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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

#141

Post by lukebechtel »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #13
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…

If I'm buying soup, I'd prefer the manufacturer, the retailer, and any other part of the supply chain to be as efficient as possible, so they can compete in the market to offer me soup of a given quality at the lowest possible cost. An individual consumer doesn't derive any benefit from companies missing out on automation opportunities. Would you prefer to buy screws that are individually made on a lathe?

don't mind me I'm just moloch posting

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

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

#142

Post by Terr_ »

WJW wrote: post #68
ujkhsjkdhf234 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

In comic form: https://xkcd.com/1827/

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

#143

Post by eloisant »

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…

That's not really new, the small teams in the 2000's with web frameworks like Rails were able to do as a team of 5 what needed a 50 people team in the 90's. Or even as a week-end solo project.

What happened it that it because the new norm, and the window were you could charge the work of 50 people for a team of 5 was short. Some teams cut the prices to gain marketshare and we were back to usual revenue per employee. At some point nobody thought of a CRUD app with a web UI as a big project.

It's probably what will happen here (if AI does gives the same productivity boost as langages with memory management and web frameworks): soon your company with a small team of friends will not be seen by anyone as equivalent to 100 or 1000 people, even if you can achieve the same thing of a company that size a few years earlier.

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

#144

Post by chanux »

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…

Great question.

I want this idea to be drawn to an extreme where I can't buy soup or anything for that matter. Sure I will starve and die soon, but I feel the kind of burning the world will go through will be fun to watch. With tears of course.

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

#145

Post by delusional »

TaylorGood wrote: post #123
delusional wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

I guess it will. Maybe the next generation of builders will attribute their success to the formative experience of watching Sargon of Akkad.

I doubt it, but maybe?

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

#146

Post by [deleted] »

haiku2077 wrote: post #133
chii wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#147

Post by Izkata »

tasty_freeze wrote: post #56
jordanb wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> expertsexchange My vote for the unintentionally funniest company name. I wonder if they were aware when the landed on it, or if they were so deep in the process that it was too late to change course when they realized what they had done.

They're still around, long ago they bought the "experts-exchange" domain name and redirected the original, then at some point after that they abandoned the original entirely.

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

#148

Post by edanm »

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.

> 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.

That is massively wrong, and frankly an insulting worldview that a lot of people on HN seem to have.

The secret is that some companies - usually ones focused on a single highly scalable technology product, and that don't need a large sales team for whatever reason - those companies can be small.

The majority of companies are more technically complex, and often a 1,000 person company includes many, many people doing marketing, sales, integrations with clients, etc.

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

#150

Post by yMEyUyNE1 »

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…

Felt like deja vu

“The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment” – Warren G. Bennis.

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