Will be curious to see which of these solo-AI ventures survive contact with the market...
AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era
171–180 of 189 posts
Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era
#172I'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…
The "small but mighty" team model feels way more appealing to me too - less management overhead, more actual building
Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era
#173I 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…
It's one thing to speed up little tasks, another to ship something truly innovative
Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era
#174I'm not entirely convinced this trend is because AI is letting people "manage fleets of agents". I do think the trend of the tiny team is growing though and I think the real driver were the laysoffs and downsizings of 2023. People were skeptical if Twitter would survive Elon's massive staff cuts and technically the site has survived. I think the era of the 2016-2020 empire building is coming to an end. Valuing a mana…
The whole "empire building" mindset definitely feels outdated now - nobody's impressed by how many direct reports you have anymore
Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
> what we've gotten the last decade has been taxi and hotel apps. Nothing truly revolutionizing. I’m not sure where you are from, but this is not my perspective from Northern California. 1. Apps in general, and Uber in particular, have very much revolutionized the part-time work landscape via gig work. There are plenty of criticisms of gig work if/when people try to do it full time, but as a replacement for part time…
Yeah but that's not tech, the positive are just result from legal loop holes. I would say though that Taxi companies now have proper app because Uber forces them to catch up with the tech. Calling taxi in the pre-Uber era was literally hell.
Uber couldn’t exist before a critical mass had a smartphone with GPS in their pocket. I don’t see what the bar is if we don’t consider it revolutionary. Anything that goes mainstream is going to eventually feel pedestrian and watered down from a tech perspective. But if you look at how most people lived and worked 30 years ago to today it’s a massive change.
Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era
#176I'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…
At some point you'll lose that edge because you stop being able to differentiate yourself. If you can x10 with agents, others can too. AI will let you reach the "higher" low hanging fruits.
Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era
#177Those who rely on AI for coding do you worry you will lose the ability to code without AI assistance
Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
> what we've gotten the last decade has been taxi and hotel apps. Nothing truly revolutionizing. I’m not sure where you are from, but this is not my perspective from Northern California. 1. Apps in general, and Uber in particular, have very much revolutionized the part-time work landscape via gig work. There are plenty of criticisms of gig work if/when people try to do it full time, but as a replacement for part time…
Yeah but that's not tech, the positive are just result from legal loop holes. I would say though that Taxi companies now have proper app because Uber forces them to catch up with the tech. Calling taxi in the pre-Uber era was literally hell.
> Calling taxi in the pre-Uber era was literally hell.
We clearly live in two completely separate parts of the world. I'm from Denmark (where Uber ran away after being told they had to operate as a taxi company) and calling a taxi was never a problem for me. You called the dispatch, said roughly where you were, and they can by with a dude in a car who you then told where you wanted to go. By now the taxi companies have apps too, but the experience is roughly identical.
The prices suck, but that's not really a usability problem.
Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The best part is those two things have only gotten worse over time. Turns out, they were never really that good of an idea, they just had money to burn and legislative holes to exploit. Now Uber is more expensive than Taxis ever were, and AirBNB is virtually useless now that they have to play the same legal ballgame as hotels. Oh, and that one is more expensive too. Tech companies forget that software is easy, the re…
> But building real stuff, in meatspace, has more variables than anyone can even conceptualize.
and is also exactly what people want. Having and app is fine and maybe cool, but at some point what I want from my taxi company is to get in a real car with the person who is preferably not a murderer and drive somewhere. The app is not very valuable to me unless it somehow optimizes that desirable part of the exchange.
I've worked a few years in the enterprise now, and the same thing keeps popping up. Startups think they have some cool cutting-edge technology to sell, but we aren't buying technology. We will gladly pay you to take away some real life problem though, but that also means you have to own any problems with your software, since we will be paying for a service, not software.
Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
Definitely agree small teams are the way to go. The bigger the company the more cognitive dissonance is imposed on the employees. I need to work where everyone is forced to engage with reality and those that don’t are fired.
The thing is the luck as usually on the side of bigger battalions. Smaller teams don't have the rich and width of bigger companies. All in all we need the full spectrum from single person startup to mega corporations.
Some people like working for big companies so this is fine. It’s a shame that outside of Silicon Valley there isn’t a high density of small software companies.