9 ms·

AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era

206 points by kjhughes 1y ago

kjhughes 1y ago
https://archive.ph/YHr9s https://archive.ph/YHr9s
apical_dendrite 1y ago
When I worked at a startup that tried to maximize revenue per employee, it was an absolute disaster for the customer. There was zero investment in quality - no dedicated QA and everyone was way too busy to worry about quality until something became a crisis. Code reviews were actively discouraged because it took people off of their assigned work to review other people's work. Automated testing and tooling were minimal. If you go to the company's subreddit, you'll see daily posts of major problems and people threatening class-action lawsuits. There were major privacy and security issues that were just ignored.
- ldjkfkdsjnv 1y ago
  Theres two types of software, the ones no one uses, and the ones people complain about
  - hackable_sand 1y ago
    Everyone should just write their own software then.
  - apical_dendrite 1y ago
    I've worked at a number of companies - the frequency and seriousness of customer issues was way beyond anything I've experienced anywhere else.
- golergka 1y ago
  Really depends on the type of business you're in. In the startup I work in, I worked almost entirely on quality of service for the last year, rarely ever on the new features — because users want to pay for reliability. If there's no investment in quality, then either the business is making a stupid decision and will pay for it, or users don't really care about it as much as you think.
- raincole 1y ago
  So did revenue per employee increase?
bgwalter 1y ago
[flagged]
- mistrial9 1y ago
  New York money is well aware of chump dust, as are the Bloomberg minions.. They know about it and frown on it heavily for real reasons.. 'Angelenos however, probably wise to do a piss test on your sales guys source: Miami Vice re-runs
geremiiah 1y ago
AI helps you cook code faster, but you still need to have a good understanding of the code. Just because the writing part is done quicker doesn't mean a developer can now shoulder more responsibility. This will only lead to burn out, because the human mind can only handle so much responsibility.
- crystal_revenge 1y ago
  > but you still need to have a good understanding of the code I've personally found this is where AI helps the most. I'm often building pretty sophisticated models that also need to scale, and nearly all SO/Google-able resources tend to be stuck at the level of "fit/predict" thinking that so many DS people remain limited to. Being able to ask questions about non-trivial models as you build them, really diving into the details of exactly how certain performance improvements work and what trade offs there are, and even just getting feed back on your approach is a huge improvement in my ability to really land a solid understanding of the problem and my solution before writing a line of code. Additionally, it's incredibly easy to make a simple mistake when modeling a complex problem and getting that immediate feedback is a kind of debugging you can otherwise only get on teams with multiple highly-skill people on them (which at a certain level is a luxury reserved only for people working a large companies). For my kind of work, vibe-coding is laughably awful, primarily because there aren't tons of examples of large ML systems for the relatively unique problem you are often tasked with. But avoiding mistakes in the initial modeling process feels like a super power. On top of that, quickly being able to refactor early prototype code into real pipelines speeds up many of the most tedious parts of the process.
  - sothatsit 1y ago
    I agree in a lot of ways, but I also feel nervous that AI could lull me into a false sense of security. I think AI could easily convince you that you understand something when really you don't. Regardless, I do find that o3 is great at auditing my plans or implementations. I will just ask "please audit this code" and it has like a 50% hit rate on giving valuable feedback to improve my work. This feels like it has a meaningful impact on improving the quality of the software that I write, and my understanding of its edge cases.
ryandrake 1y ago
It seems like a more and more recurring shareholder wet dream that companies could one day just be AI employees for digital things + robotic employees for physical things + maybe a human CEO "orchestrating" everything. No more icky employees siphoning off what should rightfully be profit for the owners. It's like this is some kind of moral imperative that business is always kind of low-key working towards. Are you rich and want to own something like a soup company? Just lease a fully-automated factory and a bunch of AI workers, and you're instantly shipping and making money! Is this capitalism's final end state?
- mechagodzilla 1y ago
