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Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously

andonlabs.com

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Re: Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously

#591
post #540
post #502

If you have an agent that can run a business, then… why not… run a business? Why does YC bother financing startups led by founders, if the AI can just do it? (This startup proudly remarks that it’s backed by YC)

A startup and a business aren't the same thing in the eyes of YC. https://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html A business is web store selling coffee cups where the bottom line governs it's continuation. A startup is ambitious project where a growth rate governs it's continuation. The end result of a business is a lemonade stand or a barber or donut shop, the end result of a startup is OpenAI or Google.

a business makes money selling a product or service.

a startup makes money selling the startup

Re: Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously

#592
post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tailwind's philosophy is that you must not use CSS facilities at all and instead all their utility classes should be inlined into the HTML soup. This leaves framework components as the only abstraction boundary, but that means if you're writing plain HTML without a framework there's literally no way to standardize your design system. That and the huge soup of classes in DOM is (part of why) I don't like Tailwind... b…

You can define css classes that combine multiple tailwind classes https://tailwindcss.com/docs/functions-and-directives#apply-...

You can, but it goes against Tailwind's philosophy. It used to be explicitly discouraged here[0] (see this 2022 GH comment[1]), but now they just don't mention it.

[0] https://tailwindcss.com/docs/styling-with-utility-classes#ma...

[1] https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss/discussions/7651...

Re: Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously

#593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still have to remind Ai not to use the n+1 pattern in queries, and fight it to stop using inconsistent inline styles vs classes, even within a single page. How are people getting this "waste of time not to use AI" and "generates 99% of my code" level of code quality? I know people's response will likely be something, something, "add instructions to memory to not use n+1", etc. But if the Ai wants to generate code t…

I've been developing a suspicion that many people simply aren't looking at what their agents produce and can't speak to the quality of it in a fully informed way. For context, I've set up harnesses with recursive automated review loops, spec driven development, explicit lists, better models, better harnesses, formal methods tooling, etc. All of it helps, but they don't eliminate output issues. Those become very appar…

If you assume that programmers’ skills follows a bell curve, the typical output will not be better than the average. And that leads directly into your third conclusion: average programmers just do not put in the effort. That’s literally part of what makes them average.

Re: Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously

#595
post #502

If you have an agent that can run a business, then… why not… run a business? Why does YC bother financing startups led by founders, if the AI can just do it? (This startup proudly remarks that it’s backed by YC)

I own a bookstore and about 90% of back office work is automated by software and AI. Probably most fulfilling project I've worked on in the past few years after taking a long break from tech.

interesting....i didn't know people still bought books from bookstore when they compete with Amazon, who are your demographics? I really do love the bookstores but haven't been in one in ages

Re: Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously

#597
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not too hopeful here as we see the major labs continuously break rules and are not held accountable for anything. Accountability in general is on a major decline, in case no one has noticed.

That's because they're massively wealthy and have teams of lawyers, not because of AI

I didn't even mention anything about AI, so no reason to bring it into this. Lawyers or not, it signals to other companies and society in general that repercussions are at least less severe now, or in some cases non-existent.

Re: Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously

#598

Meanwhile, I can't even get Astra to consistently re-use the same font-size across all of my HTML page headings+subheadings. There's just no world where this actually results in a stable, respected business. It will be death by a thousand bad impressions, mistakes and oversights. Yeah, you can automate everything. That doesn't mean it's being done well. That's not to say this might not be something feasible in 2-3 ye…

I can certainly understand why YC would fund an idea like this, and it's interesting to read about, but yeah the horizon for it working is surely very long if ever. A more appropriate scope would be "can any element of a business at all be handled autonomously by an agent in the long run?" because I would buy that product, but I can't think of one. Andon's real world experiments are a lot more interesting than the si…

>Surely a dropsharing business is easier and cheaper to test out than a brick and mortar clothing store!

I'd assume those test cases already exist.

Re: Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously

#599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know a single developer who has an agent write 99% of their code. Is that the norm outside of my bubble?

The vast majority of work people do is basically supporting simple CRUD type apps. CRUD apps have long been a solved problem long before AI, no one should be spending a lot of time dedicating their life to figuring out how to write a better CRUD app. If your bubble consists of writing critical high performance applications or bleeding edge research, maybe you have a use case for not using AI, but that is not the norm…

Yes, that is my bubble, pretty much. Sounds like I’m at the right place then. Better enjoy it while it lasts.
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