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AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era

bloomberg.com

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Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era

#41

Post by hnthrow90348765 »

geremiiah wrote: post #6

AI helps you cook code faster, but you still need to have a good understanding of the code. Just because the writing part is done quicker doesn't mean a developer can now shoulder more responsibility. This will only lead to burn out, because the human mind can only handle so much responsibility.

They often combine front end and back end roles (and sometimes sysadmin/devops/infrastructure) into one developer, so now I imagine they'll use AI to try and get even more. Burnout be damned, just going by their history.

Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era

#42

Post by jay_kyburz »

haiku2077 wrote: post #30
charliebwrites wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Can you give some examples? What’s worked well?

- Extremely strict linting and formatting rules for every language you use in a project. Including JSON, YAML, SQL. - Using AI code gen to make your own dev tools to automate tasks. Everything from "I need a make target to automate updating my staging and production config files when I make certain types of changes" or "make an ETL to clean up this dirty database" to "make a codegen tool to automatically generate lib…

I worry that once I've done all that I won't have time for my actual work. I also have to investigate all these new AI editors, and sign up for the API's and work out which is best, then I have to learn how to prompt properly.

I worry that messing with the AI is the equivalent of tweaking my colour schemes and choosing new fonts.

Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era

#43

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

WXLCKNO wrote: post #8

I'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…

A while back, someone here linked to this story[0].

It's a bit simplified and idealized, but is actually fairly spot-on.

I have been using AI every day. Just today, I used ChatGPT to translate an app string into 5 languages.

[0] https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/superhuman-what-can-ai-do-i...

Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era

#44

Post by goatlover »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #13
ryandrake wrote: post #7

It seems like a more and more recurring shareholder wet dream that companies could one day just be AI employees for digital things + robotic employees for physical things + maybe a human CEO "orchestrating" everything. No more icky employees siphoning off what should rightfully be profit for the owners. It's like this is some kind of moral imperative that business is always kind of low-key working towards. Are you ri…

If I'm buying soup, I'd prefer the manufacturer, the retailer, and any other part of the supply chain to be as efficient as possible, so they can compete in the market to offer me soup of a given quality at the lowest possible cost. An individual consumer doesn't derive any benefit from companies missing out on automation opportunities. Would you prefer to buy screws that are individually made on a lathe?

I'd prefer not to live in a fully automated society where shareholders and CEOs reap all the profits while the rest of us scrape by on just enough UBI to prevent a revolution.

Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era

#45

Post by spacemadness »

I 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 query was handled for you, thats not the bigger picture, that’s just talk.

Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era

#46

Post by TZubiri »

nemothekid wrote: post #12

I'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…

"and technically the site has survived."

Only if you squint. If you look at the quality of the site, it has suffered tremendously.

The biggest "fuck you" are phishers buying blue checkmarks and putting the face of the CEO and owner to shill scams. But you also have just extremely trash content and clickbaits consistently getting (probably botted) likes and appearing in the top of feeds. You open a political thread and somehow there's a reply of a bear driving a bicycle as the top response.

Twitter is dead, just waiting for someone to call it.

Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era

#47

Post by crgwbr »

jprokay13 wrote: post #22
charliebwrites wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Can you give some examples? What’s worked well?

If you haven’t, adding in strict(er) linting rules is an easy win. Enforcing documentation for public methods is a great one imo. The more you can do to tell the AI what you want via a “code-lint-test” loop, the better the results.

Honestly the same is true for human devs. As frustrating as strict linting can be for newer devs, it’s way less frustrating than having all the same issues pointed out in code review. That’s interesting because I’ve been finding that all sorts of stuff that’s good for AI is actually good for humans too, linting, fast easy to run tests, standardized code layouts, etc. Humans just have more ability to adapt to oddities at the moment, which leads to slack.

Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era

#49

Post by stephen_g »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #43
WXLCKNO wrote: post #8

I'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…

A while back, someone here linked to this story[0]. It's a bit simplified and idealized, but is actually fairly spot-on. I have been using AI every day. Just today, I used ChatGPT to translate an app string into 5 languages. [0] https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/superhuman-what-can-ai-do-i...

Hopefully it’s better for individual strings, but I’ve heard a few native speakers of other languages (who also can speak English) complaining about websites now serving up AI-translated versions of articles by default. They are better than Google Translate of old, but apparently still bad enough that they’d much rather just be served the English original…

I guess similar to my experience with the AI voice translation YouTube has, I’ve felt similar - I’d rather listen to the original voice but with translated subtitles than a fake voice.

Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era

#50

Post by rightbyte »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #13
ryandrake wrote: post #7

It seems like a more and more recurring shareholder wet dream that companies could one day just be AI employees for digital things + robotic employees for physical things + maybe a human CEO "orchestrating" everything. No more icky employees siphoning off what should rightfully be profit for the owners. It's like this is some kind of moral imperative that business is always kind of low-key working towards. Are you ri…

If I'm buying soup, I'd prefer the manufacturer, the retailer, and any other part of the supply chain to be as efficient as possible, so they can compete in the market to offer me soup of a given quality at the lowest possible cost. An individual consumer doesn't derive any benefit from companies missing out on automation opportunities. Would you prefer to buy screws that are individually made on a lathe?

> Would you prefer to buy screws that are individually made on a lathe?

I don't think that was your point but pressed screws got way better properties than cut screws.

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