19 ms·

It’s been a very hard year

• Havoc 11mo ago
  Everyone gets to make their own choices and take principled stances of their choosing. I don’t find that persuasive as a buy my course pitch though
  • johnnyanmac 11mo ago
    I do. But sadly I don't have money and December/January are my slowest months these past few years. I'm exactly that "money is tight" crowd being talked about.
• Swizec 11mo ago
  I’ve seen Picallilli’s stuff around and it looks extremely solid. But you can’t beat the market. You either have what they want to buy, or you don’t. > Landing projects for Set Studio has been extremely difficult, especially as we won’t work on product marketing for AI stuff, from a moral standpoint, but the vast majority of enquiries have been for exactly that The market is speaking. Long-term you’ll find out who’s wrong, but the market can usually stay irrational for much longer than you can stay in business. I think everyone in the programming education business is feeling the struggle right now. In my opinion this business died 2 years ago – https://swizec.com/blog/the-programming-tutorial-seo-industry-is-dead/ https://swizec.com/blog/the-programming-tutorial-seo-industr...
  • tonyhart7 11mo ago
    what happen if the market is right and this is "new normal"????? same like StackOverflow down today and seems like not everyone cares anymore, back then it would totally cause breakdown because SO is vital
    • indemnity 11mo ago
      I haven’t visited StackOverflow for years.
      • nrhrjrjrjtntbt 11mo ago
        I stopped using it much even before the AI wave.
      • ido 11mo ago
        Ive honestly never intentionally visited it (as in, went to the root page and started following links) - it was just where google sent me when searching answers to specific technical questions.
        • jv22222 11mo ago
          It became as annoying as experts exchange the very thing it railed against!
          • wizzwizz4 11mo ago
            What was annoying about it?
            • deleted 11mo ago
              [deleted]
            • forgetfulness 11mo ago
              They SEOd their way into being a top search result by showing crawlers both questions and answers, but when you visited the answer would be paywalled Stack Overflow’s moderation is overbearing and all, but that’s nowhere near at the same level as Expert Exchange’s baiting and switching
            • rkachowski 11mo ago
              the gatekeeping, gaming the system, capricious moderation (e.g. flagged as duplicate), and general attitude led it to be quite an insufferable part of the internet. There was a meme about how the best way to get a response is to answer your own question in an obviously incorrect fashion, because people want to tell you why you're wrong rather than actively help.
    • m463 11mo ago
      buggywhips are having a temporary setback.
      • throwaway2037 11mo ago
        I had a "milk-up-the-nose" laughter moment when I read this comment.
      • balamatom 11mo ago
        leaded gasoline is making a killing, though
      • vkou 11mo ago
        The coach drivers found other work, their horses got turned into glue.
    • lmm 11mo ago
      > what happen if the market is right and this is "new normal"????? Then there's an oversupply of programmers, salaries will crash, and lots of people will have to switch careers. It's happened before.
      • yungwarlock 11mo ago
        I'm young, please when was that and in what industry
        • forgetfreeman 11mo ago
          .com implosion, tech jobs of all kinds went from "we'll hire anyone who knows how to use a mouse" to the tech jobs section of the classifieds was omitted entirely for 20 months. There have been other bumps in the road since then but that was a real eye-opener.
          • tonyhart7 11mo ago
            well same like covid right??? digital/tech company overhiring because everyone is home and at the same time the rise of AI reduce the number of headcount covid overhiring + AI usage = massive layoff we ever see in decades
            • short_sells_poo 11mo ago
              It was nothing like covid. The dot com crash lasted years where tech was a dead sector. Equity valuations kept declining year after year. People couldn't find jobs in tech at all. There are still plenty of tech jobs these days, just less than there were during covid, but tech itself is still in a massive expansionary cycle. We'll see how the AI bubble lasts, and what the fallout of it bursting will be. The key point is that the going is still exceptionally good. The posts talking about experienced programmers having to flip burgers in the early 2000s is not an exaggeration.
              • nradov 11mo ago
    • _zoltan_ 11mo ago
      you mixed up "is dead" with "is vital" :-)
  • jillesvangurp 11mo ago
    This is the type of business that's going to be hit hard by AI. And the type of businesses that survive will be the ones that integrate AI into their business the most successfully. It's an enabler, a multiplier. It's just another tool and those wielding the tools the best, tend to do well. Taking a moral stance against AI might make you feel good but doesn't serve the customer in the end. They need value for money. And you can get a lot of value from AI these days; especially if you are doing marketing, frontend design, etc. and all the other stuff a studio like this would be doing. The expertise and skill still matter. But customers are going to get a lot further without such a studio and the remaining market is going to be smaller and much more competitive. There's a lot of other work emerging though. IMHO the software integration market is where the action is going to be for the next decade or so. Legacy ERP systems, finance, insurance, medical software, etc. None of that stuff is going away or at risk of being replaced with some vibe coded thing. There are decades worth of still widely used and critically important software that can be integrated, adapted, etc. for the modern era. That work can be partly AI assisted of course. But you need to deeply understand the current market to be credible there. For any new things, the ambition level is just going to be much higher and require more skill. Arguing against progress as it is happening is as old as the tech industry. It never works. There's a generation of new programmers coming into the market and they are not going to hold back.
    • wartywhoa23 11mo ago
      > Taking a moral stance against AI might make you feel good but doesn't serve the customer in the end. They need value for money. And you can get a lot of value from AI these days; especially if you are doing marketing, frontend design, etc. and all the other stuff a studio like this would be doing. So let's all just give zero fucks about our moral values and just multiply monetary ones.
