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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

#111

Post by bigiain »

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.

I would like to apply to join your circles.

:sigh:

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

#112

Post by booleandilemma »

taberiand wrote: post #107
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?)

The solution to this is to begin exporting your soup to other countries that have people who still work and have money. In the end it still eats itself though, but not before eating everything else.

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

#113

Post by sothatsit »

jordanb wrote: post #25
simonw wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Eh I felt that way about the internet in 2010s. Seemed like virtually any question could be answered by a google query. People were making jokes that a programmer's job mostly consisted of looking things up on stack overflow. But then google started sucking and SO turned into another expertsexchange (which was itself good in the 2000s). So far from what I've experienced AI coding agents automate away the looking thin…

I wonder whether we will avoid some enshittification of AI because people are willing to pay for it. It doesn't all have to run off ads (although I'm sure all the free tiers will contain ads eventually).

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

#114

Post by sothatsit »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #34
geremiiah wrote: post #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.

> but you still need to have a good understanding of the code I've personally found this is where AI helps the most . I'm often building pretty sophisticated models that also need to scale, and nearly all SO/Google-able resources tend to be stuck at the level of "fit/predict" thinking that so many DS people remain limited to. Being able to ask questions about non-trivial models as you build them, really diving into t…

I agree in a lot of ways, but I also feel nervous that AI could lull me into a false sense of security. I think AI could easily convince you that you understand something when really you don't.

Regardless, I do find that o3 is great at auditing my plans or implementations. I will just ask "please audit this code" and it has like a 50% hit rate on giving valuable feedback to improve my work. This feels like it has a meaningful impact on improving the quality of the software that I write, and my understanding of its edge cases.

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

#115

Post by jakevoytko »

relativ575 wrote: post #108
TZubiri wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

I was literally just comparing my Twitter and Bluesky feeds. The only discussions worth reading were on Bluesky.

It's a shame. Twitter used to be the undefeated king of breaking news.

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

#116

Post by bluefirebrand »

handfuloflight wrote: post #89
andrew_lettuce wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is the Hallmark of a great teammate, but then we won't need them anymore

But who has truly stress tested their teammates to see how much level of question bombardment they're willing to take? You really haven't, since they can't just generate tokens at the rate and consistency of an LLM.

It would be absolutely asinine to bombard your teammates like this and it would be a massive sign that you're not cut out for the work if you had to

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

#117

Post by bluefirebrand »

geremiiah wrote: post #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.

> Just because the writing part is done quicker

The writing part was never the bottleneck to begin with...

Figuring out what to write has always been the bottleneck for code

AI doesn't eliminate that. It just changes it to figuring out if the AI wrote the right thing

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

#118

Post by bluefirebrand »

jack_h wrote: post #54
goatlover wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd prefer not to live in a fully automated society where shareholders and CEOs reap all the profits while the rest of us scrape by on just enough UBI to prevent a revolution.

I don't understand this scenario. If everyone is on UBI then most people are essentially near poverty. Where are these CEOs deriving all of their profit from? I personally think a far more likely scenario is that small businesses of one or a few people become vastly more commonplace. They will be able to do a lot more by themselves, including with less expertise in areas they may not have a lot of knowledge in. I don…

> I don't think regular employees today should see LLMs as competition, rather they should see it as a tool they can use to level the playing field against current CEOs.

LLMs aren't some magic silver bullet to elevate people out of poverty. Lack of access to capital is an extreme restriction on what most people can actually accomplish on their own, it doesn't matter if they have the worlds best LLM helping them or not.

It doesn't matter if you use an LLM to build the most brilliant business in the world if you can't afford to buy real world things to do real world business

Also, Historically when regular people decide to level the playing field against the ultra wealthy, they use violence

I don't think anyone should be expecting LLMs to be the great equalizer. The great equalizer has always been violent and probably always will be violence.

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

#119

Post by NitroPython »

spacemadness wrote: post #45

I think we’re going to have to deal with the stories of shareholders wetting themselves over more layoffs more than we’re going to see higher quality software produced. Everyone is claiming huge productivity gains but generally software quality and new products being created seem at best unchanged. Where is all this new amazing software? It’s time to stop all the talk and show something. I don’t care that your SQL qu…

This really resonates with me, I want to see the bigger picture as well.

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

#120

Post by handfuloflight »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #116
handfuloflight wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But who has truly stress tested their teammates to see how much level of question bombardment they're willing to take? You really haven't, since they can't just generate tokens at the rate and consistency of an LLM.

It would be absolutely asinine to bombard your teammates like this and it would be a massive sign that you're not cut out for the work if you had to

I wasn't suggesting we literally bombard teammates.

The whole point is that with LLMs, you can explore ideas as deeply as you want without tiring them out or burning social capital. You're conflating this with poor judgment about what to ask humans and when.

Taking 'bombard' literally is itself pretty asinine when the real point is about using AI to get thoroughly informed before human collaboration.

And if using AI to explore questions deeply is a sign you're 'not cut out for the work,' then you're essentially requiring omniscience, because no one knows everything about every domain, especially as they constantly evolve.

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