'Design for automation.'
If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true
141–150 of 166 posts
Re: If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true
#142So previously the bottleneck was production. I'd wager now the bottleneck is willingness to test your hypotheses. The willingness to experience failure as soon as possible. To test and iterate. As technology brings the cost of everything else to 0, psychological costs will predominate. Reality testing is ultimately unavoidable, of course, but I'd guess most people still lean away from that rather than into it. (Our w…
The ability to endure some degree of suffering seems essential for building high quality products. Getting in front of the customer as often as possible and proving things end to end is very painful. But it provides the most feedback and gets you aligned quickly.
If you want an example of the polar opposite, the TDD idea seems to be a good fit. Unit tests are a perfect little universe that you can always control. All side effects and scary possibilities can be handwaved away under mocks. The psychological power of having control over everything is what draws so many toward the idea. A deterministic guarantee that the little circles will turn green when you press play every time is painless.
Failing tests are the most informative and you can only develop those by meaningful interaction with the customer's requirements. If you aren't constantly fighting a wave of red in your testing suite, it's likely you are too isolated from reality.
Re: If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
Made me wonder if there's a live-streaming equivalent for blogging... some platform that both ensures the reader knows the blogger is a person, and promotes a parasocial relationship. There's live-coding, so it's not totally a crazy idea.
As a way to get my feet wet vibe coding, I made https://seeitwritten.com with that idea. That by capturing how you write with all its fits and starts you can show that a human wrote it. So, sort of recorded live-streaming. But I'm thinking that a sufficiently cute agent could be prompted to write something and re-write something in a convincing manner. I'm not so sure about that, though, since their corpus is complet…
I don't know if this idea is generally useful.
Most of what makes writing a medium worth engaging with is how its presentation is causally insulated from its creation. Well, that is true of other media: film has a whole history of production that you, the viewer, don't witness - being its main difference from theater. But with writing said production cost is trivial, and so is editing: the author doesn't need to commit to a sentence like a director must commit to a shot. This is integral to the identity of the medium, and is what allows writing to be what speech is to cinema: considerably more polished, high-budget, and well-edited conversation with an assumed reader.
When you take that away, or make the writer conscious of how their each edit is being surveilled, you do lose that ability to freely revise your thoughts, degrading it back into a form of lightly edited monologue. Whether it is a good or bad thing is irrelevant, but it does result in a much different kind of writing. All the while, the collected writing history itself offers very low SNR: it does contain certain some divergent possibilities, but so does orders more meaningless mistakes, attention lapses, and runaway sentences - all that writing is defined by omitting.
But assuming most writers use the keyboard just as some use the cursor to follow their gaze, it does at least impart a cognitive fingerprint, useful for light authenticity detection (unless the author is just rewriting a finished thought they plagiarized from memory) but also profiling.
I wrote this, not AI: https://seeitwritten.com/v/ye2p6fgs
Re: If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
I caught that too. What is he getting at? How does the code and infra stack differ at all between a company that is using AI, vs one that is not?
Here's my take on what he was getting at: Build vs. buy is an eternal question in enterprises. I remember many in-house data teams trying to build tools for "digital transformation" and cloud migration about 10 years ago. The challenge was, building those tools was more expensive than those enterprises could budget for (IT as cost center), so a startup like Snowflake would easily outcompete in-house solutions with th…
Thanks, this is a good explanation, though I would not have phrased it the way he did.
Re: If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true
#145[deleted]
Re: If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true
#146The post reads like written by someone who read too much about AI rather than tried to build a startup with the help of AI that they advocate so much. I'm still bounded by system design, UX, pricing and feature decisions, if not by the speed of code output, by the review time for sure. Yes, iterating is faster, but we're nowhere near agentic AI loops spitting out working products. Technically it's possible, but then…
Yeah… also, it’s just weird. Interfaces are important, they contain information and affordances, everything should not become a chatbot.
Yeah, it's crazy to think an opaque chatbot will be preferable to a well designed UI for most users. People don't like badly designed UIs, but I'm pretty sure most people under 40 prefer a well designed UI to a customer service agent. We call customer service because the website doesn't do what we want, not because we don't want to use the website.
Re: If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true
#147[dead]
Re: If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
A laundromat isn't a startup in that sense. There's no potential for exponential growth. A VC would never give you money to open a laundromat, you'd go to a bank and get a business loan for that.
Was uber a startup? Airbnb?
Uber was considered a startup:
"Uber: The history of the ride-hailing app, from start to IPO" https://www.businessinsider.com/ubers-history
"[Uber] quickly became the world's most valuable startup, "disrupted" personal transportation and food delivery, and became an emblem of the arrival of the gig economy" https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/11101...
"Kalanick tried to recruit him to join the startup, but at the time Uber looked like a luxury town-car service, not a worldwide transportation juggernaut." - https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/07/the-inside-story-of-the-ri...
Ditto Airbnb:
"Reservation-booking app Resy just got a massive investment from Airbnb, one of the most valuable startups in the world" https://www.businessinsider.com/resy-airbnb-investment-2017-...
Airbnb is one "of the top Travel, Leisure and Tourism startups funded by Y Combinator" https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/industry/travel-leisur...
Re: If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true
#149I think Blank's story is about a guy who missed a $20B market shift in defense VC, not a guy who failed to adopt AI. He's not saying "add AI to your product" or "use AI or die" but more that AI has shifted institutional assumptions about tech stacks, defensibility and fundability. The bottleneck moved up the stack from engineering to judgment, insight and design. Chris lost because he was heads down building while $2…
>> $20B in defense VC
"defense VC budget" seems like a generous way of saying "USA attack budget". Not everyone wants to deal with moral implications of building automation for that.