51–60 of 77 posts
What I don’t understand is that how is this automatically good for startups? Say I have a startup that vibe codes “AI for real estate”. What about customer acquisition? On the other hand, if I’m Zillow, why can’t I just throw a developer on the same feature and automatically have a customer base for it? If you look at most of the YC funded startups these days, they are just prompt engineers with no go to market strat…
Good explanation for why hiring stopped. If AI is improving rapidly why hire engineers now that you might not need in 6-12 months?
They are definitely not needed anymore.
The market is flooded with seniors.
So no problem there either
Good explanation for why hiring stopped. If AI is improving rapidly why hire engineers now that you might not need in 6-12 months?
> Good explanation for why hiring stopped. If AI is improving rapidly why hire engineers now that you might not need in 6-12 months? I'm not so sure that's the reason. I mean, to believe LLMs replace engineers you first need to believe engineers spend the bulk of their time typing frantically churning out code in greenfield projects. That's not compatible with reality. Although LLMs excel at generating new code from…
On recession: cost of living is becoming crisis-level. I read recently that 67% of Americans are paycheck-to-paycheck. 150k/yr is 12k/month. If groceries go from 500 to 1000/month, a 150k wage-earner save less for retirement. For someone making 30-40k (basically minimum wage), it's a huge hit. Then consider it's the same story for cars, housing, medical care...it goes on and on. It doesn't look "recessionary" because GDP keeps going up. But we're getting so much less for it with every passing year.
I also agree that we need to consider what brownfield dev looks like. It's where the vast majority of my time has gone over 15+ years in software and I'm not convinced all the coordination / sequencing / thinking will be assisted with LLMs. Particularly because they aren't trained on large proprietary codebases.
What we might both be missing, is that for most people, writing the actual code is hard. LLMs help with that a lot. That's what a lot of junior/entry-level work, actually is (not as much planning/thinking as seniors do).
Comparing with reading books you might have or need to order, read, or get from the library, you bet.
There still are some interesting problems to tackle. Maybe more than before. So who knows.
What I don’t understand is that how is this automatically good for startups? Say I have a startup that vibe codes “AI for real estate”. What about customer acquisition? On the other hand, if I’m Zillow, why can’t I just throw a developer on the same feature and automatically have a customer base for it? If you look at most of the YC funded startups these days, they are just prompt engineers with no go to market strat…
Yap, AI coding will just help monopolize positions lol.
At the end of the day. Open AI is losing billions of dollars and Google caught up while still seeing record revenues and profits using its own infrastructure and TPUs
Even the laggard Apple is reportedly just going to throw a billion (chump change) at Google for its model and keep selling phones and other hardware while OpenAI is reportedly working on a “smart egg”
"But building the same functionality has undoubtedly become simpler." I disagree with this statement. It has become simpler, provided you don't care about it actually being correct, and you don't care about whether you really have tests that test what you think you asked for, you don't care about security, and other things. Building the same thing involves doing the things that LLMs have proved time and again that th…
I've been able to use LLMs to build things in a weekend that I would not have been able to do in the past, without putting in months of serious effort.
I recently rewrote from scratch in a weekend a project that i had made a couple years ago. In a single weekend i now have a better product than I did at the time, when I spent maybe 20x the amount of time on it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Deflation is about all prices going down. Just a few decreasing is normal. Anyway, WTF, economics communication has a huge problem. I've seen the article's explanation repeated in plenty of places, it's completely wrong and borderline nonsense. The reason deflation is bad is not because it makes people postpone buying things. It's because some prices, like salaries or rent just refuse to go down. That causes rationin…
Rent and salaries don't like going down because of debt. Debts are denominated in currency units and go up with inflation (interest rates have a component to correct for inflation) but they don't decrease if the currency gains value over time (this would need negative interest rates). I suppose that's something that could be done with regulation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rent and salaries don't like going down because of debt. Debts are denominated in currency units and go up with inflation (interest rates have a component to correct for inflation) but they don't decrease if the currency gains value over time (this would need negative interest rates). I suppose that's something that could be done with regulation.
Yes. And even if people could refinance, debt values going down causes further deflation.
I think analysis around inflation, deflation, and consumer prices are valid but they are part of an understanding from economies of 100 years ago. Money loses value when you can't do anything with it. Tech and AI runs on debt, and an extraordinary amount of it. Is that really money? I don't think so.
Deflation may suffer from Goodhart's law. Because we've repurposed all of available human resources for mitigating against it, the variables we used to measure it cease to become useful. Our central measure for the economy are things like the stock market and the unemployment rate which have prevalent and valid criticisms that policy makers ignore. They truly don't indicate what's occurring on main street and I'm afraid that we will be in a deflationary spiral without knowing it.