      • senordevnyc 11mo ago
        [flagged]
        • nothrabannosir 11mo ago
  • jimmydddd 11mo ago
    Not wanting to help the rich get richer means you'll be fighting an uphill battle. The rich typically have more money to spend. And as others have commented, not doing anything AI related in 2025-2026 is going to further limit the business. Good luck though.
    • Aurornis 11mo ago
      Rejecting clients based on how you wish the world would be is a strategy that only works when you don’t care about the money or you have so many clients that you can pick and choose. Running a services business has always been about being able to identify trends and adapt to market demand. Every small business I know has been adapting to trends or trying to stay ahead of them from the start, from retail to product to service businesses.
      • bluGill 11mo ago
        Rejecting clients when you have enough is a sound business decision. Some clients are too annoying to serve. Some clients don't want to pay. Sometimes you have more work than you can do... It is easy to think when things are bad that you must take any and all clients (and when things are bad enough you might be forced to), but that is not a good plan and to be avoided. You should be choosing your clients. It is very powerful when you can afford to tell someone I don't need your business.
        • tacker2000 11mo ago
          Sure, but it seems here that they are rejecting everything related to AI, which is probably not a smart business move, as they also remark, since this year was much harder for them. The fact is, a lot of new business is getting done in this field, with or without them. If they want to take the "high road", so be it, but they should be prepared to accepts the consequences of worse revenues.
          • bluGill 11mo ago
            Is it though? We don't know the future. Is this just a dip in a growing business, or sign of things to come? Even if AI does better than the most optimistic projections it could still be great for a few people to be anti-ai if they are in the right place selling to the right people. Without knowing the future I cannot answer.
  • arthurfirst 11mo ago
    I get the moral argument and even agree with it but we are a minority and of course we expect to be able sell our professional skills -- but if you are 'right' and out of business nobody will know. Is that any better than 'wrong' and still in business? You might as well work on product marketing for ai because that is where the client dollars are allocated. If it's hype at least you stayed afloat. If it's not maybe u find a new angle if you can survive long enough? Just survive and wait for things to shake out.
    • trial3 11mo ago
      > but if you are 'right' and out of business nobody will know. Is that any better than 'wrong' and still in business? yes [0] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raytheon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raytheon
      • anonymars 11mo ago
        Can you... elaborate?
        • jfindper 11mo ago
          Not the parent. I believe that they are bringing up a moral argument. Which I'm sympathetic too, having quit a job before because I found that my personal morals didn't align with the company, and the cognitive dissonance to continue working there was weighing heavily on me. The money wasn't worth the mental fight every day. So, yes, in some cases it is better to be "right" and be forced out of business than "wrong" and remain in business. But you have to look beyond just revenue numbers. And different people will have different ideas of "right" and "wrong", obviously.
          • arthurfirst 11mo ago
            Moral arguments are a luxury of thinkers and only a small percentage of people can be reasoned with that way anyways. You can manipulate on morals but not reason in most cases. Agreed that you cannot be in a toxic situation and not have it affect you -- so if THAT is the case -- by all means exit asap. If it's perceived ethical conflict the only one you need to worry about is the golden rule -- and I do not mean 'he who has the gold makes the rules' I mean the real one. If that conflicts with what you are doing then also probably make an exit -- but many do not care trust me... They would take everything from you and feel justified as long as they are told (just told) it's the right thing. They never ask themselves. They do not really think for themselves. This is most people. Sadly.
  • skeeter2020 11mo ago
    markets are not binary though, and this is also what it looks like when you're early (unfortunately similar to when you're late too). So they may totally be able to carve out a valid & sustainable market exactly because theyu're not doing what everyone else is doing right now. I'm currently taking online Spanish lessons with a company that uses people as teachers, even though this area is under intense attack from AI. There is no comparison, and what's really great is using many tools (including AI) to enhance a human product. So far we're a long way from the AI tutor that my boss keeps envisioning. I actually doubt he's tried to learn anything deep lately, let alone validated his "vision".
  • kagevf 11mo ago
    I think your post pretty well illustrates how LLMs can and can't work. Favoriting this so I can point people to it in the future. I see so many extreme opinions on it like from how LLM is basically AGI to how it's "total garbage" but this is a good, balanced - and concise! - overview.
  • jimbokun 11mo ago
    Has anyone considered that the demand for web sites and software in general is collapsing? Everyone and everything has a website and an app already. Is the market becoming saturated?
    • Aperocky 11mo ago
      The demand is massively increasing, but filled by less people and more GPUs.
    • oldandboring 11mo ago
      I know a guy who has this theory, in essence at least. Businesses use software and other high-tech to make efficiency gains (fewer people getting more done). The opportunities for developing and selling software were historically in digitizing industries that were totally analog. Those opportunities are all but dried up and we're now several generations into giving all those industries new, improved, but ultimately incremental efficiency gains with improved technology. What makes AI and robotics interesting, from this perspective, is the renewed potential for large-scale workforce reduction.
    • HeyLaughingBoy 11mo ago
      And new companies are created every day, and new systems are designed every day, and new applications are needed every day. The market is nowhere close to being saturated.
      • jimbokun 11mo ago
        You're just begging the question. What are examples of these "new applications" that are needed every day? Do consumers really want them? Or are software and other companies just creating them because it benefits those companies?
        • HeyLaughingBoy 11mo ago
          Most of the software written worldwide is created for internal company usage. Consumers don't even know that it exists. I've worked (still do!) for engineering services companies. Other businesses pay us to build systems for them to either use in-house or resell downstream. I have to assume that if they're paying for it, they see profit potential.