  If anyone can pay-as-you-go use a fully automated factory, and the factories are interchangeable, it seems like the value of capital is nearly zero in your envisioned future. Anyone with an idea for soup can start producing it with world class efficiency, prices for consumers should be low and variety should be sky-high.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- rahimnathwani 1y ago
  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?
  - mikeocool 1y ago
    Personally, the best soups I’ve ever had were not made in kitchens that were optimized for efficiency or automation, they were optimized for quality. They weren’t cheap soups, but they sure were good.
WXLCKNO 1y ago
I'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 average. In some respects like testing, it's perhaps 10x because having proper test coverage is essential to being able to let agentic AI run by itself in a git worktree without fearing that it will fuck everything up. I do dream of a scenario where I could have a company that's equivalent to 100 or 1000 people with just a small team of close friends and trusted coworkers that are all using this kind of tooling. I think the feeling of small companies is just better and more intimate and suits me more than expanding and growing by hiring.
- charliebwrites 1y ago
  > 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?
  - jprokay13 1y ago
    If you haven’t, adding in strict(er) linting rules is an easy win. Enforcing documentation for public methods is a great one imo. The more you can do to tell the AI what you want via a “code-lint-test” loop, the better the results.
    - crgwbr 1y ago
      Honestly the same is true for human devs. As frustrating as strict linting can be for newer devs, it’s way less frustrating than having all the same issues pointed out in code review. That’s interesting because I’ve been finding that all sorts of stuff that’s good for AI is actually good for humans too, linting, fast easy to run tests, standardized code layouts, etc. Humans just have more ability to adapt to oddities at the moment, which leads to slack.
ldjkfkdsjnv 1y ago
I think this is the beginning of the end of early stage venture capital in b2b saas. Growth capital will still be there, but increasingly there will be no reason to raise. It will empower individuals with actual skill sets, rather than those with fancy schools on their resume
- lmeyerov 1y ago
  I think bar for b2c, prosumer, SMB, yes.. folks want to see fast revenue growth (vs eyeballs & ideas)... but enterprise... not as much, and that's half the b2b market Reverse there afaict, enterprise + defense tech are booming. AI means get to do a redo + extension of the code automation era. It's fairly obvious to buyers + investors this time around so don't even need to educate. Likewise, in gov/defense tech, palantir broke the dam, and most of our users there have an instinctive allergic reaction to palantir+xai, so pretty friendly.
nemothekid 1y ago
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 manager on their number of reports is now out of fashion and theres now no longer any reason to inflate team sizes.
- simonw 1y ago
  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 couple of hours at least... and there's a decent chance I would have got stuck on some minor point and given up in frustration. Transcript: https://claude.ai/share/5f0e6547-a3e9-4252-98d0-56f3141c3694 https://claude.ai/share/5f0e6547-a3e9-4252-98d0-56f3141c3694 - write-up: https://til.simonwillison.net/github/container-registry https://til.simonwillison.net/github/container-registry
  - jordanb 1y ago
    Eh I felt that way about the internet in 2010s. Seemed like virtually any question could be answered by a google query. People were making jokes that a programmer's job mostly consisted of looking things up on stack overflow. But then google started sucking and SO turned into another expertsexchange (which was itself good in the 2000s). So far from what I've experienced AI coding agents automate away the looking things up on SO part (mostly by violating OSS licenses on Github). But that part is only bad because the existing tools for doing that were intentionally enshitified.
    - tasty_freeze 1y ago
      > expertsexchange My vote for the unintentionally funniest company name. I wonder if they were aware when the landed on it, or if they were so deep in the process that it was too late to change course when they realized what they had done.
dboreham 1y ago
Like Johnny Depp in that movie..
- khazhoux 1y ago
  You’re gonna have to be more specific
- noman-land 1y ago
  How come you put two dots instead of one or three?
  - unsungNovelty 1y ago
    I thought I was the only one. :P
satvikpendem 1y ago
