLM costs. From that, I am currently of the mind that the most interesting question is if they can get it to work in the first place. After that, like with "performance" in the past, I believe there are ways to optimize things. We see the code harnesses doing this out of necessity, for example.

Some of the tools we use: https://www.induction.ai/docs/context-management

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