  • xnx 11mo ago
    > In my opinion this business died 2 years ago It was an offshoot bubble of the bootcamp bubble which was inflated by ZIRP.
• jumploops 11mo ago
  > we won’t work on product marketing for AI stuff, from a moral standpoint, but the vast majority of enquiries have been for exactly that Although there’s a ton of hype in “AI” right now (and most products are over-promising and under-delivering), this seems like a strange hill to die on. imo LLMs are (currently) good at 3 things: 1. Education 2. Structuring unstructured data 3. Turning natural language into code From this viewpoint, it seems there is a lot of opportunity to both help new clients as well as create more compelling courses for your students. No need to buy the hype, but no reason to die from it either.
  • ttiurani 11mo ago
    > imo LLMs are (currently) good at 3 things Notice the phrase "from a moral standpoint". You can't argue against a moral stance by stating solely what is, because the question for them is what ought to be.
    • weird-eye-issue 11mo ago
      I think some people prefer living in reality
      • computerthings 11mo ago
        [dead]
    • strken 11mo ago
      Really depends what the moral objection is. If it's "no machine may speak my glorious tongue", then there's little to be said; if it's "AI is theft", then you can maybe make an argument about hypothetical models trained on public domain text using solar power and reinforced by willing volunteers; if it's "AI is a bubble and I don't want to defraud investors", then you can indeed argue the object-level facts.
      • ttiurani 11mo ago
        Indeed, facts are part of the moral discussion in ways you outlined. My objection was that just listing some facts/opinions about what AI can do right now is not enough for that discussion. I wanted to make this point here explicitly because lately I've seen this complete erasure of the moral dimension from AI and tech, and to me that's a very scary development.
• anovikov 11mo ago
  Interesting. I agree that this has been a hard year, hardest in a decade. But comparison with 2020 is just surprising. I mean, in 2020 crazy amounts of money were just thrown around left and right no? For me, it was the easiest year of my career when i basically did nothing and picked up money thrown at me.
  • nrhrjrjrjtntbt 11mo ago
    Why would your company or business suddenly require no effort due to covid.
    • anovikov 11mo ago
      Too much demand, all of a sudden. Money got printed and i went from near bankruptcy in mid-Feb 2020 to being awash with money by mid-June. And it continued growing nonstop all the way through ~early Sep 2024, and been slowing down ever since, by now coming to an almost complete stop - to the point i ever fired all sales staff because they were treading water with no even calls let alone deals, for half a year before being dismissed in mid-July this year. I think it won't return - custom dev is done. The myth of "hiring coders to get rich" is over. No surprise it did, because it never worked, sooner or later people had to realise it. I may check again in 2-3 years how market is doing, but i'm not at all hopeful. Switched into miltech where demand is real.
• _ttg 11mo ago
  I want to sympathize but enforcing a moral blockade on the "vast majority" of inbound inquiries is a self-inflicted wound, not a business failure. This guy is hardly a victim when the bottleneck is explicitly his own refusal to adapt.
  • venturecruelty 11mo ago
    Survival is easy if you just sell out.
    • _ttg 11mo ago
      if the alternative to 'selling out' is making your business unviable and having to beg the internet for handouts(essentially), then yes, you should "sell out" every time.
      • owenthejumper 11mo ago
        The guy won’t work with AI, but works with Google…
        • averageRoyalty 11mo ago
          Thank you. I would imagine the entire Fortune 500 list passes the line of "evil", drawing that line at AI is weird. I assume it's a mask for fear people have of their industry becoming redundant, rather than a real morality argument.
        • johnnyanmac 11mo ago
          "Works with Google" in what way? And at what tome-frame? Even as someone who's actively decoupling from Google it's hard to truly de-Googlefy in this world as is.
      • venturecruelty 11mo ago
        "I have to do this societally deleterious thing or else someone else will." Is that the world you want to live in?
• AIorNot 11mo ago
  Sorry for them- after I got laid off in 2023 I had a devil of a time finding work to the point my unemployment ran out - 20 years as a dev and tech lead and full stack, including stints as a EM and CTO Since then I pivoted to AI and Gen AI startups- money is tight and I dont have health insurance but at least I have a job…
  • wickedsight 11mo ago
    Come to Europe. Salaries are (much) lower, but we can use good devs and you'll have vacation days and health care.
    • klardotsh 11mo ago
      Moving to Europe is anything but trivial. Have you looked at y'all's immigration processes recently? It can be a real bear.
      • nothrabannosir 11mo ago
        If you have a US or Japanese passport and want to try NL: https://expatlaw.nl/dutch-american-friendship-treaty https://expatlaw.nl/dutch-american-friendship-treaty aka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DAFT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DAFT . It applies to freelancers.
        • wickedsight 11mo ago
          Yeah, I'm in NL, so this is my frame of reference. Also, in many companies English is the main language, so that helps.
        • AIorNot 11mo ago
          Interesting thanks!
      • kergonath 11mo ago
        Yeah. It is much harder now than it used to be. I know a couple of people who came from the US ~15 to 10 years ago and they had it easy. It was still a nightmare with banks that don’t want to deal with US citizens, though. As Americans, getting a long-term visa or residency card is not too hard, provided you have a good job. It’s getting the job that’s become more difficult. For other nationalities, it can range from very easy to very hard.
• ChrisArchitect 11mo ago
  Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46070842 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46070842
  • johnnyanmac 11mo ago
    Well, glad this one wasn't flagged by the AI defenders. It was an interesting and frank look at the situation.
• deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
• frankhsu 11mo ago
  I agree that this year has been extremely difficult, but as far as I know, a large number of companies and individuals still made a fortune. Two fundamental laws of nature: the strong prey on the weak, and survival of the fittest. Therefore, why is it that those who survive are not the strong preying on the weak, but rather the "fittest"? Next year's development of AI may be even more astonishing, continuing to kill off large companies and small teams unable to adapt to the market. Only by constantly adapting can we survive in this fierce competition.
• paulsutter 11mo ago
  > we won’t work on product marketing for AI stuff, from a moral standpoint Can someone explain this?
  • powerclue 11mo ago
    Some folks have moral concerns about AI. They include: * The environmental cost of inference in aggregate and training in specific is non-negligible * Training is performed (it is assumed) with material that was not consented to be trained upon. Some consider this to be akin to plagiarism or even theft. * AI displaces labor, weakening the workers across all industries, but especially junior folks. This consolidates power into the hands of the people selling AI. * The primary companies who are selling AI products have, at times, controversial pasts or leaders. * Many products are adding AI where it makes little sense, and those systems are performing poorly. Nevertheless, some companies shove short AI everywhere, cheapening products across a range of industries. * The social impacts of AI, particularly generative media and shopping in places like YouTube, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, etc are not well understood and could contribute to increased radicalization and Balkanization. * AI is enabling an attention Gish-gallop in places like search engines, where good results are being shoved out by slop. Hopefully you can read these and understand why someone might have moral concerns, even if you do not. (These are not my opinions, but they are opinions other people hold strongly. Please don't downvote me for trying to provide a neutral answer to this person's question.)
    • lukan 11mo ago
      "Please don't downvote me for trying to provide a neutral answer to this person's question" Please note, that there are some accounts downvoting any comment talking about downvoting by principle.
    • simianwords 11mo ago
      These points are so wide and multi dimensionsal that one must really wonder whether they were looking for reasons for concern.
      • 11mo ago
• mmaunder 11mo ago
  [flagged]
• black_13 11mo ago
  [dead]
• Simon321 11mo ago
  >especially as we won’t work on product marketing for AI stuff, from a moral standpoint, but the vast majority of enquiries have been for exactly that. I intentionally ignored the biggest invention of the 21st century out of strange personal beliefs and now my business is going bankrupt
  • hutattedonmyarm 11mo ago
    I don't think it's fair to call them "strange" personal beliefs
    • averageRoyalty 11mo ago
      It probably depends on your circle. I find those beliefs strange, seems like moral relativism.
    • Glemkloksdjf 11mo ago
      I personally would call them ignorant beliefs.
  • Mistletoe 11mo ago
    Yes I find this a bit odd. AI is a tool, what specific part of it do you find so objectionable OP? For me, I know they are never going to put the genie back in the bottle, we will never get back the electricity spent on it, I might as well use it. We finally got a pretty good Multivac we can talk to and for me it usually gives the right answers back. It is a once in a lifetime type invention we get to enjoy and use. I was king of the AI haters but around Gemini 2.5 it just became so good that if you are hating it or criticizing it you aren’t looking at it objectively anymore.
• senordevnyc 11mo ago
  It’s ironic that Andy calls himself “ruthlessly pragmatic”, but his business is failing because of a principled stand in turning down a high volume of inbound requests. After reading a few of his views on AI, it seems pretty clear to me that his objections are not based in a pragmatic view that AI is ineffective (though he claims this), but rather an ideological view that they should not be used. Ironically, while ChatGPT isn’t a great writer, I was even more annoyed by the tone of this article and the incredible overuse of italics for emphasis.
  • Magmalgebra 11mo ago
    Yeah. For all the excesses of the current AI craze there's a lot of real meat to it that will obviously survive the hype cycle. User education, for example, can be done in ways that don't even feel like gen AI in ways that can drastically improve activation e.g. recommendation to use feature X based on activity Y, tailored to their use case. If you won't even lean into things like this you're just leaving yourself behind.
    • johnnyanmac 11mo ago
      >here's a lot of real meat to it that will obviously survive the hype cycle. Okay. When the hype cycle dies we can re-evaluate. Stances aren't set in stone. >If you won't even lean into things like this I'm sure Andy knows what kind of business was in his clients and used that to inform his acceptance/rejection of projects. It mentions web marketing so it doesn't seem like much edutech crossed ways here.
• qingcharles 11mo ago
  Andy Bell is absolute top tier when it comes to CSS + HTML, so when even the best are struggling you know it's starting to get hard out there.
  • senordevnyc 11mo ago
    Being absolute top tier at what has become a commodity skillset that can be done “good enough” by AI for pennies for 99.9999% of customers is not a good place to be…
    • brazukadev 11mo ago
      When 99.99% of the customers have garbage as a website, 0.01% will grow much faster and topple the incumbents, nothing changed.
      • nkmnz 11mo ago
        Lots of successful companies have garbage as a website (successful in whatever sense, from Fortune 500 to neighbourhood stores).
        • johnnyanmac 11mo ago
          Are they successful companies despite a bad websote, or companies successful because they knew where to stop cutting corners that lead to success? I suspect it's the former.
      • alecco 11mo ago
        Amazon has "garbage as a website" and they seem to be doing just fine.
      • dewey 11mo ago
        A lesson many developers have to learn is that code quality / purity of engineering is not a thing that really moves the needle for 90% of companies. Having the most well tested backend and beautiful frontend that works across all browsers and devices and not just on the main 3 browsers your customers use isn't paying the bills.
