131–140 of 147 posts
> Generative AI tools, .. supercharge the spread of disinformation and fascism, ... and concentrate wealth in fewer hands People caught up in this line of beliefs generally tend to be more neurotic and unhappy about most things.
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> I'm literally building little vibe-engineered tools for local companies. Sounds interesting. Care to elaborate?
I have some of my old contacts from my prior life flying airplanes for a living. I started there because I know the field extremely well. These are my first customers so far. The first thing was just some really simple stuff a bush airline I used to work for needed too, like, their software is through a DB run by this other company, they wanted a status board customers could view. That shouldn't be a huge lift, but t…
Good luck!
> Generative AI tools, .. supercharge the spread of disinformation and fascism, ... and concentrate wealth in fewer hands People caught up in this line of beliefs generally tend to be more neurotic and unhappy about most things.
Can you elaborate? What "line of beliefs" is it?
All kind of interesting point and then suddenly a wild Trump card appears. What does Trump have to do with AI?
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I have some of my old contacts from my prior life flying airplanes for a living. I started there because I know the field extremely well. These are my first customers so far. The first thing was just some really simple stuff a bush airline I used to work for needed too, like, their software is through a DB run by this other company, they wanted a status board customers could view. That shouldn't be a huge lift, but t…
Thank you for the detailed response! My background is Ruby on Rails web development, but I started vibe engineering add-ons to my wife's dental practice software lately. Tools to reconcile payments and open invoices, by reading straight from DBF database files of the ancient Windows desktop app. Windows tray apps cross-compiled in Go from my Mac. Things that would have taken me weeks to learn the boilerplate previous…
I think the key is to not think that you need to build some crazy big SaaS app that you're going to charge $1000 a month for or whatever for a product that isn't specifically tuned to the specific customer. That world is fundamentally dead outside of some niches, so your value comes in building some bespoke tools that EXACTLY solve a problem the customer has, and charging for maintenance on it.
If I can keep this going, I figure I'm physically capable of supporting about 5 to 10 small businesses with this strategy, which by the time the dust settles probably generates something around $3000-$10,000 month depending on how much they want, etc. And a lot of this is going to be recurring revenue to maintain various things and produce new creative solutions to problems, so even though I won't be clacking out the code on my keyboard as much I'll be thinking about things much more than I was at my old job.
You could probably "scale" this model or whatever, but I honestly don't really want that? Everything that gets big like that turns to crap in my experience. So, I'm going to try to be a boutique and do a good job. The other thing I'm doing along the way is reinvesting in myself with education. If you pour your wallet into your head, nobody can ever take it away from you. This sort of "bespoke applications engineering" or whatever is going to grow in scope too.
Right now it's just software, but in a few years someone is going to need to set up the robots at Bob's grass cutting service or configure the drones for Steve's delivery service. That's going to be me.
After that though, the economy probably breaks? And I'm fine with that too - it'd be nice to step off the hamster wheel, but I can't yet.
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most are not, e.g. if your company has any of these you're probably not ai pilled - mandatory ai usage - ai usage tied to kpis or performance reviews - trainings on how to use claude code - restrictions on what tools you can use - layoffs - engineers still typing every line of code by hand
Wait, I don't get it. Some of those are a bit contradicting, and for others I don't see how they _don't_ mean your company is "AI pilled"?
if ai has to be enforced (mandatory usage, kpis, training, restrictions on tools) -> clearly the execs think the employees are not bought in
typing every line by hand -> self explanatory
layoffs -> this one is a bit of a stretch, but from what i've seen the best companies at leveraging ai are not laying people off, instead continuing to hire more to capture the market or capitalize on the demand. could be confounding variables though
Before LLMs, a friend of mine lamented that all the juniors at his gig were really fast at producing buggy code. The greater lament was that his bosses loved it. And as a dev, you're getting paid to do what your bosses want. LLMs can really help you get what your bosses want a lot faster. As an older dev, myself, I'd already been bitching about the state of software quality before all of this. Companies just didn't g…
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So you advise that they do not need to change their approach at all, since they’re already doing something: posting on hacker news.
Ok, so comments like this are helpful then?