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The Sideprocalypse

johan.hal.se

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Re: The Sideprocalypse

#121

Post by manmal »

arkensaw wrote: post #21
chasd00 wrote: post #8

I wish i could take back the view i gave to this article, it says nothing. Is there such a thing as an inverse hype machine? Where people take the opposite side of a hyped product and then hype that view just as much but for the same purpose? His footer even admits he's basically just trolling for views so he can reach the status of "thought leader". btw, someone else having the same idea you have for a saas company…

Exactly. If someone pitched you a book about a young kid who goes to a school of magic to learn how to use his powers, makes friends and enemies and ultimately battles evil, you might shoot down their dreams because "some cocaine-addled sales critter" already had that idea, and she's called J K Rowling and she's worth billions and shes so successful she can't even be cancelled because she makes so much money. And yet…

Thank you, it was time for my annual check on the status of Doors of Stone. Whelp. I wonder why LLMs don’t help such cases of writer’s block.

Re: The Sideprocalypse

#122

Post by anonzzzies »

seyz wrote: post #81

Side projects don't die from lack of time. They die from success anxiety. Shipping means facing judgment. An eternal WIP stays safe in the "potential" zone where it can't disappoint anyone including yourself

Yep, that feels likely. When tech people don't ship, they overarchitect. Add all the stuff 'the big guys' have to Be Ready for the big time when you launch. And then never launch after spending 1000s on infrastructure, tools etc. I have done it, I see many people do it around me.

Re: The Sideprocalypse

#123

Post by anonzzzies »

simpaticoder wrote: post #10

>Yours actually works and is higher quality, because you know about things like TTFP and INP and "not putting your Supabase god-token in the client"? Oh, you sweet summer child: I take no pleasure in this but I need to tell you that these things don't matter anymore. Quality is not a metric anyone cares about in 2026. Quality will matter the most in 2026. Specifically because the barrier-to-entry for making software…

It already happened mostly outside the AI slop; only if you have marketing money you will succeed and your clients usually cannot distinguish bad from good; if you have VC money and 1B$ valuation you must be doing something right no?

I walk into products being garbage and basically broken (upgrade bottom doesn't work, email always broken, support form goes to dev null etc) and most products I try are b2b and many are enterprise SaaS.

Only yesterday, I am in the EU, I wanted to try out some enterprise software of a company with VC money valuated at billions, so I signed up for a demo which needed me to validate my email. But that email didn't arrive. I tried with 4 different addresses (different providers including google and ms): nothing. So I forgot about it and went on with my day; hours later, 1 hour after the west coast US woke up, I got all 4 emails with expired links. So I guess while sleeping, their system was broken. No worries, things happen, but they happen all the time and it doesn't matter how much money they have. They also often just refuse to fix things because why would they.

I threw out Canva because they refuse to fix fundamental issues and keep blaming the customers or play dumb 'oh we never saw this happen!' while you can just do a search and find heaps of people having the same issues. etc. Quality does not matter, at all. Deep marketing pockets do.

Re: The Sideprocalypse

#124

Post by habitable5 »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #67
habitable5 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The game has change. The ‘how’ we build it is easy. The ‘what’ we build is and always has been the hardest part of any SaaS or business. This is what the promptfondlers don't want to admit: the how has been easy for a long time. This last, I dunno, 35 years or so, Visual Basic, Delphi, whatnot, producing code has been very easy. You don't need a fundamentally fascist probabilistic nightmare to do it. The hard probl…

> This last, I dunno, 35 years or so, Visual Basic, Delphi, whatnot, producing code has been very easy I’m not so sure about that. It’s very easy to take your own knowledge for granted. Most people can’t do what we do. Most of my customers couldn’t even express what they wanted.

> Most of my customers couldn’t even express what they wanted.

And AI doesn't help with that. At all. This is the part where I said figuring out what to build is hard.

Re: The Sideprocalypse

#125

Post by d0100 »

ramon156 wrote: post #38
ramon156 wrote: post #36

Has OP been at a company where sales people do this? I have, and I can tell you they have not gotten far. There was one PM at my ex-job that showed a dashboard for... well... i honestly didnt understand. I think it was some uptime checks. It broke during his presentation. There's a company I hired at that "built an ERP in 5 days and is shipping the product in June". Same thing happened, it broke when presenting. Basi…

I wonder what the game dev side has been like with agentic coding. Starting a project from scratch is usually a boring task, so I wonder if - making a markdown file with all specs, details and plans - asking claude to search online and suggest some approaches is a better alternative to doing the research yourself.