I read a few books the other day, The Million-dollar, One-person Business and Company of One. They both discuss how with the advances of code (to build a product with), the infrastructure to host them (with AWS so that you don't need to build data centers), and the network of people to sell to (the Internet in general, and more specifically social media, both organic and ads-based), the likelihood of running a large multi-million-dollar company all by yourself greatly increases in a way it has never done in the history of humanity before. They were written before the advent of ChatGPT and LLMs in general, especially coding related ones, so the ceiling must be even greater now, and this is doubly true for technical founders, for LLMs aren't perfect and if your vibed code eventually breaks, you'll need to know how to fix it. But yes, in the future with agents doing work on your behalf, maybe your own work becomes less and less too.
- _1tem 1y ago
  There are already several million-dollar companies of one. Pieter Levels is one such famous builder on X. CertifyTheWeb.com is another one man millionaire product on HN.
  - satvikpendem 1y ago
    Yes, Levels and many others are already covered in those books.
JaggerFoo 1y ago
Some excellent ideas presented in the article. It doesn't matter if they all pan out, just that they expand our thinking into the realm of AI and its role in the future of business startups and operations. Revenue per employee, to me, is an aside that distracts from the ideas presented.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
TaylorGood 1y ago
It’s true, especially with the “vibe” movement happening in real-time on X… “you can just do things” — I am building ai app layers b2c/b2b and while I do have an ml technical co-founder, I am largely scaling this with AI from strategy, visuals to coding. For example, with Claude created a framework for my company to scale, then built an AI powered dashboard in cursor around it as the command center. At scale we don’t need a team of more than ~5 to reach 7 fig MRR. Greg Isenberg has some of the best takes on this on X. He articulates the paradigm shift extremely well.. @gregisenberg — one example: https://x.com/gregisenberg/status/1936083456611561932?s=46 https://x.com/gregisenberg/status/1936083456611561932?s=46)
- delusional 1y ago
  > 26. lots of first-time founders will build faster than veterans because they are more AI fluent/grew up on vlogging. Ahh yes, fantastic insights.
  - TaylorGood 1y ago
    time will tell
    - delusional 1y ago
      I guess it will. Maybe the next generation of builders will attribute their success to the formative experience of watching Sargon of Akkad. I doubt it, but maybe?
      - TaylorGood 1y ago
        Lol.
runako 1y ago
AI gets top billing, but the assault via tax code on engineering employment is likely a bigger factor. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44226145 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44226145
spacemadness 1y ago
I 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 query was handled for you, thats not the bigger picture, that’s just talk.
- delusional 1y ago
  This has been an industry wide problem at silicon valley for years now. For all their talks of changing the world, what we've gotten the last decade has been taxi and hotel apps. Nothing truly revolutionizing.
  - john2x 1y ago
    The revolution is happening at the top.
    - WJW 1y ago
      Top of what? It seems to be the same few people at the top for decades now.
      - zabzonk 1y ago
        And they are mostly sociopaths.
  - const_cast 1y ago
    The best part is those two things have only gotten worse over time. Turns out, they were never really that good of an idea, they just had money to burn and legislative holes to exploit. Now Uber is more expensive than Taxis ever were, and AirBNB is virtually useless now that they have to play the same legal ballgame as hotels. Oh, and that one is more expensive too. Tech companies forget that software is easy, the real world is hard. Computers are very isolated and perfect environments. But building real stuff, in meatspace, has more variables than anyone can even conceptualize.
altairprime 1y ago
The subhead makes a specific misstatement: > Startups used to brag about valuations and venture capital. Now AI is making revenue per employee the new holy grail. The corrected form is: > Startups used to brag about valuations and venture capital. Now AI is making rate of revenue growth per employee the new holy grail. Specifically, as with all growth capitalism, it is long-term irrelevant how much revenue each employee generates. The factor that is being measured is how much each employee increases the rate of growth of revenue. If a business is growing revenue at +5% YoY, then a worker that can increase that rate by 20% (to +6% YoY) is worth keeping; a worker that can only increase revenue by 5% contributed +0% YoY after the initial boost and will be replaced by automation, AI, etc. (This is also why tech won’t invest in technical debt: it may lower expenses, but those one-time efficiencies are typically irrelevant when increasing the rate of growth of income results in far more income than the costs of the debt.)
