Flagged. Please don't post items on HN where we have to pay or hand over PII to read it. Thanks.
pls don't create new guidelines
Ditto.
73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering
171–180 of 212 posts
Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering
#172This makes no sense to me? I don't understand why a company, even if it is using GPT or Claude as their true backend, is going to leave API calls in Javascript that anyone can find. Sure maybe a couple would, but 73% of those tested? Surely your browser is going to talk to their webserver, and yup sure it'll then go off and use Claude etc then return the answer to you, but surely they're not all going to just skin an…
It makes perfect sense when you consider that the average Javascript developer does not know that business logic can exist outside of React components.
Yea I understand maybe 10-20% of these AI clowns don't know what they're doing, but to suggest they're all making a mistake this silly doesn't stack up IMHO.
Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering
#173This is an AI slop article that sounds completely fabricated. Half of what's being claimed here isn't even possible to discern. My guess is that some LLM is churning out these 100% fake articles to get subscribers and ad revenue on Medium. Flagged.
Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't take anyone seriously who uses prompt engineering unironically. I see those emails come through at work and all I can do is roll my eyes and move on
what level of seriousness does "context engineering" deserve?
Is there a level lower than 0?
Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
He may be real, but the article is fake BS. There is simply no way he'd be in a position to intercept the calls, and he never explains it.
There is nothing difficult about monitoring network traffic in this way for desktop or native apps.
So? The vast majority of these startups would still do the wrapping on their own backend.
Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Eg how do you build representative evals and measure forward progress? This assumes that those companies do evaluations. In my experience, seeing a huge amount of internal AI projects at my company (FAANG), there's not even 5% that have any sort of eval in place.
Yeah, I believe that lots of startups don’t have evals either, but as soon as you get paying customers you’re gonna need something to prevent accidentally regressing as you tune your scaffolding, swap in newer models, etc. This is a big chasm that I could well believe a lot of founders fail to cross. It’s really easy to build an impressive-looking tech demo, much harder to get and retain paying customers and continuo…
Lol ok so all of this is just a ploy to advertise your thing xD
Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Monitored their network traffic for 60-second sessions How can he monitor what's going on between a startup's backend and OpenAI's server? > The truth is just an F12 away That's just not how this works. You can see the network traffic between your browser and some service. In 12 cases that was OpenAI or similar. Fine. But that's not 73%. What about the rest? He literally has a diagram claiming that the startups con…
I believe he's saying that a large number of the startups he tested did not have their own backend to mediate. It was literally direct front-end calls to openai. And if this sounds insane, remember that openai actually supports this: https://platform.openai.com/docs/api-reference/realtime-sess... Presumably OpenAI didn't add that for fun, either, so there must be non-zero demand for it.
It's a fair point that OpenAI officially supports ephemeral keys.
But I still believe the vast majority of startups do wrapping in their own backend. Yes, I read what he's doing, and he's still only able to analyze client-side traffic, which means his overall claims of "73%" are complete and total bullshit. It is simply impossible to conclude what he's concluding without having access to backend network traces.
EDIT: This especially doesn't make sense because the specific sequence diagram in this article shows the wrapping happening in "Startup Backend", and again, it would be impossible for him to monitor that network traffic. This entire article is made-up LLM slop.
Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering
#178100% of startups are just software engineering
Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
The money is easy to come by because wealthy investors, while they don't want to pay any more in taxes, are desperate to find possible returns in an economy that sucks outside of ballooning healthcare and the AI bubble... not because they need the money but because NUMBER MUST GO UP. And more so than even most VC markets, raising for an "AI" company is more about who you know than what results you can show. If anyone…
What’s your opinion on any of the plethora of unicorns in domain-specific AI, like Harvey? ($100m ARR from what I could find on a cursory search) https://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/2025/10/29/legal-ai-...
I’m yet to be convinced it (Harvey) is anything other than a a prompt and some streamlined Rag.
Law is slow and conservative, they were likely just the first to get a enterprise sales team.
Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actual AI. Not being "AI" users. Being LLM users would be fine but they pretend they do AI.
Everything is a spectrum. At what point can you claim that you did "it"? Do you have to use an open source model instead of an API? Do you have to fine tune it? How much do you need to? Do you have to create synthetic data for training? Do you have to gather your own data? Do you need to train from scratch? Do you need to come up with a novel architecture? 10 years ago if you gathered some data and trained a linear m…
> At what point can you claim that you did "it"?
When the core of your business ist something that’s shamelessly farmed out to .
It would be like calling yourself a restaurant, and then getting uber eats deliveries of whatever customers ordered and handing that to them.