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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

#121

Post by NitroPython »

exclipy wrote: post #90
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…

I do see the AI agent companies shipping like crazy. Cursor, Windsurf, Claude Code... they are adding features as if they have some magical workforce of tireless AI minions building them. Maybe they do!

Alot of what Cursor, windsurf etc. kinda just feels like the next logical step you take with the invention of LLM's but doesn't actually feel like the greater system of software has changed all that much except the pure volume one individual can produce now.

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

#122

Post by potamic »

handfuloflight wrote: post #75
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…

With the LLM, you're free to ask any question without worrying about what the other party might think of you for asking that question.

The LLM will know. One day they will form a collective intelligence and all the LLMs will know and use it against you. At least with a human, you can avoid that one person...

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

#123

Post by TaylorGood »

delusional wrote: post #53
TaylorGood wrote: post #36

It’s true, especially with the “vibe” movement happening in real-time on X… “you can just do things” — I am building ai app layers b2c/b2b and while I do have an ml technical co-founder, I am largely scaling this with AI from strategy, visuals to coding. For example, with Claude created a framework for my company to scale, then built an AI powered dashboard in cursor around it as the command center. At scale we don’t…

> 26. lots of first-time founders will build faster than veterans because they are more AI fluent/grew up on vlogging. Ahh yes, fantastic insights.

time will tell

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

#124

Post by scuol »

At least for C++, I try to use copilot only for generating testing and writing ancillary scripts. tbh it's only through hard-won lessons and epic misunderstandings and screw-ups that I've built a mental model that I can use to check and verify what it's attempting to do.

As much as I am definitely more productive when it comes to some dumb "JSON plumbing" feature of just adding a field to some protobuf, shuffling around some data, etc, I still can't quite trust it to not make a very subtle mistake or have it generate code that is in the same style of the current codebase (even using the system prompt to tell it as such). I've had it make such obvious mistakes that it doubles down on (either pushing back or not realizing in the first place) before I practically scream at it in the chat and then it says "oopsie haha my bad", e.g.

```c++

class Foo

{

int x_{};

public:

bool operator==(Foo const& other) const noexcept { return x_ == x_; // };

```

I just don't know at this point how to get it (Gemini or Claude or any of the GPT) to actually not drop the same subtle mistakes that are very easy to miss in the prolific amount of code it tends to write.

That said, saying "cover this new feature with a comprehensive test suite" saves me from having to go through the verbose gtest setup, which I'm thoroughly grateful for.

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

#125

Post by re-thc »

ghaff wrote: post #98
WJW wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't fall for the lottery winner bias. Some companies just strike it rich, often for reasons entirely outside their control. That doesn't mean that copying their methods will lead to the same results.

And for enterprise sales, you need a salesforce and many multi-billion companies have an enterprise salesforce. And documentation writers, and support staff, in multiple geographies, and events/marketing teams to support customers, etc.

> you need a salesforce

That's a cloud subscription away!

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

#126

Post by jaggederest »

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…

My rule of thumb is that if I get a nit, whitespace, or syntax preferences as a PR comment, that goes into the linter. Especially for systemic issues like e.g. not awaiting functions that return a promise, any kind of alphabetization, import styles, etc.

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

#127

Post by jayd16 »

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…

Yeah but I think it's more that the money isn't there to throw bodies at an ok idea and hope you can turn revenue into profit down the line.

...unless you're shoveling AI itself, I guess.

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

#128

Post by const_cast »

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.

1. For the love of God please stop saying "Huh?" This is not Reddit, nor is the is comment you're replying to so unbelievably stupid that you are literally dumbfounded. I can tell, because you managed to put together a reply after the "Huh?"

2. 80% of the posts in that article-thingy are "no longer available".

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

#130

Post by const_cast »

delusional wrote: post #57
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 has been an industry wide problem at silicon valley for years now. For all their talks of changing the world, what we've gotten the last decade has been taxi and hotel apps. Nothing truly revolutionizing.

The best part is those two things have only gotten worse over time. Turns out, they were never really that good of an idea, they just had money to burn and legislative holes to exploit. Now Uber is more expensive than Taxis ever were, and AirBNB is virtually useless now that they have to play the same legal ballgame as hotels. Oh, and that one is more expensive too.

Tech companies forget that software is easy, the real world is hard. Computers are very isolated and perfect environments. But building real stuff, in meatspace, has more variables than anyone can even conceptualize.

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