neom 1y ago
One 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" work, way way more than I would have to do with an experienced humans. I like LLMs and I push for their use, but I'm starting to find something here and I can't put my finger on what it is, I guess they're not wide enough to capture deep nuances? As a result, they seem pretty bad at understanding how a human will react to their ideas in practice.
- ricw 1y ago
  Just do both? Need an adequate network for that though which new school ai vibe entrepreneurs might lack…
  - neom 1y ago
    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 can talk to them instead of just reading reports, like bro, you don't understand churn fundamentally, why are you looking at these numbers??
    - baxtr 1y ago
      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.
lpa22 1y ago
AWS, GCP and other cloud providers play just as large of a role in allowing for tiny teams. Used to need an ops team of 10+ people to do all the stuff on premise that AWS can do
aussieguy1234 1y ago
" Do what you do best, and let AI do the rest". Exactly the approach I'm taking with Tunnelmole, which as of right now is still a one person company with no investors. I focused on coding, which I'm good at. I'm also reasonably good at content writing, I have some articles on Hackernoon before the age of AI. So far AI has helped with - Marketing ideas and strategies - General advice on setting up a company - Tax stuff, i.e what are my options for paying myself - The logo. I used stable diffusion and an anime art model from CivitAI, had multiple candidates made, chose one, then did some minor touch ups in Gimp I'm increasingly using it for more and more coding tasks as it gets better. I'll generally use it for anything repeatable and big refactors. One of the biggest things coding wise working alone is Code Review. I don't have human colleagues at Tunnelmole who can review code for me. So I've gotten into the routine of having AI review all my changes. More than once, bugs have been prevented from being deployed to prod using this method.
jmward01 1y ago
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.
- scarface_74 1y ago
  I was also around in 1999. Most of the small companies had bad ideas that were able to get funding and died by 2001. A few were able to sell out to the bigger fools like Mark Cuban was able to sell broadcast.com to Yahoo for $10K per user.
timewizard 1y ago
> "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.
scuol 1y ago
At least for C++, I try to use copilot only for generating testing and writing ancillary scripts. tbh it's only through hard-won lessons and epic misunderstandings and screw-ups that I've built a mental model that I can use to check and verify what it's attempting to do. As much as I am definitely more productive when it comes to some dumb "JSON plumbing" feature of just adding a field to some protobuf, shuffling around some data, etc, I still can't quite trust it to not make a very subtle mistake or have it generate code that is in the same style of the current codebase (even using the system prompt to tell it as such). I've had it make such obvious mistakes that it doubles down on (either pushing back or not realizing in the first place) before I practically scream at it in the chat and then it says "oopsie haha my bad", e.g. ```c++ class Foo { int x_{}; public: bool operator==(Foo const& other) const noexcept { return x_ == x_; // <- what about other.x_? } }; ``` I just don't know at this point how to get it (Gemini or Claude or any of the GPT) to actually not drop the same subtle mistakes that are very easy to miss in the prolific amount of code it tends to write. That said, saying "cover this new feature with a comprehensive test suite" saves me from having to go through the verbose gtest setup, which I'm thoroughly grateful for.
willtemperley 1y ago
I think this is great for the world. So much less waste - imagine all the BMWs that aren’t going to be bought by middle managers or VCs, while people who know what they’re doing can build useful products.
bravetraveler 1y ago
The beatings will continue as profit improves
AbstractH24 1y ago
Funny has this goes hand in hand with the rise in fractional and contract roles If they are 1099 they aren’t part of the team, right?
Philip44 1y ago
[dead]
SwtCyber 1y ago
Will be curious to see which of these solo-AI ventures survive contact with the market...
ipaddr 1y ago
Those who rely on AI for coding do you worry you will lose the ability to code without AI assistance
scrps 1y ago
Are there any projects working on models for business management? I feel for skilled technical people the benefit would be from off-loading a lot of the management side and let them focus on the hard problems.