• shubhamjain 11mo ago
  > Landing projects for Set Studio has been extremely difficult, especially as we won’t work on product marketing for AI stuff, from a moral standpoint, but the vast majority of enquiries have been for exactly that I started TextQuery[1] with same moralistic standing. Not in respect of using AI or not, but that most software industry is suffering from rot that places more importance on making money, forcing subscription vs making something beautiful and detail-focused. I poured time in optimizing selections, perfecting autocomplete, and wrestling with Monaco’s thin documentation. However, I failed to make it sustainable business. My motivation ran out. And what I thought would be fun multi-year journey, collapsed into burnout and a dead-end project. I have to say my time was better spent on building something sustainable, making more money, and optimizing the details once having that. It was naïve to obsess over subtleties that only a handful of users would ever notice. There’s nothing wrong with taking pride in your work, but you can’t ignore what the market actually values, because that's what will make you money, and that's what will keep your business and motivation alive. [1]: https://textquery.app/ https://textquery.app/
  • nicbou 11mo ago
    That is a beautiful product. How unfortunate!
  • doug_durham 11mo ago
    Software is a means to an end. It always has been. There are a privileged few who have the luxury of being able to thoughtfully craft software. The attention to detail needs to go into what people see, not in the code underneath.
  • johnnyanmac 11mo ago
    >It was naïve to obsess over subtleties that only a handful of users would ever notice. "When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through." - Steve jobs Didn't take long for people to abandon their principles, huh?
• BrenBarn 11mo ago
  In contrast to others, I just want to say that I applaud the decision to take a moral stance against AI, and I wish more people would do that. Saying "well you have to follow the market" is such a cravenly amoral perspective.
  • jstummbillig 11mo ago
    No, of course you don't have to – but don't torture yourself. If the market is all AI, and you are a service provider that does not want to work with AI at all then get out of the business. If you found it unacceptable to work with companies that used any kind of digital database (because you found centralization of information and the amount of processing and analytics this enables unbecoming) then you should probably look for another venture instead of finding companies that commit to pen and paper.
    • bayindirh 11mo ago
      > If the market is all AI, and you are a service provider that does not want to work with AI at all then get out of the business. Maybe they will, and I bet they'll be content doing that. I personally don't work with AI and try my best to not to train it. I left GitHub & Reddit because of this, and not uploading new photos to Instagram. The jury is still out on how I'm gonna share my photography, and not sharing it is on the table, as well. I may even move to a cathedral model or just stop sharing the software I write with the general world, too. Nobody has to bend and act against their values and conscience just because others are doing it, and the system is demanding to betray ourselves for its own benefit. Life is more nuanced than that.
      • jstummbillig 11mo ago
        Good on you. Maybe some future innovation will afford everyone the same opportunity.
        • balamatom 11mo ago
          Maybe one day we will all become people again! (But only all of us simultaneously, otherwise won't count! ;)))) The number of triggered Stockholm Syndrome patients in this comment section is terminally nauseating.
• jstummbillig 11mo ago
  > Landing projects for Set Studio has been extremely difficult, especially as we won’t work on product marketing for AI stuff If all of "AI stuff" is a "no" for you, then I think you just signed out off working in most industries to some important degree going forward. This is also not to say that service providers should not have any moral standards. I just don't understand the expectation in this particular case. You ignore what the market wants and where a lot/most of new capital turns up. What's the idea? You are a service provider, you are not a market maker. If you refuse service with the market that exists, you don't have a market. Regardless, I really like their aesthetics (which we need more of in the world) and do hope that they find a way to make it work for themselves.
  • otabdeveloper4 11mo ago
    > what the market wants Pretty sure the market doesn't want more AI slop.
    • nicbou 11mo ago
      I understand it as the market wanting more content about competing in an AI world
    • Geste 11mo ago
      Sora's app has a 4.8 rating on the app store with 142K rating. It seems to me that the market does not care about slop or not, whether I like it or not.
      • Ocerge 11mo ago
        I don't understand why you're being downvoted, you're not wrong. I think Suno being successful bums me out, I really hate it, but people that are not me love it. I can't do anything about that.
        • johnnyanmac 11mo ago
          >but people that are not me love it Are people that are not you making it profitable? That's the obvious issue.
• deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
• otikik 11mo ago
  On this thread what people are calling “the market” is just 6 billionaire guys trying to hype their stuff so they can pass the hot potato to someone else right before the whole house of cards collapses.
  • fzeroracer 11mo ago
    It's very funny reading this thread and seeing the exact same arguments I saw five years ago for the NFT market and the metaverse. All of this money is being funneled and burned away on AI shit that isn't even profitable nor has it found a market niche outside of enabling 10x spammers, which is why companies are literally trying to force it everywhere they can.
    • mrguyorama 11mo ago
      It's also the exact same human beings who were doing the NFT and metaverse bullshit and insisting they were the next best things and had to jump ship to the next "Totally going to change everything" grift because the first two reached the end of their runs. I wonder what their plan was before LLMs seemed promising? These techbros got rich off the dotcom boom hype and lax regulation, and have spent 20 years since attempting to force themselves onto the throne, and own everything.
  • flag_fagger 11mo ago
    > On this thread what people are calling “the market” is just 6 billionaire guys trying to hype their stuff so they can pass the hot potato to someone else right before the whole house of cards collapses. Careful now, if they get their way, they’ll be both the market and the government.
  • 0x3f 11mo ago
    That might well be the current 'market' for SWE labor though. I totally agree it's a silly bubble but I'm not looking forward to the state of things when it pops.
  • satvikpendem 11mo ago
    In the case of the author, their market isn't LLM makers directly, it's the people who use those LLMs, so the author's market is much bigger and isn't susceptible to collapse if LLM makers go bankrupt (because they can just go back to what they are already doing now pre-LLM), quite the opposite as this post shows.
