> the internet’s most wretched hive of engagement farmers and master solicitors of fake information and fictional anecdotes, LinkedIn
Great quote!
The minimum viable unit of saleable software
41–50 of 89 posts
Re: The minimum viable unit of saleable software
#42> the internet’s most wretched hive of engagement farmers and master solicitors of fake information and fictional anecdotes, LinkedIn Great quote!
Ahem. "AI-powered engagement farmers..."
Re: The minimum viable unit of saleable software
#43In business you should focus more on how much you can make than on how much you can save.
If you are lucky to have talented staff on your payroll, they should put their hard work into things which increase business revenue and profit, not things which reduce expenses. Unless there's an expense which is outrageous.
If that engineer in the article example can build a Salesforce clone, then he can instead build more valuable software which the business can sell for a profit. It could be a Salesforce clone even.
Re: The minimum viable unit of saleable software
#44I am forced to use jira soon as I was using BB issues and that is expiring soon. So I'll build something simple for us, that integrates with our systems and how we like to do things. It won't cost us much since our meagre requirements are nothing comparted to a full fledged Jira replacement. Without LLMs it would have taken maybe a couple of days effort and perhaps an hour a month to fix any bugs we miss or add an ex…
If your choices are "use Jira" vs. "build task management software with an LLM" then you are already in a losing proposition. Go spend some time with Redmine before building your own. Redmine is free, far better than Jira, and already includes the features you don't yet realize you need.
Re: The minimum viable unit of saleable software
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah exactly, I literally don’t know how to change my spec until I’ve gathered more data. I was building a transaction classifier recently and I initially thought it would be a trivial “solved” problem. Throw transactions into a tiny local LLM, let it classify. But that approach was too slow, and not accurate enough. I didn’t know that though until I tried and then needed to change the spec.
You'd probably get much further along by fine tuning a small BERT style encoder model based classifier for it. IMO, even something as simple as training a linear classifier on the CLS token embeddings from a frozen encoder might work.
Yeah, Ive tried a bi-encoder, cross encoder and some small LLMs so far. I think I’ll do BERT soon too
Re: The minimum viable unit of saleable software
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah exactly, I literally don’t know how to change my spec until I’ve gathered more data. I was building a transaction classifier recently and I initially thought it would be a trivial “solved” problem. Throw transactions into a tiny local LLM, let it classify. But that approach was too slow, and not accurate enough. I didn’t know that though until I tried and then needed to change the spec.
So wait ... you're not even going to train based on what you want, just "throw into"? Did you actually put in work on a very clear and accurate prompt with a full manual on what to do?
Throwing a tiny little LLM at it helped me assess that it was far too slow for me to reasonably use at the scale I needed. So it didn’t really matter how accurate the prompt was. I was more just pointing out that I didn’t know if would be too slow without trying it. I maybe could have done some simple math in retrospect, but trying it out was easy enough
Re: The minimum viable unit of saleable software
#47Corporations will be quite happy with really simple features if they're packaged right. I'm selling software that mostly does things that a good programmer could whip up in a couple of days or weeks, but what cost me most of the development time wasn't the features but all the FUD around them e.g. SSO, multitenancy, audit logs, corporate design support, ... Most enterprise software could be replaced with simple scripts and command line tools if they had this enterprise layer. I'd wager tons of SaaS is just simple open-source software and libraries behind a management layer.
Re: The minimum viable unit of saleable software
#48[dead]
Re: The minimum viable unit of saleable software
#49I have multiple side projects that I would never have contemplated building before but whose utility now exceeds the much lower cost to build. I got a few weeks in to each and then stalled on all of them because the effort and motivation required to extend beyond the crazed early days _is_ still more than the utility I get. In a professional context, paying someone for software to do something outside my core domain…
I've been surprised by how far my motivation has taken me. I have multiple projects now that are so much further ahead than I have ever managed before. I would get stuck on some small issue or key-decision and then would struggle to move past it.
Certainly, I still have those tendencies, but it's easier than ever to push through and build a throwaway version with code that might not be what I end up shipping, but is enough to help me understand the final shape of the solution. Once that happens, I'm unblocked and away I go again.
The mental cost of building throwaway code has essentially dropped to zero for me. Of course, I keep working now until light mode comes on automatically on my Mac, but that's a whole other problem.
Re: The minimum viable unit of saleable software
#50I recently asked Claude to duplicate Google Docs. It practically threw up. I tried to have it write a plan, decompose it, deobfuscate it. It gave me all sorts of reasons why this was a terrible idea. I've never seen it resist a task so directly and relentlessly. It knew. One point worth considering is that tools like Jira and Salesforce have dozens of screens and modals. But you only ever look at one at a time. So th…
I'm not sure I'm following you. What does 'duplicate Google Docs' mean? We already have OSS rich text editor (ProseMirror) and CRDT implementations (yjs, automerge). Are you talking about replicating every single enterprise Docs has? Integration with a large suite of other services you control? Replicating the business model too?
'duplicate Google Docs' spans everything from providing the actual service to replicating the world and becoming Google.