206 points by kjhughes 1y ago

https://archive.ph/YHr9s https://archive.ph/YHr9s

When I worked at a startup that tried to maximize revenue per employee, it was an absolute disaster for the customer. There was zero investment in quality - no dedicated QA and everyone was way too busy to worry about quality until something became a crisis. Code reviews were actively discouraged because it took people off of their assigned work to review other people's work. Automated testing and tooling were minimal. If you go to the company's subreddit, you'll see daily posts of major problems and people threatening class-action lawsuits. There were major privacy and security issues that were just ignored.

ldjkfkdsjnv 1y ago
Theres two types of software, the ones no one uses, and the ones people complain about
- hackable_sand 1y ago
  Everyone should just write their own software then.
- apical_dendrite 1y ago
  I've worked at a number of companies - the frequency and seriousness of customer issues was way beyond anything I've experienced anywhere else.
golergka 1y ago
Really depends on the type of business you're in. In the startup I work in, I worked almost entirely on quality of service for the last year, rarely ever on the new features — because users want to pay for reliability. If there's no investment in quality, then either the business is making a stupid decision and will pay for it, or users don't really care about it as much as you think.
raincole 1y ago
So did revenue per employee increase?

bgwalter 1y ago

[flagged]

mistrial9 1y ago
New York money is well aware of chump dust, as are the Bloomberg minions.. They know about it and frown on it heavily for real reasons.. 'Angelenos however, probably wise to do a piss test on your sales guys source: Miami Vice re-runs

geremiiah 1y ago

AI helps you cook code faster, but you still need to have a good understanding of the code. Just because the writing part is done quicker doesn't mean a developer can now shoulder more responsibility. This will only lead to burn out, because the human mind can only handle so much responsibility.

crystal_revenge 1y ago
> but you still need to have a good understanding of the code I've personally found this is where AI helps the most. I'm often building pretty sophisticated models that also need to scale, and nearly all SO/Google-able resources tend to be stuck at the level of "fit/predict" thinking that so many DS people remain limited to. Being able to ask questions about non-trivial models as you build them, really diving into the details of exactly how certain performance improvements work and what trade offs there are, and even just getting feed back on your approach is a huge improvement in my ability to really land a solid understanding of the problem and my solution before writing a line of code. Additionally, it's incredibly easy to make a simple mistake when modeling a complex problem and getting that immediate feedback is a kind of debugging you can otherwise only get on teams with multiple highly-skill people on them (which at a certain level is a luxury reserved only for people working a large companies). For my kind of work, vibe-coding is laughably awful, primarily because there aren't tons of examples of large ML systems for the relatively unique problem you are often tasked with. But avoiding mistakes in the initial modeling process feels like a super power. On top of that, quickly being able to refactor early prototype code into real pipelines speeds up many of the most tedious parts of the process.
- sothatsit 1y ago
  I agree in a lot of ways, but I also feel nervous that AI could lull me into a false sense of security. I think AI could easily convince you that you understand something when really you don't. Regardless, I do find that o3 is great at auditing my plans or implementations. I will just ask "please audit this code" and it has like a 50% hit rate on giving valuable feedback to improve my work. This feels like it has a meaningful impact on improving the quality of the software that I write, and my understanding of its edge cases.

ryandrake 1y ago

It seems like a more and more recurring shareholder wet dream that companies could one day just be AI employees for digital things + robotic employees for physical things + maybe a human CEO "orchestrating" everything. No more icky employees siphoning off what should rightfully be profit for the owners. It's like this is some kind of moral imperative that business is always kind of low-key working towards. Are you rich and want to own something like a soup company? Just lease a fully-automated factory and a bunch of AI workers, and you're instantly shipping and making money! Is this capitalism's final end state?

mechagodzilla 1y ago
If anyone can pay-as-you-go use a fully automated factory, and the factories are interchangeable, it seems like the value of capital is nearly zero in your envisioned future. Anyone with an idea for soup can start producing it with world class efficiency, prices for consumers should be low and variety should be sky-high.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
rahimnathwani 1y ago
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?
- mikeocool 1y ago
  Personally, the best soups I’ve ever had were not made in kitchens that were optimized for efficiency or automation, they were optimized for quality. They weren’t cheap soups, but they sure were good.