• bobjordan 11mo ago
  Man, I definitely feel this, being in the international trade business operating an export contract manufacturing company from China, with USA based customers. I can’t think of many shittier businesses to be in this year, lol. Actually it’s been pretty difficult for about 8 years now, given trade war stuff actually started in 2017, then we had to survive covid, now trade war two. It’s a tough time for a lot of SMEs. AI has to be a handful for classic web/design shops to handle, on top of the SMEs that usually make up their customer base, suffering with trade wars and tariff pains. Cash is just hard to come by this year. We’ve pivoted to focus more on design engineering services these past eight years, and that’s been enough to keep the lights on, but it’s hard to scale, it is just a bandwidth constrained business, can only take a few projects at a time. Good luck to OP navigating it.
• theiz 11mo ago
  I had a discussion yesterday with someone that owns a company creating PowerPoints for customers. As you might understand, that is also a business that is to be hit hard by AI. What he does is offer an AI entry level option, where basically the questions he asks the customer (via a Form) will lead to a script for running AI. With that he is able to combine his expertise with the AI demand from the market, and gain a profit from that.
  • duderific 11mo ago
    I guess then, that he is relying on his customers not discovering that there are options out there that will do this for them, without a "middle man" as it were. Seems like shaky ground to be standing on, but I suppose it can work for a while, if he already has good relationships in his industry.
    • theiz 11mo ago
      I think what he does is thinking in possibilities, just what an entrepreneur should do.
• popalchemist 11mo ago
  Interesting how someone can clearly be brilliant in one area and totally have their head buried under the sand in another, and not even realize it.
• gregjor 11mo ago
  > ... we won’t work on product marketing for AI stuff, from a moral standpoint, but the vast majority of enquiries have been for exactly that I don't use AI tools in my own work (programming and system admin). I won't work for Meta, Palantir, Microsoft, and some others because I have to take a moral stand somewhere. If a customer wants to use AI or sell AI (whatever that means), I will work with them. But I won't use AI to get the work done, not out of any moral qualm but because I think of AI-generated code as junk and a waste of my time. At this point I can make more money fixing AI-generated vibe coded crap than I could coaxing Claude to write it. End-user programming creates more opportunity for senior programmers, but will deprive the industry of talented juniors. Short-term thinking will hurt businesses in a few years, but no one counting their stock options today cares about a talent shortage a decade away. I looked at the sites linked from the article. Nice work. Even so I think hand-crafted front-end work turned into a commodity some time ago, and now the onslaught of AI slop will kill it off. Those of us in the business of web sites and apps can appreciate mastery of HTML and CSS and Javascript, beautiful designs and user-oriented interfaces. Sadly most business owners don't care that much and lack the perspective to tell good work from bad. Most users don't care either. My evidence: 90% of public web sites. No one thinks WordPress got the market share it has because of technical excellence or how it enables beautiful designs and UI. Before LLMs could crank out web sites we had an army of amateur designers and business owners doing it with WordPressl, paying $10/hr or less on Upwork and Fiverr.
• tonyhart7 11mo ago
  Maybe they dont need to "create" website anymore, fixing other website that LLM generated is the future now we say that wordpress would kill front end but years later people still employ developer to fix wordpress mess same thing would happen with AI generated website
  • baggachipz 11mo ago
    > same thing would happen with AI generated website Probably even moreso. I've seen the shit these things put out, it's unsustainable garbage. At least Wordpress sites have a similar starting point. I think the main issue is that the "fixing AI slop" industry will take a few years to blossom.
  • johnnyanmac 11mo ago
    >fixing other website that LLM generated is the future now I barely like fixing human code. I can't think of a worse job than fixing garbage in, garbage out in order to prop up billionaires pretending they don't need humans anymore. If that's the long term future then it's time for a career shift. I'm still much more optimistic about prospects, fortunately.
• nicbou 11mo ago
  I feel like this person might be just a few bad months ahead of me. I am doing great, but the writing is on the wall for my industry. We should have more posts like this. It should be okay to be worried, to admit that we are having difficulties. It might reach someone else who otherwise feels alone in a sea of successful hustlers. It might also just get someone the help they need or form a community around solving the problem. I also appreciate their resolve. We rarely hear from people being uncompromising on principles that have a clear price. Some people would rather ride their business into the ground than sell out. I say I would, but I don’t know if I would really have the guts.
  • Glemkloksdjf 11mo ago
    Its a global industry shift. You can either hope that this shift is not happening or that you are one of these people surviving in your niche. But the industry / world is shifting, you should start shifting with. I would call that being innovative, ahead etc.
    • nicbou 11mo ago
      The industry is not really shifting. It's not shifting to anything. It's just that the value is being captured by parasitic companies. They still need people like me to feed them training data while they destroy the economics of producing that data.
      • Glemkloksdjf 11mo ago
        They pay people in Malaysia to solve issues. Google has a ton of code internal. And million of people happily thumb down or up for their RL / Feedback. The industry is still shifting. I use LLMs instead of StackOverflow. You can be as dismissive as you want, but that doesn't change the fact that millions of people use AI tools every single day. People start using AI based tools. The industry overall is therefore shifting money and goals etc. into direction of AI. And the author has an issue because of that.
        • 11mo ago
• lijok 11mo ago
  > especially as we won’t work on product marketing for AI stuff, from a moral standpoint, but the vast majority of enquiries have been for exactly that Sounds like a self inflicted wound. No kids I assume?
• didacusc 11mo ago
  Isn't this a bit of an ad?
  • Glemkloksdjf 11mo ago
    Completly agree
  • xdc0 11mo ago
    This article was posted a few days ago, it was flagged and removed within an hour or two. I don't know what is different this time.
