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The creator of Claude Code's Claude setup

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Re: The creator of Claude Code's Claude setup

#252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My initial response to reading this post was "wow, I think I'd rather just write the code". I also remain a bit skeptical because, if all of this really worked (and I mean over a long time and scaling to meet a range of business requirements), even if it's not how I personally want to write code, shouldn't we be seeing a ton of 1 person startups? I see Bay area startups pushing 996 and requiring living in the Bay are…

> shouldn't we be seeing a ton of 1 person startups? Here's the dirty secret: 1 person AI coding enabled startups don't want their customers to know that they are 1 engineer AI coding startups so they do not expose it or share that info. There is still a lot of negative sentiment associated with this. I know 3 such founders; none would advertise to their customers the extent of their AI usage. There is also a conside…

But eventually people will catch up you can basically create a working product alone with the help of AI.

My prediction is that this will lead to a margin free-fall for many software products where the main moat is the software itself. And a lot of SaaS companies will also become redundant when the AI can code up a tailored solution in an hour for free.

Re: The creator of Claude Code's Claude setup

#253
post #65

This is interesting to hear, but I don't understand how this workflow actually works. I don't need 10 parallel agents making 50-100 PRs a week, I need 1 agent that successfully solves the most important problem. I don't understand how you can generate requirements quicky enough to have 10 parallel agents chewing away at meaningful work. I don't understand how you can have any meaningful supervising role over 10 thing…

My initial response to reading this post was "wow, I think I'd rather just write the code". I also remain a bit skeptical because, if all of this really worked (and I mean over a long time and scaling to meet a range of business requirements), even if it's not how I personally want to write code, shouldn't we be seeing a ton of 1 person startups? I see Bay area startups pushing 996 and requiring living in the Bay are…

> shouldn't we be seeing a ton of 1 person startups

How do you know this is not happening. There is always a lag. By the time you visibly see it, its already past.

Re: The creator of Claude Code's Claude setup

#254
post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> shouldn't we be seeing a ton of 1 person startups? Here's the dirty secret: 1 person AI coding enabled startups don't want their customers to know that they are 1 engineer AI coding startups so they do not expose it or share that info. There is still a lot of negative sentiment associated with this. I know 3 such founders; none would advertise to their customers the extent of their AI usage. There is also a conside…

My biggest question now is - since now anyone can build a SaaS, and since everything is now optimized not for "employment" but for "enterprise" (run your own business), just how many 1-2 person companies can we build? I mean how many genuine sell-able ideas are there. Can we as a society have a 100,000s small software enterprises (and not a few hundred employing 1000s)? I would love to start my own SaaS company, even…

Two of the startups are lead by non-technical founders who have strong industry specific experience (legal and finance). The third has a partner that has industry experience (is the ICP).

So you definitely still need strong sales and marketing and a deep understanding of a business domain.

1 person and AI is not sufficient to create a business.

Re: The creator of Claude Code's Claude setup

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My initial response to reading this post was "wow, I think I'd rather just write the code". I also remain a bit skeptical because, if all of this really worked (and I mean over a long time and scaling to meet a range of business requirements), even if it's not how I personally want to write code, shouldn't we be seeing a ton of 1 person startups? I see Bay area startups pushing 996 and requiring living in the Bay are…

I do stuff in my free time now that would have been a full time job a year ago. Accomplishing in months what would have taken years. (And doing in days what would have taken weeks.) I'm talking about actually built-out products with a decent amount of code and features, not basic prototypes. I feel like the vibe is "put up or shut up", so check out my bio for one example. I think your logic goes wrong because you ass…

> It's not like there was some fixed pool of work to be done and you just had to hire enough to exhaust the pool.

I'm my opinion you are failing to consider other bottlenecks, a la the theory of constraints.

An analogy: Imagine you have a widget factory that requires 3 machines, executed in sequence, to produce one widget.

Now imagine one of those machines gets 2x-5x more efficient. What will you do? Buy more of the faster machines? Of course not! Maybe you'll scale up by buying more of the slower machines (which are now your bottleneck) so they can match the output of the faster one, but that's only if you can acquire the raw material inputs fast enough to make use of them, and also that you can sell the output fast enough to not end up with a massive unsold inventory.

Bringing this back to software engineering: there are other processes in the software development lifecycle besides writing code -- namely gathering requirements, testing with users (getting feedback), and deployment / operations. And human coordination across these processes is hard, and hard to scale with agents.

These other aspects are much harder to scale (for now, at least) with agents. This is the core reason why agentic development will lead to fewer developers -- because you just don't need as many developers to deliver the same amount of development velocity.

The same logic explains (at least in part) why US companies don't simply continue hiring more and more outsourced developers. At a certain point, more raw development velocity isn't helpful because you're limited by other constraints.

On the other hand, agentic development DOES mean a boon to solo developers, who can MUCH more easily scale just themselves. It's much easier to coordinate between the product team, the development team, the ops team, and the customer support team when all the teams are in the same person's head.

Re: The creator of Claude Code's Claude setup

#256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> shouldn't we be seeing a ton of 1 person startups? Here's the dirty secret: 1 person AI coding enabled startups don't want their customers to know that they are 1 engineer AI coding startups so they do not expose it or share that info. There is still a lot of negative sentiment associated with this. I know 3 such founders; none would advertise to their customers the extent of their AI usage. There is also a conside…

But eventually people will catch up you can basically create a working product alone with the help of AI. My prediction is that this will lead to a margin free-fall for many software products where the main moat is the software itself. And a lot of SaaS companies will also become redundant when the AI can code up a tailored solution in an hour for free.

You are discounting sales, marketing, and branding. Take drop shipping for example: anyone can do this, but the successful ones are those that know how to brand and market the product well.

Not to mention having the right mindset for startups and building a business.

The code and product is maybe only 20% of the story.

Re: The creator of Claude Code's Claude setup

#257

I’ve found that experienced devs use agentic coding in a more “hands-on” way than beginners and pure vibe-coders. Vibecoders are the best because they push the models in humorous and unexpected ways. Junior devs are like “I automated the deploy process via an agent and this markdown file” Seasoned devs will spend more time writing the prompt for a bug fix, or lazily paste the error and then make the 1-line change the…

Partially related: I really dislike the vibe of Gas Town, both the post and the tool, I really hope this isn't what the future looks like. It just feels disappointing.

Re: The creator of Claude Code's Claude setup

#258

How much Codex and Claude Code are different from each other? I have been using Codex for few weeks doing experiments related to data analysis and training models with some architecture modifications. I wouldn't say I have used it extensively, but so far my experience has been good. Only annoying part has been not able to use GPU in the Codex without using `--sandbox danger-full-access` flag. Today, I started using C…

Codex is heavily inspired by Claude Code. They aren't that different. They might diverge more in future.

Re: The creator of Claude Code's Claude setup

#260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> shouldn't we be seeing a ton of 1 person startups? Here's the dirty secret: 1 person AI coding enabled startups don't want their customers to know that they are 1 engineer AI coding startups so they do not expose it or share that info. There is still a lot of negative sentiment associated with this. I know 3 such founders; none would advertise to their customers the extent of their AI usage. There is also a conside…

But eventually people will catch up you can basically create a working product alone with the help of AI. My prediction is that this will lead to a margin free-fall for many software products where the main moat is the software itself. And a lot of SaaS companies will also become redundant when the AI can code up a tailored solution in an hour for free.

I predict that the commercial market for a lot of software will evaporate as people find that getting AI to whip up a custom solution that fits their unique problem space like a glove is actually cheaper and simpler than trying to make COTS software do the job. We're not quite here yet, but maybe in a few years.
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