WXLCKNO 1y ago

I'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 average. In some respects like testing, it's perhaps 10x because having proper test coverage is essential to being able to let agentic AI run by itself in a git worktree without fearing that it will fuck everything up. I do dream of a scenario where I could have a company that's equivalent to 100 or 1000 people with just a small team of close friends and trusted coworkers that are all using this kind of tooling. I think the feeling of small companies is just better and more intimate and suits me more than expanding and growing by hiring.

charliebwrites 1y ago
> 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?
- jprokay13 1y ago
  If you haven’t, adding in strict(er) linting rules is an easy win. Enforcing documentation for public methods is a great one imo. The more you can do to tell the AI what you want via a “code-lint-test” loop, the better the results.
  - crgwbr 1y ago
    Honestly the same is true for human devs. As frustrating as strict linting can be for newer devs, it’s way less frustrating than having all the same issues pointed out in code review. That’s interesting because I’ve been finding that all sorts of stuff that’s good for AI is actually good for humans too, linting, fast easy to run tests, standardized code layouts, etc. Humans just have more ability to adapt to oddities at the moment, which leads to slack.

ldjkfkdsjnv 1y ago

I think this is the beginning of the end of early stage venture capital in b2b saas. Growth capital will still be there, but increasingly there will be no reason to raise. It will empower individuals with actual skill sets, rather than those with fancy schools on their resume

lmeyerov 1y ago
I think bar for b2c, prosumer, SMB, yes.. folks want to see fast revenue growth (vs eyeballs & ideas)... but enterprise... not as much, and that's half the b2b market Reverse there afaict, enterprise + defense tech are booming. AI means get to do a redo + extension of the code automation era. It's fairly obvious to buyers + investors this time around so don't even need to educate. Likewise, in gov/defense tech, palantir broke the dam, and most of our users there have an instinctive allergic reaction to palantir+xai, so pretty friendly.

nemothekid 1y ago

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 manager on their number of reports is now out of fashion and theres now no longer any reason to inflate team sizes.

simonw 1y ago
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 couple of hours at least... and there's a decent chance I would have got stuck on some minor point and given up in frustration. Transcript: https://claude.ai/share/5f0e6547-a3e9-4252-98d0-56f3141c3694 https://claude.ai/share/5f0e6547-a3e9-4252-98d0-56f3141c3694 - write-up: https://til.simonwillison.net/github/container-registry https://til.simonwillison.net/github/container-registry
- jordanb 1y ago
  Eh I felt that way about the internet in 2010s. Seemed like virtually any question could be answered by a google query. People were making jokes that a programmer's job mostly consisted of looking things up on stack overflow. But then google started sucking and SO turned into another expertsexchange (which was itself good in the 2000s). So far from what I've experienced AI coding agents automate away the looking things up on SO part (mostly by violating OSS licenses on Github). But that part is only bad because the existing tools for doing that were intentionally enshitified.
  - tasty_freeze 1y ago
    > expertsexchange My vote for the unintentionally funniest company name. I wonder if they were aware when the landed on it, or if they were so deep in the process that it was too late to change course when they realized what they had done.

dboreham 1y ago

Like Johnny Depp in that movie..

khazhoux 1y ago
You’re gonna have to be more specific
noman-land 1y ago
How come you put two dots instead of one or three?
- unsungNovelty 1y ago
  I thought I was the only one. :P

satvikpendem 1y ago

I read a few books the other day, The Million-dollar, One-person Business and Company of One. They both discuss how with the advances of code (to build a product with), the infrastructure to host them (with AWS so that you don't need to build data centers), and the network of people to sell to (the Internet in general, and more specifically social media, both organic and ads-based), the likelihood of running a large multi-million-dollar company all by yourself greatly increases in a way it has never done in the history of humanity before. They were written before the advent of ChatGPT and LLMs in general, especially coding related ones, so the ceiling must be even greater now, and this is doubly true for technical founders, for LLMs aren't perfect and if your vibed code eventually breaks, you'll need to know how to fix it. But yes, in the future with agents doing work on your behalf, maybe your own work becomes less and less too.

