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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

#131

Post by chii »

cartoonfoxes wrote: post #63
jay_kyburz wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worry that once I've done all that I won't have time for my actual work. I also have to investigate all these new AI editors, and sign up for the API's and work out which is best, then I have to learn how to prompt properly. I worry that messing with the AI is the equivalent of tweaking my colour schemes and choosing new fonts.

Some of what I learned from a decade of keeping up with the perfusion of JS libraries and frameworks seems relevant to AI: - anything with good enough adoption is good enough (unless I'm an SME to judge directly) - build something with it before considering a switch - they're similar enough that what I learn in one will transfer to others - everything sucks compared with 2-3 years from now; switching between "sucks"…

how do you prevent lock-in when choosing?

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

#132

Post by const_cast »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #61
delusional wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're picturing a utopia at the limit of some idealized world. Try and take a second to return to planet earth. There will not be a "quality" dial that you get to tweak to decide on your perfect quality of soup. There will be graduations, and you will be stuck with whatever the store provides. If you want medium quality soup, but the store only carries 3 brands of soup (because unlike in your utopia somebody actuall…

You describe three potential undesirable outcomes: - consolidation, such that there are only a few different choices of soup - a race to the bottom in quality - poisoning These are all possibilities under our current system, and we have mechanisms (laws and market competition) which limit the extent to which they occur. What is it about extreme automation technology that you think will increase these prevalence of th…

Automation returns more power (abstract) to the owning class, which will make inequality more severe over time, which then results in said owning class having enough power to change legislation and market dynamics to their own desires. So, in turn - more poisoning, less quality, and more consolidation.

A lot of people think wealth inequality isn't a big deal, but I disagree. The more proportion of money a select few have in comparison to everyone else, the higher the likelihood those select few can mold society to their whim. Corruption thrives off of wealth inequality. Without it, it cannot exist.

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

#133

Post by haiku2077 »

chii wrote: post #131
cartoonfoxes wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of what I learned from a decade of keeping up with the perfusion of JS libraries and frameworks seems relevant to AI: - anything with good enough adoption is good enough (unless I'm an SME to judge directly) - build something with it before considering a switch - they're similar enough that what I learn in one will transfer to others - everything sucks compared with 2-3 years from now; switching between "sucks"…

how do you prevent lock-in when choosing?

If you can build, test and run your project entirely from the command line you're never locked in. Every project I've worked on in the past decade has not enforced a choice of editor, and most have been portable to 2-3 OSes.

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

#134

Post by sien »

ujkhsjkdhf234 wrote: post #35
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…

Instagram was 13 employees before they were purchased by Facebook. The secret is most employees in a 1000 person company don't need to be there or cover very niche cases that your company likely wouldn't have.

YouTube had fewer than 70 employees when Google bought them in 2006.

With a good idea and good execution teams can be impressively small.

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

#135

Post by flowerthoughts »

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…

I recently had a related issue where I was explaining an idea I'm working on, and one of my mates were engaging in creative thinking. The other found something he could do: look up a Chinese part to buy. He spent quite a few minutes on his phone, and then exclaimed "The hardware is done!" The problem is what he found was incomplete and wrong.

So he missed out on the thing we should do when being together: talk and brainstorm, and he didn't help with anything meaningful, because he didn't grasp the requirements.

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

#136

Post by Towaway69 »

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.

An internet full of pointless advertising and the invention of adblocks to hide that advertising.

Digital devices that track everything you do, that then generated so much data that the advertising actually got worse. Thereby the data was collected with the promise that the adverts would get more appropriate.

Now comes AI to make sense of the data and the training data (I.e., the internet) is being swamped with AI content so that the training data for AIs is becoming useless.

I wonder what is being invented to remove all the AI content from the training data.

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

#137

Post by _1tem »

satvikpendem wrote: post #18

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…

There are already several million-dollar companies of one. Pieter Levels is one such famous builder on X. CertifyTheWeb.com is another one man millionaire product on HN.

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

#138

Post by Towaway69 »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #117
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

Humans hate to think and make decisions, they like being told what to do.

So having an AI doing the dangerous part of thinking, leaves humans to do what they do best: follow orders.

Even better AI will take on the responsibility when anything fails: just get the AI to fix it, after all AI coded the mistake.

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

#139

Post by satvikpendem »

_1tem wrote: post #137
satvikpendem wrote: post #18

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…

There are already several million-dollar companies of one. Pieter Levels is one such famous builder on X. CertifyTheWeb.com is another one man millionaire product on HN.

Yes, Levels and many others are already covered in those books.
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