Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 189 posts

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

#101

Post by jprokay13 »

crgwbr wrote: post #47
jprokay13 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you haven’t, adding in strict(er) linting rules is an easy win. Enforcing documentation for public methods is a great one imo. The more you can do to tell the AI what you want via a “code-lint-test” loop, the better the results.

Honestly the same is true for human devs. As frustrating as strict linting can be for newer devs, it’s way less frustrating than having all the same issues pointed out in code review. That’s interesting because I’ve been finding that all sorts of stuff that’s good for AI is actually good for humans too, linting, fast easy to run tests, standardized code layouts, etc. Humans just have more ability to adapt to oddities…

Yeah I find it pretty funny that so much of us (myself included) threw out strict documentation practices because “the code should be self documenting!” Now I want as much of it as I can get.

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

#102

Post by avoutos »

neom wrote: post #59

One area of business that I'm struggling in is how boring it is talking to an LLM, I enjoy standing at a whiteboard thinking through ideas, but more and more I see push for "talk to the llm, ask the llm, the llm will know" - The LLM will know, but I'd rather talk to a human about it. Also in pure business, it takes me too long to unlock nuances that an experienced human just knows, I have to do a lot of "yeah but" wo…

My experience has been similar. I can't escape the feeling that these LLMs are weighted down by their training data. Everything seems to me generically intelligent at best.

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

#103

Post by jprokay13 »

haiku2077 wrote: post #30
charliebwrites wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

- Extremely strict linting and formatting rules for every language you use in a project. Including JSON, YAML, SQL. - Using AI code gen to make your own dev tools to automate tasks. Everything from "I need a make target to automate updating my staging and production config files when I make certain types of changes" or "make an ETL to clean up this dirty database" to "make a codegen tool to automatically generate lib…

Claude recommended I use Tilt for setting up a new project at work. I wasn’t sure if it was worth it…is it pretty easy to set up a debugger? Not only do I have to adopt it, but I have to get a small team to be OK with it.

Our target deploy environment is K8S if that makes a difference. Right now I’m using mise tasks to run everything

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

#104

Post by seabombs »

andy99 wrote: post #80
neom wrote: post #59

One area of business that I'm struggling in is how boring it is talking to an LLM, I enjoy standing at a whiteboard thinking through ideas, but more and more I see push for "talk to the llm, ask the llm, the llm will know" - The LLM will know, but I'd rather talk to a human about it. Also in pure business, it takes me too long to unlock nuances that an experienced human just knows, I have to do a lot of "yeah but" wo…

It's not quite the same but since the dawn of smartphones, I've hated it when you ask a question, as a discussion starter or to get people's views, and some jerk reads off the wikipedia answer as if that's some insight I didn't know was available to me, and basically ruins the discussion. I know talking to an llm is not exactly parallel, but it's a similar idea, it's like talking to the guy with wikipedia instead of…

Some of my colleagues will copy/paste several paragraphs of LLM output into ongoing slack discussions. Totally interrupts the flow of ideas. Shits me to tears.

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

#105

Post by wyre »

baxtr wrote: post #92
neom wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both indeed. I'm older, I do consulting, often to the new school AI CEOs and they keep thinking I'm nuts for saying we should bring in this person to talk to about this thing...I've tried to explain to a few folks now a human would be much better in this loop, but I have no good way to prove it as it's just experience. I've noticed across the board, they also spend A LOT of time getting all the data into LLMs so they…

Ok wow this is actually frightening. I talked to a friend recently who is a plastic surgeon. He told me about a young pretty girl came in recently with super clear ideas what she wanted to fixed. Turns out she uploaded her pictures to an LLM and it gave her recommendations. My friend told her she didn’t need any treatment at this stage but she kept insisting that the LLM had told her this and that. I’m worried that t…

I was talking with Claude last night about making tempura, and it suggested if the oil is too hot I should add ice…

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

#106

Post by haiku2077 »

jprokay13 wrote: post #103
haiku2077 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Extremely strict linting and formatting rules for every language you use in a project. Including JSON, YAML, SQL. - Using AI code gen to make your own dev tools to automate tasks. Everything from "I need a make target to automate updating my staging and production config files when I make certain types of changes" or "make an ETL to clean up this dirty database" to "make a codegen tool to automatically generate lib…

Claude recommended I use Tilt for setting up a new project at work. I wasn’t sure if it was worth it…is it pretty easy to set up a debugger? Not only do I have to adopt it, but I have to get a small team to be OK with it. Our target deploy environment is K8S if that makes a difference. Right now I’m using mise tasks to run everything

If your programming language can do remote debugging you can set it up in Tilt: https://docs.tilt.dev/debuggers_python.html

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

#107

Post by taberiand »

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…

Final end state where it eats itself? Who buys all that soup when the workers have no jobs and no money? How much soup can one human CEO drink? (And why isn't the CEO also replaced by the AI?)

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

#108

Post by relativ575 »

TZubiri wrote: post #46
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…

"and technically the site has survived." Only if you squint. If you look at the quality of the site, it has suffered tremendously. The biggest "fuck you" are phishers buying blue checkmarks and putting the face of the CEO and owner to shill scams. But you also have just extremely trash content and clickbaits consistently getting (probably botted) likes and appearing in the top of feeds. You open a political thread an…

Huh? Look at the hottest topic at the moment:

https://www.twz.com/news-features/u-s-has-attacked-irans-nuc...

and see for yourself if Twitter is dead.

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

#109

Post by skybrian »

james_marks wrote: post #83
andy99 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not quite the same but since the dawn of smartphones, I've hated it when you ask a question, as a discussion starter or to get people's views, and some jerk reads off the wikipedia answer as if that's some insight I didn't know was available to me, and basically ruins the discussion. I know talking to an llm is not exactly parallel, but it's a similar idea, it's like talking to the guy with wikipedia instead of…

This has peaked in my circles, thankfully. Now it’s considered a bit of a faux pas to look up an answer during a discussion, for exactly this reason.

Is it a faux pas to say “I have no idea, ask Google?”

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

#110

Post by scarface_74 »

jmward01 wrote: post #81

This may date me, but it feels like 1999 again where a small startup can disrupt an industry. Not just because of what LLMs can do in terms of delivered product, but because a small team can often turn on a problem so much faster than a big one can. I really hope that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of three to five person companies forming in basements right now ready to challenge the big players again.

I was also around in 1999. Most of the small companies had bad ideas that were able to get funding and died by 2001. A few were able to sell out to the bigger fools like Mark Cuban was able to sell broadcast.com to Yahoo for $10K per user.
Post reply on HN