  • sceptic123 11mo ago
    I'm glad I wasn't the only one that thought that!
  • josfredo 11mo ago
    A “bit”? This is self-immolation as an ad, posing as moral superiority.
• arathis 11mo ago
  [flagged]
  • deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  • johnnyanmac 11mo ago
    As always the case when AI comes up directly or indirectly. Really brings out the worst of the community, and that sums up AI in and of itself.
• ramon156 11mo ago
  My post had the privilege of being on front page for a few minutes. I got some very fair criticism because it wasn't really a solid article and was written when traveling on a train when I was already tired and hungry. I don't think I was thinking rationally. I'd much rather see these kind of posts on the front page. They're well thought-out and I appreciate the honesty. I think that, when you're busy following the market, you lose what works for you. For example, most business communication happens through push based traffic. You get assigned work and you have x time to solve all this. If you don't, we'll have some extremely tedious reflection meeting that leads to nowhere. Why not do pull-based work, where you get done what you get done? Is the issue here that customers aren't informed about when a feature is implemented? Because the alternative is promising date X and delaying it 3 times because customer B is more important
• jalapenos 11mo ago
  Corrected title: "we have inflicted a very hard year on ourselves with malice aforethought". The equivalent of that comic where the cyclist intentionally spoke-jams themselves and then acts surprised when they hit the dirt. But since the author puts moral high horse jockeying above money, they've gotten what they paid for - an opportunity to pretend they're a victim and morally righteous. Par for the course
• mono442 11mo ago
  His business seems to be centered around UI design and front-end development and unfortunately this is one of the things that AI can do decently well. The end result is worse than a proper design but from my experience people don't really care about small details in most cases.
  • ramon156 11mo ago
    I can definitely tell. Some sites just seem to give zero fucks about usability, just that it looks pretty. It's a shame
• hexbin010 11mo ago
  Tough crowd here. Though to be expected - I'm sure a lot of people have a fair bit of cash directly or indirectly invested in AI. Or their employer does ;) We Brits simply don't have the same American attitude towards business. A lot of Americans simply can't understand that chasing riches at any cost is not a particularly European trait. (We understand how things are in the US. It's not a matter of just needing to "get it" and seeing the light)
  • ausbah 11mo ago
    some would say historically that isn’t quite the case lol
    • hexbin010 11mo ago
      LOL. Some would say it's been beaten out of us too...which makes Americans telling us to be enterprising even funnier.
  • satvikpendem 11mo ago
    It's not really whether one has invested in the companies or not, it's more that we can see the author shooting themselves in the foot by not wanting to listen to the market. It's like selling vinegar at a lemonade stand (and only insisting on selling vinegar, not lemonade). It's simply logically nonsensical to us "Americans."
• billy99k 11mo ago
  "especially as we won’t work on product marketing for AI stuff, from a moral standpoint, but the vast majority of enquiries have been for exactly that." You will continue to lose business, if you ignore all the 'AI stuff'. AI is here to stay, and putting your head in the sand will only leave you further behind. I've known people over the years that took stands on various things like JavaScript frameworks becoming popular (and they refused to use them) and the end result was less work and eventually being pushed out of the industry.
• infecto 11mo ago
  I simply have a hard time following the refusal to work on anything AI related. There is AI slop but also a lot of interesting value add products and features for existing products. I think it makes sense to be thoughtful of what to work on but I struggle with the blanket no to AI.
  • vaylian 11mo ago
    I'm critical of AI because of climate change. Training and casual usage of AI takes a lot of resources. The electricity demand is way too high. We have made great progress in bringing a lot of regenerative energy to the grid, but AI eats up a huge part of it, so that other sectors can't decarbonize as much. We are still nowhere near to get climate change under control. AI is adding fuel to the fire.
  • johnnyanmac 11mo ago
    My domain is games. It's a battlefield out there (pun somewhat intended). I ain't touching anything Gen-AI until we figure out what the hell is going on with regards to copyright, morality of artists, and general "not look like shit"-ness. Sad part is I probably will still be accused of using AI. But I'll still do my best.
    • infecto 11mo ago
      Ship has sailed and that won’t be figured out. There is very little chance to put the cat back into the bag.
• rckt 11mo ago
  Wishing these guys all the best. It's not just about following the market. It's about the ability to just be yourself. When everyone around you is telling you that you just have to start doing something and it's not even about the moral side of that thing. You simply just don't want to do it. Yeah, yeah, it's a cruel world. But this doesn't mean that we all need to victim blame everyone who doesn't feel comfortable in this trendy stream. I hope things with the AI will settle soon and there will be applications that actually make sense and some sort of new balance will be established. Right now it's a nightmare. Everyone wants everything with the AI.
  • Octoth0rpe 11mo ago
    > Everyone wants everything with the AI. All the _investors_ want everything with AI. Lots of people - non-tech workers even - just want a product that works and often doesn't work differently than it did last year. That goal is often at odds with the ai-everywhere approach du jour.
  • johnnyanmac 11mo ago
    >When everyone around you is telling you that you just have to start doing something and it's not even about the moral side of that thing. No, that's the most important situation to consider the moral thing. My slightly younger peers years back were telling everyone to eat tide pods. That's a pretty important time to say "no, that's a really stupid idea", even if you don't get internet clout. I'd hope the tech community of all people would know what it's like to resist peer pressure. But alas. >But this doesn't mean that we all need to victim blame everyone who doesn't feel comfortable in this trendy stream. I don't see that at all in the article. Quite the opposite here actually. I just see a person being transparent about their business and morals and commentors here using it to try and say "yea but I like AI". Nothing here attacked y'all for liking it. The author simply has his own lines.