_1tem 1y ago
There are already several million-dollar companies of one. Pieter Levels is one such famous builder on X. CertifyTheWeb.com is another one man millionaire product on HN.
- satvikpendem 1y ago
  Yes, Levels and many others are already covered in those books.

JaggerFoo 1y ago

Some excellent ideas presented in the article. It doesn't matter if they all pan out, just that they expand our thinking into the realm of AI and its role in the future of business startups and operations. Revenue per employee, to me, is an aside that distracts from the ideas presented.

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TaylorGood 1y ago

It’s true, especially with the “vibe” movement happening in real-time on X… “you can just do things” — I am building ai app layers b2c/b2b and while I do have an ml technical co-founder, I am largely scaling this with AI from strategy, visuals to coding. For example, with Claude created a framework for my company to scale, then built an AI powered dashboard in cursor around it as the command center. At scale we don’t need a team of more than ~5 to reach 7 fig MRR. Greg Isenberg has some of the best takes on this on X. He articulates the paradigm shift extremely well.. @gregisenberg — one example: https://x.com/gregisenberg/status/1936083456611561932?s=46 https://x.com/gregisenberg/status/1936083456611561932?s=46)

delusional 1y ago
> 26. lots of first-time founders will build faster than veterans because they are more AI fluent/grew up on vlogging. Ahh yes, fantastic insights.
- TaylorGood 1y ago
  time will tell
  - delusional 1y ago
    I guess it will. Maybe the next generation of builders will attribute their success to the formative experience of watching Sargon of Akkad. I doubt it, but maybe?
    - TaylorGood 1y ago
      Lol.

runako 1y ago

AI gets top billing, but the assault via tax code on engineering employment is likely a bigger factor. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44226145 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44226145

spacemadness 1y ago

I 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 query was handled for you, thats not the bigger picture, that’s just talk.

delusional 1y ago
This has been an industry wide problem at silicon valley for years now. For all their talks of changing the world, what we've gotten the last decade has been taxi and hotel apps. Nothing truly revolutionizing.
- john2x 1y ago
  The revolution is happening at the top.
  - WJW 1y ago
    Top of what? It seems to be the same few people at the top for decades now.
    - zabzonk 1y ago
      And they are mostly sociopaths.
- const_cast 1y ago
  The best part is those two things have only gotten worse over time. Turns out, they were never really that good of an idea, they just had money to burn and legislative holes to exploit. Now Uber is more expensive than Taxis ever were, and AirBNB is virtually useless now that they have to play the same legal ballgame as hotels. Oh, and that one is more expensive too. Tech companies forget that software is easy, the real world is hard. Computers are very isolated and perfect environments. But building real stuff, in meatspace, has more variables than anyone can even conceptualize.

altairprime 1y ago

The subhead makes a specific misstatement: > Startups used to brag about valuations and venture capital. Now AI is making revenue per employee the new holy grail. The corrected form is: > Startups used to brag about valuations and venture capital. Now AI is making rate of revenue growth per employee the new holy grail. Specifically, as with all growth capitalism, it is long-term irrelevant how much revenue each employee generates. The factor that is being measured is how much each employee increases the rate of growth of revenue. If a business is growing revenue at +5% YoY, then a worker that can increase that rate by 20% (to +6% YoY) is worth keeping; a worker that can only increase revenue by 5% contributed +0% YoY after the initial boost and will be replaced by automation, AI, etc. (This is also why tech won’t invest in technical debt: it may lower expenses, but those one-time efficiencies are typically irrelevant when increasing the rate of growth of income results in far more income than the costs of the debt.)