I haven't had much success using LLM's in Unity as there is a lot of work that goes into the editor and cannot be done via code, especially if you are using several different assets

Re: The Sideprocalypse

#126

Post by micimize »

Vapid and wrong on every point. Many good ideas come from steeping in a novel soup of ideas for a long time, you don't need that many people to care about quality to make it a lucrative differentiator, and as I've seen many point out on X dot com the everything app: where's all the the shipped results of these slop torrent?

The models are increasingly capable in impressive ways. Maybe the next gen will enable the "sales critter" to slop out commercially viable software with no tech know-how. If not, I'm sure we'll assume the next can, and if not that, the next.

But feigning confidence about the shape and nature of this unfurling sea-change is absurd when the high-profile examples we have are like, what, moltbook? And denigrate _all_ potential ingenuity and insight unilaterally into the bargain? What a careless way of looking at the world

Re: The Sideprocalypse

#127

Post by jujube3 »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #88
wasmainiac wrote: post #63

> Quality is not a metric anyone cares about in 2026. When you write operational critical code, it matters. No one can blame “the AI made me do it” when things go down and hundreds of thousands of people are without service. When your code can hurt people, it matters. You can’t burn someone’s eye with a laser then point to some AI agent when lawsuits start flying in. When millions of dollars in production data is los…

I just sat on an enterprise onboarding call where their success engineer did in fact blame the AI and the client said "OK"

More like a failure engineer, am I right?

Re: The Sideprocalypse

#128

Post by abirch »

jadar wrote: post #120
chasd00 wrote: post #8

I wish i could take back the view i gave to this article, it says nothing. Is there such a thing as an inverse hype machine? Where people take the opposite side of a hyped product and then hype that view just as much but for the same purpose? His footer even admits he's basically just trolling for views so he can reach the status of "thought leader". btw, someone else having the same idea you have for a saas company…

I was struck that it was full of assertions and backed up by nothing. I suppose his clawdbot could have written it.

Were we the crows?

Re: The Sideprocalypse

#129

Post by jakubtomanik »

whynotmaybe wrote: post #93
wasmainiac wrote: post #63

> Quality is not a metric anyone cares about in 2026. When you write operational critical code, it matters. No one can blame “the AI made me do it” when things go down and hundreds of thousands of people are without service. When your code can hurt people, it matters. You can’t burn someone’s eye with a laser then point to some AI agent when lawsuits start flying in. When millions of dollars in production data is los…

I'm sure "bad quality" will soon be classified in the "cost of doing business" section like fines for not respecting laws. That's why AI is hurting us so much right now. We were always trying to have quality in our project, whether it was for readability or for code evolution. No, Steve, you don't name your 42 variables with only two letter and no you don't use Norse mythology for naming servers in your infrastructur…

Bad quality is already a cost of doing business and has been for years. Does AI write perfect code? No, but guess what. It writes better code than any of my coworkers. And my boss not only never was complaining about them but also tries to hire more of them all the time.

Re: The Sideprocalypse

#130

Post by ileonichwiesz »

mbgerring wrote: post #74
ileonichwiesz wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like the tide of fast fashion caused people to seek out local-sewn clothes made from high-quality materials, right? Right? Quality isn’t a differentiator if the market is saturated with indistinguishable garbage. Everything is made in sweatshops out of the cheapest plastic available, and I don’t see why software isn’t next in line.

Yeah it actually did do this for me. I will not purchase new clothing at all unless I have some understanding of the supply chain and where it was made, with a strong preference for clothes that are at least cut and sewn in the US. I won’t tolerate buying clothes, or really any textile product, if I can’t be relatively certain it will last me at least five years. A flood of cheap, unreliable shit did actually make me…

I’m not denying this has been the case for some people. I myself have switched to pretty much exclusively wearing trousers from my favourite tiny brand that cuts and sews them Looking at my family and friend group’s spending habits, it feels like everything is purchased either from Temu or from one of those super-low-price-super-low-quality stores that have been taking Europe by storm these past couple years (i.e. Action, Tedi, Pepco). It’s kinda maddening.
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