91–100 of 152 posts
Level 4 is where I see the most interesting design decisions get made, and also where most practitioners take a shortcut that compounds badly later. When the author talks about "codifying" lessons, the instinct for most people is to update the rules file. That works fine for conventions - naming patterns, library preferences, relatively stable stuff. But there's a different category of knowledge that rules files hand…
Level 4 is where I see the most interesting design decisions get made, and also where most practitioners take a shortcut that compounds badly later. When the author talks about "codifying" lessons, the instinct for most people is to update the rules file. That works fine for conventions - naming patterns, library preferences, relatively stable stuff. But there's a different category of knowledge that rules files hand…
The challenge is really crafting your main agent prompt such that the agent only reads the ADRs when absolutely necessary. Otherwise they muddy the context for simple inside-the-box tasks.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why sell the factory when you can create automated software cloner companies that make millions off of instantly copying promising startups as soon as they come out of stealth? If you could get a dark factory working when others don't have one, you can make much more money using it than however much you can make selling it
Producing the software is only a small part of the picture when it comes to generating revenue. So far, we haven’t seen much to suggest that LLMs can (yet) replace sales and most of the related functions.
In relation to sales, there were two gems. For direct to consumer type companies - influencers are where it's at right now especially during bootstrap phase - and they were talking about trying to keep marketing budget under 20% of sales.
Another, who is mostly in the VC business, finds the best way to gain traction for his startups is to create controversy - ie anything to be talked about.
In both cases you are trying to be talked about - either by directly paying for people to do that, or by providing entertainment value so people talk about you.
You could argue that both of those activities are already been automated - and the nice thing about sales is there is that fairly direct feedback loop you can actively learn from.
I am feeling like to go back to Level 5.
Level 6 helps with fixing bugs, but adding a new feature in a scalable way is not working out for me, I feed bunch of documents and ask it to analyze and come up with a solution.
1. It misses some details from docs when summarizing
2. It misses some details from code and its architecture, especially in multi-repo Java projects (annotations, 100 level inheritance is making it confuse a lot)
3. Then comes up with obvious (non) "solution" which is based on incorrect context summaries.
I don't think I can give full autonomy to these things yet.
But then, I wonder, people on Level 8, why don't they create bunch of clones of games, SaaS vendors and start making billions
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can do a lot of work with agents to remove a lot of manual work around the sales process. Sales is a lot of grinding on leads, contacts, follow ups, etc. And a lot of that is preparation work (background research, figuring out who to talk to, who the customer is, etc.), making sure follow ups are scheduled appropriately, etc. You still should talk to people yourself and be very careful with communicating AI slop,…
Your points are all valid, but it doesn’t really change the situation that was being discussed: an AI company trying to enter completely new markets just because they can write software for it is hardly some sort of automatic win. They’re much more likely to fail than succeed. I mentioned sales and marketing but there’s a whole lot more as well. Basically, it involves creating an entire subsidiary. Perhaps the time w…
What's the balance going to be between, 'connecting customers to product' and 'making differentiated product'?
In theory, if customers have perfect information ( ignoring a very large part of sales is emotional ), then the former part will disappear. However the rise of the internet, and perhaps AI agents shopping on your behalf, hasn't really made much of a dent there [1] - marketing, in all it's forms, is still huge business - and you could argue still expanding ( cf google ).
[1] Perhaps because of the huge importance of the emotional component. Perhaps also because in many areas of manufacturing you've reached a product plateau already - is there much space to make a better cup and plate?
As a lowly level 2 who remains skeptical of these software “dark factories” described at the top of this ladder, what I don’t understand is this: If software engineering is enough of a solved problem that you can delegate it entirely to LLM agents, what part of it remains context-specific enough that it can’t be better solved by a general-purpose software factory product? In other words, if you’re a company that is u…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s still an insightful and well written comment, but the LLM-ness does make me wonder whether this part was actually human-intended or just LLM filler: > The discipline to do it consistently enough that agents can actually retrieve and use it is what's missing, and structuring it for that purpose is genuinely underexplored territory Because I somewhat agree that discipline may be missing, but I don’t believe it to…
Suppose you spend months deeply researching a niche topic. You make your own discoveries, structure your own insights, and feed all of this tightly curated, highly specific context into an LLM. You essentially build a custom knowledge base and train the model on your exact mental framework. Is this fundamentally different from using a ghostwriter, an editor, or a highly advanced compiler? If I am doing the heavy lift…
I’m on the internet for human beings. I already read a newspaper for editors and books for ghostwriters.
Not for long though, HN is dying. Just hanging around here waiting for the next thing , I guess…