This may date me, but it feels like 1999 again where a small startup can disrupt an industry. Not just because of what LLMs can do in terms of delivered product, but because a small team can often turn on a problem so much faster than a big one can. I really hope that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of three to five person companies forming in basements right now ready to challenge the big players again.
AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era
81–90 of 189 posts
Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era
#82I'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…
> Valuing a manager on their number of reports is now out of fashion
I highly doubt human nature has changed enough to say that. It's just a down market.
Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era
#83One area of business that I'm struggling in is how boring it is talking to an LLM, I enjoy standing at a whiteboard thinking through ideas, but more and more I see push for "talk to the llm, ask the llm, the llm will know" - The LLM will know, but I'd rather talk to a human about it. Also in pure business, it takes me too long to unlock nuances that an experienced human just knows, I have to do a lot of "yeah but" wo…
It's not quite the same but since the dawn of smartphones, I've hated it when you ask a question, as a discussion starter or to get people's views, and some jerk reads off the wikipedia answer as if that's some insight I didn't know was available to me, and basically ruins the discussion. I know talking to an llm is not exactly parallel, but it's a similar idea, it's like talking to the guy with wikipedia instead of…
This has peaked in my circles, thankfully. Now it’s considered a bit of a faux pas to look up an answer during a discussion, for exactly this reason.
Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era
#84Earlier 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…
> make an ETL to clean up this dirty database
Can you provide concrete details?
When I do projects in this realm, it requires significant discussion with the business to understand how reality is modeled in the database and data, and that info is required before any notion of "clean up" can be defined.
Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era
#85I'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...
Weblate has been doing that for any number of languages (up to 200 or however many it supports) for many years, using many different sources, including public translation memory reviewed by humans.
It can be plugged into your code forge and fully automated — you push the raw strings and get a PR with every new/modified string translated into every other language supported by your application.
I use its auto-translation feature to prepare quick and dirty translations into five languages, which lets you test right away and saves time for professional translators later — as they have told me.
If anyone is reading this, save yourself the time on AI bullshit and use Weblate — it's a FOSS project.
Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era
#86I'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…
I think the productivity improvement you can get just from having a decent LLM available to answer technical questions is significant enough already even without the whole Agent-based tool-in-a-loop thing. This morning I used Claude 4 Sonnet to figure out how to build, package and ship a Docker container to GitHub Container Registry in 25 minutes start to finish. Without Claude's help I would expect that to take me a…
Their boilerplate works out of the box, you don't need to change anything. I recently packaged, signed, and published an OCI container into ghcr for the first time, it took about 5 to 10 minutes without touching any LLMs thanks to the quality of their documentation.
Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era
#87> "Ushering in a new era."
It's ushering in a new era of valley bullshit. If only journalists tried to falsify their premise before blindly publishing it.
> Jack Clark whether AI’s coding ability meant “the age of the nerds” was over.
When was the "age of the nerds" exactly? What does that even mean? My interpretation is that it means "is the age of having to pay skilled programmers for quality work over?" Which explains Bloomberg's interest.
> “I think it’s actually going to be the era of the manager nerds now,” Clark replied. “I think being able to manage fleets of AI agents and orchestrate them is going to make people incredibly powerful.”
And they're all going to be people on a subscription model and locked into one particular LLM. It's not going to make anyone powerful other than the owner class. This is the worst type of lie. They don't believe any of this. They just really really hate having to pay your salary increases every year.
> AI is sometimes described as providing the capability of “infinite interns.”
More like infinite autistic toddlers. Sure. It can somehow play a perfect copy of Chopin after hearing it once. Is that really where business value comes from? Quickly ripping other people off so you can profit first?
The Bloomberg class I'm sure is so thrilled they don't even have the sense to question any of this self serving propaganda.
Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era
#88One area of business that I'm struggling in is how boring it is talking to an LLM, I enjoy standing at a whiteboard thinking through ideas, but more and more I see push for "talk to the llm, ask the llm, the llm will know" - The LLM will know, but I'd rather talk to a human about it. Also in pure business, it takes me too long to unlock nuances that an experienced human just knows, I have to do a lot of "yeah but" wo…
With the LLM, you're free to ask any question without worrying about what the other party might think of you for asking that question.
Which is the Hallmark of a great teammate, but then we won't need them anymore
Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
With the LLM, you're free to ask any question without worrying about what the other party might think of you for asking that question.
Which is the Hallmark of a great teammate, but then we won't need them anymore
But who has truly stress tested their teammates to see how much level of question bombardment they're willing to take? You really haven't, since they can't just generate tokens at the rate and consistency of an LLM.
Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era
#90I 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 qu…
I do see the AI agent companies shipping like crazy. Cursor, Windsurf, Claude Code... they are adding features as if they have some magical workforce of tireless AI minions building them. Maybe they do!