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AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era

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

#91

Post by maest »

james_marks wrote: post #83
andy99 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is it faux pas to google something too?

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

#92

Post by baxtr »

neom wrote: post #67
ricw wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just do both? Need an adequate network for that though which new school ai vibe entrepreneurs might lack…

Both indeed. I'm older, I do consulting, often to the new school AI CEOs and they keep thinking I'm nuts for saying we should bring in this person to talk to about this thing...I've tried to explain to a few folks now a human would be much better in this loop, but I have no good way to prove it as it's just experience. I've noticed across the board, they also spend A LOT of time getting all the data into LLMs so they…

Ok wow this is actually frightening.

I talked to a friend recently who is a plastic surgeon. He told me about a young pretty girl came in recently with super clear ideas what she wanted to fixed.

Turns out she uploaded her pictures to an LLM and it gave her recommendations.

My friend told her she didn’t need any treatment at this stage but she kept insisting that the LLM had told her this and that.

I’m worried that these young folks just trust whatever these things tell them to do is right.

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

#93

Post by frakkingcylons »

maest wrote: post #91
james_marks wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is it faux pas to google something too?

I think the faux pas is regurgitating the first hit you find on StackOverflow or Wikipedia without considering if actually adds something to a discussion.

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

#94

Post by zxexz »

james_marks wrote: post #83
andy99 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In my personal social circle, it's but faux pas to even take out your phone during a discussion, without a statement why. Not explicitly a rule, it just kinda evolved that way. “Ok, I need to know, I’m gonna check wiki” is enough, and honestly makes everything more engaging — “oh! What does it say? How many times DID Cellini escape execution?. Bring up the talk page that should be fun!”

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

#95

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

delusional wrote: post #55
rahimnathwani wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You're picturing a utopia at the limit of some idealized world. Try and take a second to return to planet earth. There will not be a "quality" dial that you get to tweak to decide on your perfect quality of soup. There will be graduations, and you will be stuck with whatever the store provides. If you want medium quality soup, but the store only carries 3 brands of soup (because unlike in your utopia somebody actuall…

The wild thing is that they'll probably find entirely novel versions of this:

> they start spicing the soup with lead to give it cinnamon flavor or whatever

Like, we all know lead is bad, and we all know that humans are unscrupulous, but at least the human putting lead in the soup knows they're being unscrupulous at that time (probably). For an AI it would just be an entirely favorable optimization.

We're going to find out how far we can trust them, and the limits of that trust will determine where the people need to be.

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

#96

Post by haiku2077 »

RaftPeople wrote: post #84
haiku2077 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- 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.

Yeah, you still do all of that domain research and requirements gathering and system design as your meatbag job. But now instead of writing the ETL code yourself by hand you can get 80-90% of the way there in a minute or two with AI assistance.

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

#97

Post by haiku2077 »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #42
haiku2077 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- 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.

> 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 found this didn't take me very long. Try things in order of how popular they seem and keep notes on what you do and don't like.

I personally settled on Zed (because I genuinely like the editor even with the AI bits turned off), Copilot (because Microsoft gave me a free subscription as an active OSS dev) and Claude Sonnet (seems to be a good balance). Other people I work with like Claude Code.

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

#98

Post by ghaff »

WJW wrote: post #68
ujkhsjkdhf234 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instagram was 13 employees before they were purchased by Facebook. The secret is most employees in a 1000 person company don't need to be there or cover very niche cases that your company likely wouldn't have.

Don't fall for the lottery winner bias. Some companies just strike it rich, often for reasons entirely outside their control. That doesn't mean that copying their methods will lead to the same results.

And for enterprise sales, you need a salesforce and many multi-billion companies have an enterprise salesforce. And documentation writers, and support staff, in multiple geographies, and events/marketing teams to support customers, etc.

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

#99

Post by data-ottawa »

TZubiri wrote: post #46
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 an…

Those are almost all management decisions, I expected a lot more crashes and security issues and a general inability to ship without taking things down.

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

#100

Post by data-ottawa »

simonw wrote: post #20
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…

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…

Conceptually I find LLMs/AI broaden my skillset but slow down any processes that are deep in specific knowledge and context.

It is really nice to have that, it raises the floor on the skills I'm not good at.

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