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AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era

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Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era

#3
When I worked at a startup that tried to maximize revenue per employee, it was an absolute disaster for the customer. There was zero investment in quality - no dedicated QA and everyone was way too busy to worry about quality until something became a crisis. Code reviews were actively discouraged because it took people off of their assigned work to review other people's work. Automated testing and tooling were minimal. If you go to the company's subreddit, you'll see daily posts of major problems and people threatening class-action lawsuits. There were major privacy and security issues that were just ignored.

Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era

#6
AI helps you cook code faster, but you still need to have a good understanding of the code. Just because the writing part is done quicker doesn't mean a developer can now shoulder more responsibility. This will only lead to burn out, because the human mind can only handle so much responsibility.

Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era

#7
It seems like a more and more recurring shareholder wet dream that companies could one day just be AI employees for digital things + robotic employees for physical things + maybe a human CEO "orchestrating" everything. No more icky employees siphoning off what should rightfully be profit for the owners. It's like this is some kind of moral imperative that business is always kind of low-key working towards. Are you rich and want to own something like a soup company? Just lease a fully-automated factory and a bunch of AI workers, and you're instantly shipping and making money! Is this capitalism's final end state?

Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era

#8
I'm working on a bunch of different projects trying out new stuff all the time for the past six months.

Every time I do something I add another layer of AI automation/enhancement to my personal dev setup with the goal of trying to see how much I can extend my own ability to produce while delivering high quality projects.

I definitely wouldn't say I'm 10x of what I could do before across the board but a solid 2-3x average.

In some respects like testing, it's perhaps 10x because having proper test coverage is essential to being able to let agentic AI run by itself in a git worktree without fearing that it will fuck everything up.

I do dream of a scenario where I could have a company that's equivalent to 100 or 1000 people with just a small team of close friends and trusted coworkers that are all using this kind of tooling.

I think the feeling of small companies is just better and more intimate and suits me more than expanding and growing by hiring.

Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era

#9
I think this is the beginning of the end of early stage venture capital in b2b saas. Growth capital will still be there, but increasingly there will be no reason to raise. It will empower individuals with actual skill sets, rather than those with fancy schools on their resume

Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era

#10

When I worked at a startup that tried to maximize revenue per employee, it was an absolute disaster for the customer. There was zero investment in quality - no dedicated QA and everyone was way too busy to worry about quality until something became a crisis. Code reviews were actively discouraged because it took people off of their assigned work to review other people's work. Automated testing and tooling were minima…

Theres two types of software, the ones no one uses, and the ones people complain about
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