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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

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.
    - Izkata 1y ago
      They're still around, long ago they bought the "experts-exchange" domain name and redirected the original, then at some point after that they abandoned the original entirely.
  - sothatsit 1y ago
    I wonder whether we will avoid some enshittification of AI because people are willing to pay for it. It doesn't all have to run off ads (although I'm sure all the free tiers will contain ads eventually).
- nemothekid 1y ago
  I'm not denying LLMs are useful. I believe the trend was going to happen whether regardless of how useful LLMs are. AI ended up being a convenient excuse for big tech to justify their layoffs, but Twitter already painted a story about how bloated some organizations were. Now that there is no longer any status in having 9,001 reports the pendulum has swing the other way - it's now sexy to brag about how little people you employ.
- homebrewer 1y ago
  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.
- data-ottawa 1y ago
  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.
TZubiri 1y ago
"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 and somehow there's a reply of a bear driving a bicycle as the top response. Twitter is dead, just waiting for someone to call it.
- data-ottawa 1y ago
  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.
- relativ575 1y ago
  Huh? Look at the hottest topic at the moment: https://www.twz.com/news-features/u-s-has-attacked-irans-nuclear-facilities https://www.twz.com/news-features/u-s-has-attacked-irans-nuc... and see for yourself if Twitter is dead.
  - jakevoytko 1y ago
    I was literally just comparing my Twitter and Bluesky feeds. The only discussions worth reading were on Bluesky. It's a shame. Twitter used to be the undefeated king of breaking news.
  - const_cast 1y ago
    1. For the love of God please stop saying "Huh?" This is not Reddit, nor is the is comment you're replying to so unbelievably stupid that you are literally dumbfounded. I can tell, because you managed to put together a reply after the "Huh?" 2. 80% of the posts in that article-thingy are "no longer available".
heraldgeezer 1y ago
So I can't hide in the masses watching Netflix anymore?
gedy 1y ago
> 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.
jayd16 1y ago
Yeah but I think it's more that the money isn't there to throw bodies at an ok idea and hope you can turn revenue into profit down the line. ...unless you're shoveling AI itself, I guess.
SwtCyber 1y ago
The whole "empire building" mindset definitely feels outdated now - nobody's impressed by how many direct reports you have anymore

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.
  - Izkata 1y ago
    They're still around, long ago they bought the "experts-exchange" domain name and redirected the original, then at some point after that they abandoned the original entirely.
- sothatsit 1y ago
  I wonder whether we will avoid some enshittification of AI because people are willing to pay for it. It doesn't all have to run off ads (although I'm sure all the free tiers will contain ads eventually).
nemothekid 1y ago
I'm not denying LLMs are useful. I believe the trend was going to happen whether regardless of how useful LLMs are. AI ended up being a convenient excuse for big tech to justify their layoffs, but Twitter already painted a story about how bloated some organizations were. Now that there is no longer any status in having 9,001 reports the pendulum has swing the other way - it's now sexy to brag about how little people you employ.
homebrewer 1y ago
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.
data-ottawa 1y ago
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.

TZubiri 1y ago

"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 and somehow there's a reply of a bear driving a bicycle as the top response. Twitter is dead, just waiting for someone to call it.

data-ottawa 1y ago
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.
relativ575 1y ago
Huh? Look at the hottest topic at the moment: https://www.twz.com/news-features/u-s-has-attacked-irans-nuclear-facilities https://www.twz.com/news-features/u-s-has-attacked-irans-nuc... and see for yourself if Twitter is dead.
- jakevoytko 1y ago
  I was literally just comparing my Twitter and Bluesky feeds. The only discussions worth reading were on Bluesky. It's a shame. Twitter used to be the undefeated king of breaking news.
- const_cast 1y ago
  1. For the love of God please stop saying "Huh?" This is not Reddit, nor is the is comment you're replying to so unbelievably stupid that you are literally dumbfounded. I can tell, because you managed to put together a reply after the "Huh?" 2. 80% of the posts in that article-thingy are "no longer available".

heraldgeezer 1y ago

So I can't hide in the masses watching Netflix anymore?

gedy 1y ago

> 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.

jayd16 1y ago

Yeah but I think it's more that the money isn't there to throw bodies at an ok idea and hope you can turn revenue into profit down the line. ...unless you're shoveling AI itself, I guess.

SwtCyber 1y ago

The whole "empire building" mindset definitely feels outdated now - nobody's impressed by how many direct reports you have anymore