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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

#11

Post by mechagodzilla »

ryandrake wrote: post #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 ri…

If anyone can pay-as-you-go use a fully automated factory, and the factories are interchangeable, it seems like the value of capital is nearly zero in your envisioned future. Anyone with an idea for soup can start producing it with world class efficiency, prices for consumers should be low and variety should be sky-high.

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

#12

Post by nemothekid »

I'm not entirely convinced this trend is because AI is letting people "manage fleets of agents".

I do think the trend of the tiny team is growing though and I think the real driver were the laysoffs and downsizings of 2023. People were skeptical if Twitter would survive Elon's massive staff cuts and technically the site has survived.

I think the era of the 2016-2020 empire building is coming to an end. Valuing a manager on their number of reports is now out of fashion and theres now no longer any reason to inflate team sizes.

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

#13

Post by rahimnathwani »

ryandrake wrote: post #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 ri…

If I'm buying soup, I'd prefer the manufacturer, the retailer, and any other part of the supply chain to be as efficient as possible, so they can compete in the market to offer me soup of a given quality at the lowest possible cost.

An individual consumer doesn't derive any benefit from companies missing out on automation opportunities.

Would you prefer to buy screws that are individually made on a lathe?

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

#14

Post by golergka »

apical_dendrite wrote: post #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 minima…

Really depends on the type of business you're in. In the startup I work in, I worked almost entirely on quality of service for the last year, rarely ever on the new features — because users want to pay for reliability. If there's no investment in quality, then either the business is making a stupid decision and will pay for it, or users don't really care about it as much as you think.

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

#16

Post by charliebwrites »

WXLCKNO wrote: post #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 ave…

> 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

Can you give some examples? What’s worked well?

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

#17

Post by mikeocool »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #13
ryandrake wrote: post #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 ri…

If I'm buying soup, I'd prefer the manufacturer, the retailer, and any other part of the supply chain to be as efficient as possible, so they can compete in the market to offer me soup of a given quality at the lowest possible cost. An individual consumer doesn't derive any benefit from companies missing out on automation opportunities. Would you prefer to buy screws that are individually made on a lathe?

Personally, the best soups I’ve ever had were not made in kitchens that were optimized for efficiency or automation, they were optimized for quality.

They weren’t cheap soups, but they sure were good.

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

#18

Post by satvikpendem »

I read a few books the other day, The Million-dollar, One-person Business and Company of One. They both discuss how with the advances of code (to build a product with), the infrastructure to host them (with AWS so that you don't need to build data centers), and the network of people to sell to (the Internet in general, and more specifically social media, both organic and ads-based), the likelihood of running a large multi-million-dollar company all by yourself greatly increases in a way it has never done in the history of humanity before.

They were written before the advent of ChatGPT and LLMs in general, especially coding related ones, so the ceiling must be even greater now, and this is doubly true for technical founders, for LLMs aren't perfect and if your vibed code eventually breaks, you'll need to know how to fix it. But yes, in the future with agents doing work on your behalf, maybe your own work becomes less and less too.

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

#19

Post by hackable_sand »

ldjkfkdsjnv wrote: post #10
apical_dendrite wrote: post #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 minima…

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

Everyone should just write their own software then.

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

#20

Post by simonw »

nemothekid wrote: post #12

I'm not entirely convinced this trend is because AI is letting people "manage fleets of agents". I do think the trend of the tiny team is growing though and I think the real driver were the laysoffs and downsizings of 2023. People were skeptical if Twitter would survive Elon's massive staff cuts and technically the site has survived. I think the era of the 2016-2020 empire building is coming to an end. Valuing a mana…

I think the productivity improvement you can get just from having a decent LLM available to answer technical questions is significant enough already even without the whole Agent-based tool-in-a-loop thing.

This morning I used Claude 4 Sonnet to figure out how to build, package and ship a Docker container to GitHub Container Registry in 25 minutes start to finish. Without Claude's help I would expect that to take me a couple of hours at least... and there's a decent chance I would have got stuck on some minor point and given up in frustration.

Transcript: https://claude.ai/share/5f0e6547-a3e9-4252-98d0-56f3141c3694 - write-up: https://til.simonwillison.net/github/container-registry

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