neom 1y ago

One 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" work, way way more than I would have to do with an experienced humans. I like LLMs and I push for their use, but I'm starting to find something here and I can't put my finger on what it is, I guess they're not wide enough to capture deep nuances? As a result, they seem pretty bad at understanding how a human will react to their ideas in practice.

ricw 1y ago
Just do both? Need an adequate network for that though which new school ai vibe entrepreneurs might lack…
- neom 1y ago
  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 can talk to them instead of just reading reports, like bro, you don't understand churn fundamentally, why are you looking at these numbers??
  - baxtr 1y ago
    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.

lpa22 1y ago

AWS, GCP and other cloud providers play just as large of a role in allowing for tiny teams. Used to need an ops team of 10+ people to do all the stuff on premise that AWS can do

aussieguy1234 1y ago

" Do what you do best, and let AI do the rest". Exactly the approach I'm taking with Tunnelmole, which as of right now is still a one person company with no investors. I focused on coding, which I'm good at. I'm also reasonably good at content writing, I have some articles on Hackernoon before the age of AI. So far AI has helped with - Marketing ideas and strategies - General advice on setting up a company - Tax stuff, i.e what are my options for paying myself - The logo. I used stable diffusion and an anime art model from CivitAI, had multiple candidates made, chose one, then did some minor touch ups in Gimp I'm increasingly using it for more and more coding tasks as it gets better. I'll generally use it for anything repeatable and big refactors. One of the biggest things coding wise working alone is Code Review. I don't have human colleagues at Tunnelmole who can review code for me. So I've gotten into the routine of having AI review all my changes. More than once, bugs have been prevented from being deployed to prod using this method.

jmward01 1y ago

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.

scarface_74 1y ago
I was also around in 1999. Most of the small companies had bad ideas that were able to get funding and died by 2001. A few were able to sell out to the bigger fools like Mark Cuban was able to sell broadcast.com to Yahoo for $10K per user.

timewizard 1y ago

> "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.

scuol 1y ago

At least for C++, I try to use copilot only for generating testing and writing ancillary scripts. tbh it's only through hard-won lessons and epic misunderstandings and screw-ups that I've built a mental model that I can use to check and verify what it's attempting to do. As much as I am definitely more productive when it comes to some dumb "JSON plumbing" feature of just adding a field to some protobuf, shuffling around some data, etc, I still can't quite trust it to not make a very subtle mistake or have it generate code that is in the same style of the current codebase (even using the system prompt to tell it as such). I've had it make such obvious mistakes that it doubles down on (either pushing back or not realizing in the first place) before I practically scream at it in the chat and then it says "oopsie haha my bad", e.g. ```c++ class Foo { int x_{}; public: bool operator==(Foo const& other) const noexcept { return x_ == x_; // <- what about other.x_? } }; ``` I just don't know at this point how to get it (Gemini or Claude or any of the GPT) to actually not drop the same subtle mistakes that are very easy to miss in the prolific amount of code it tends to write. That said, saying "cover this new feature with a comprehensive test suite" saves me from having to go through the verbose gtest setup, which I'm thoroughly grateful for.

willtemperley 1y ago

I think this is great for the world. So much less waste - imagine all the BMWs that aren’t going to be bought by middle managers or VCs, while people who know what they’re doing can build useful products.

bravetraveler 1y ago

The beatings will continue as profit improves

AbstractH24 1y ago

Funny has this goes hand in hand with the rise in fractional and contract roles If they are 1099 they aren’t part of the team, right?

Philip44 1y ago

[dead]

SwtCyber 1y ago

Will be curious to see which of these solo-AI ventures survive contact with the market...

ipaddr 1y ago

Those who rely on AI for coding do you worry you will lose the ability to code without AI assistance

scrps 1y ago

Are there any projects working on models for business management? I feel for skilled technical people the benefit would be from off-loading a lot of the management side and let them focus on the hard problems.