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How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

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Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#221

Post by johnnyanmac »

ryandrake wrote: post #195
Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why almost lie though? Like, if I am a company and I integrate AI just to say to my investors that I got AI so that they can not feel FOMO is utterly bonkers and well, I don't know but the investors definitely don't sound reasonable and I think that the people who are somehow lending money to these investors who are investing on such basis definitely need to think about their life choices if the company in their port…

I don't think anyone anywhere on the totem pole: from the junior engineer, to the engineering manager, to the founder, to the VC, to the investors, cares if it's actually AI. They just want to see the word there. Someone got it into their head that "AI is the thing now" and now the junior engineer isn't going to get hired unless he says AI. The Eng manager is not going to get promoted unless he talks about managing A…

>Nobody really wants any of this shit as a product.

To be fair, the investor never cared about the product to begin with. It's a shame that that apathy spread all down the totem pole. But I guess taht's what happens when the consumer is no longer the audience of consumer products.

Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#222

Post by johnnyanmac »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #209
ryandrake wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think anyone anywhere on the totem pole: from the junior engineer, to the engineering manager, to the founder, to the VC, to the investors, cares if it's actually AI. They just want to see the word there. Someone got it into their head that "AI is the thing now" and now the junior engineer isn't going to get hired unless he says AI. The Eng manager is not going to get promoted unless he talks about managing A…

Why sell shit that you don't want yourself/ aren't passionate about?? That is just exploitative of sorts on preying people who don't have enough knowledge about AI let's say... And this behaviour shouldn't be condoned though > And investors have no clue what to do with their money, but heard somewhere that "AI is the thing now" and that's where they want to flush their money. This is where the system needs to change,…

>Why sell shit that you don't want yourself/ aren't passionate about??

Best interpreation: you need to pay bills and this startup is your last hope after sending out 500 apps and getting 3 interviews back (2 interviews ghosted you after the first round and the 3rd said "overqualified" despite it being a senior role)

Worst interpretation: we're in a gold rush, and a lot of people will sell fool's gold if they can.

Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#223

Post by johnnyanmac »

pixl97 wrote: post #186
skeeter2020 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

maybe a big difference is those hype cycles were net-positive for developers. This is the first one in a while that has VCs and upper management salivating with the idea of cutting all the devs lose. Who do YOU think this is likely to replace first, technical developers or administrators?

"Developers surprised automation takes them out after decades of taking other people out with automation" But hey, mention the word union here and you'll still get beat with a stick.

That's the stupid part. Nothing is actually automated yet. AI is just a smokescreen for the recession we're clearly in but no one wants to say out loud.

And I sense a reckoning on the horizon. There's a reason the 10's were filled with billionaire (now trillionaire) tech companies poaching any potential talent that can rise against them. That knowledge is still there and rife to disrupt.

>mention the word union here and you'll still get beat with a stick.

I'm in the games industry. It's slow but people are starting to wake up here. Only took decades of abuse, instability, and rampant layoffs in an industry alreaady known for regular layoffs. But you know the quote about Churchill and Americans.

Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#224

Post by johnnyanmac »

tedggh wrote: post #123

The article starts by assuming there’s an AI bubble. Then it goes to label all these startups as AI companies. This is how they are categorized (2025 batch only): AI Agents (15%) Productivity/Ops Tools (11.4%) AI Infrastructure (10%) Healthcare (10%) Consumer Apps (9.3%). We cannot argue that AI infrastructure is AI, but what about say back office automation and healthcare? Are these AI companies? Or are they automat…

>Many Fintech and e-commerce companies use ML, are they ML companies?

if that's how they market themselves, yes.

Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#225

Post by johnnyanmac »

Mistletoe wrote: post #25

AI ate HN also. It’s ridiculous how many articles are about AI now. Are we truly out of any new ideas? Can we not talk about something else? I kind of like AI but it’s a tool, I don’t talk about my screwdriver constantly.

>Can we not talk about something else?

well HN is also burying the collapse of the country many of community resides in, so I guess that's off the table.

Heck, even the layoff news seems to have been normalized these days. There's this oddly sterile feeling here lately. As if we need to pretend we are still in good times, when clearly many of us are struggling.

Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#226

Post by johnnyanmac »

the__alchemist wrote: post #70
Mistletoe wrote: post #25

AI ate HN also. It’s ridiculous how many articles are about AI now. Are we truly out of any new ideas? Can we not talk about something else? I kind of like AI but it’s a tool, I don’t talk about my screwdriver constantly.

It is your duty to read HN new, and upvote articles you find interesting, or that you think others might find interesting. You can bias towards non-LLM ones.

I try. But gaming news doesn't get much traction here (never really did, to beg fair) and graphics programming info these days are few and far between.

Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#227

Post by johnnyanmac »

anthonypasq wrote: post #163
Mistletoe wrote: post #25

AI ate HN also. It’s ridiculous how many articles are about AI now. Are we truly out of any new ideas? Can we not talk about something else? I kind of like AI but it’s a tool, I don’t talk about my screwdriver constantly.

If hackernews existing during the dawn of personal computing you bet your ass that every single cpu release by intel or ibm or whatever would be front page news and everyone would be talking about how they were going to use computers to automate all paperwork etc etc. you just need some perspective.

It would try. Moderation for HN back then was very different, however. Most of that noise would be filtered to focus on the truly curious thoughts.

The culture definiely changed over the years, not just the community.

Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#228

Post by tim333 »

Mistletoe wrote: post #25

AI ate HN also. It’s ridiculous how many articles are about AI now. Are we truly out of any new ideas? Can we not talk about something else? I kind of like AI but it’s a tool, I don’t talk about my screwdriver constantly.

AI is kind of more interesting than screwdrivers though. Three AI movies in the IMDB top 100 vs zero screwdriver movies (The Matrix, Terminator 2, Wall-E).

Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#229

Post by tim333 »

programmertote wrote: post #156

A tangential note -- these days when I'm casually reading through job postings, a lot of companies mention in their job requirements something along the lines of "Must be familiar/knowledgeable about GenAI technologies (RAG/MCP)" even for roles that are not strictly related to GenAI. When you look deeper into most of these companies, they seem better off using third-party services (like Claude/ChatGPT) instead of bui…

It seems sensible to want people familiar with the tech of the day like they'd expect most people to be familiar with the internet.

Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#230

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #222
Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why sell shit that you don't want yourself/ aren't passionate about?? That is just exploitative of sorts on preying people who don't have enough knowledge about AI let's say... And this behaviour shouldn't be condoned though > And investors have no clue what to do with their money, but heard somewhere that "AI is the thing now" and that's where they want to flush their money. This is where the system needs to change,…

>Why sell shit that you don't want yourself/ aren't passionate about?? Best interpreation: you need to pay bills and this startup is your last hope after sending out 500 apps and getting 3 interviews back (2 interviews ghosted you after the first round and the 3rd said "overqualified" despite it being a senior role) Worst interpretation: we're in a gold rush, and a lot of people will sell fool's gold if they can.

I understand this situation and maybe this is the reason why I think that we might need to change the system so that there isn't so much pressure on people to pay the bills that startup becomes the last hope..

Like, I definitely understand the desperation but I can't help but blame the system which lead us to where we are but I don't really know man, maybe blaming the system wouldn't help either and there is definitely some pessimism in the air.

We can change so much things but to me it just seems as if __people don't care__ And I can understand if people are busy in their lives but now we are just gonna have this churn keep on going and going and this bubble is going to burst which is suddenly gonna impact people's wallets but then everybody is going to forget just as they forgot the web bubble.

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