    • rckt 11mo ago
      By victim blaming I meant some comments here. I can relate to the author, and the narrative that it's my fault for trying to be myself and keep to my ways triggers me.
• arthurfirst 11mo ago
  I did not look for a consulting contract for 18 years. Through my old network more quality opportunities found me than I could take on. That collapsed during the covid lockdowns. My financial services client cut loose all consultants and killed all 'non-essential' projects, even when mine (that they had already approved) would save them 400K a year, they did not care! Top down the word came to cut everyone -- so they did. This trend is very much a top down push. Inorganic. People with skills and experience are viewed by HR and their AI software as risky to leave and unlikely to respond to whatever pressures they like to apply. Since then it's been more of the same as far as consulting. I've come to the conclusion I'm better served by working on smaller projects I want to build and not chasing big consulting dollars. I'm happier (now) but it took a while. An unexpected benefit of all the pain was I like making things again... but I am using claude code and gemini. Amazing tools if you have experience already and you know what you want out of them -- otherwise they mainly produce crap in the hands of the masses.
  • zwnow 11mo ago
    They also produce crap once you leave the realm of basic CRUD web apps... Try using it with Microsofts Business Central bullshit, does not work well.
    • arthurfirst 11mo ago
      I have worked with a lot of code generation systems. LLMs strike me as mainly useful in the same way. I can get most of the boilerplate and tedium done with LLM tools. Then for core logic esp learning or meta-programming patterns etc. I need to jump in. Breaking tasks down to bite size, and writing detailed architecture and planning docs for the LLM to work from, is critical to managing increasing complexity and staying within context windows. Also critical is ruthlessly throwing away things that do not fit the vision and not being afraid to throw whole days away (not too often tho!) For ref I have built stuff that goes way beyond CRUD app with these tools in 1/10th of the time it previously took me or less -- the key though is I already knew how to do and how to validate LLM outputs. I knew exactly what I wanted a priori. Code generation technically always 'replaced' junior devs and has been around for ages, the results of the generation are just a lot better now., whereas in the past it was mixed bag of benefits/hassles doing code generation regularly, now it works much better and the cost is much less. I started my career as a developer and the main reasons I became a solutions systems guy were money and that I hated the tedium boilerplate phase of all software development projects over a certain scale. I never stoped coding because I love it -- just not for large enterprise soul destroying software projects.
• Andrew-Tate 11mo ago
  [dead]
• wonderwonder 11mo ago
  "Landing projects for Set Studio has been extremely difficult, especially as we won’t work on product marketing for AI stuff, from a moral standpoint, but the vast majority of enquiries have been for exactly that" The market is literally telling them what it wants and potential customers are asking them for work but they are declining it from "a moral standpoint" and instead blaming "a combination of limping economies, tariffs, even more political instability and a severe cost of living crisis" This is a failure of leadership at the company. Adapt or die, your bank account doesn't care about your moral redlines.
• deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
• evantbyrne 11mo ago
  Being broadly against AI is a strange stance. Should we all turn off swipe to type on our phones? Are we supposed to boycott cancer testing? Are we to forbid people with disabilities reading voicemail transcriptions or using text to speech? Make it make sense.
  • blamestross 11mo ago
    Intentionally or not, you are presenting a false equivalency. I trust in your ability to actually differentiate between the machine learning tools that are generally useful and the current crop of unethically sourced "AI" tools being pushed on us.
    • evantbyrne 11mo ago
      How am I supposed to know what specific niche of AI the author is talking about when they don't elaborate? For all I know they woke up one day in 2023 and that was the first time they realized machine learning existed. Consider my comment a reminder that ethical use of AI has been around of quite some time, will continue to be, and even that much of that will be with LLMs.
      • blamestross 11mo ago
        You have reasonably available context here. "This year" seems more than enough on it's own. I think there is ethical use cases for LLMs. I have no problem leveraging a "common" corpus to support the commons. If they weren't over-hyped and almost entirely used as extensions of the weath-concentration machine, they could be really cool. Locally hosted llms are kinda awesome. As it is, they are basically just theft from the public and IP laundering.
      • johnnyanmac 11mo ago
        >Consider my comment a reminder that ethical use of AI has been around of quite some You can be among a a swamp and say "but my corner is clean". This is the exact opposite of the rotten barrel metaphor. You're trying to claim your sole apple is so how not rotted compared to the fermenting that is came from.
• Tokkemon 11mo ago
  All the AI-brained people are acting like the very AIs they celebrate. That's horrifying.
• smileson2 11mo ago
  ceaseless AI drama aside, this blog and the set-studio website look and feel great I hope things turn around for them it seems like they do good work
• paxiscivlab 11mo ago
  I don’t think they’re unique. They’re simply among the first to run into the problems AI creates. Any white-collar field—high-skill or not—that can be solved logically will eventually face the same pressure. The deeper issue is that society still has no coherent response to a structural problem: skills that take 10+ years to master can now be copied by an AI almost overnight. People talk about “reskilling” and “personal responsibility,” but those terms hide the fact that surviving the AI era doesn’t just mean learning to use AI tools in your current job. It’s not that simple. I don’t have a definitive answer either. I’m just trying, every day, to use AI in my work well enough to stay ahead of the wave.
• rglover 11mo ago
  Not a big fan of his these days but Gary Vaynerchuk has my favorite take on this: "To run your business with your personal romance of how things should be versus how they are is literally the great vulnerability of business."
  • SoftTalker 11mo ago
    It's very likey the main reason that small businesses like local restaurants, bakeries, etc. fail. People start them based on a fantasy and don't know how to watch the hard realities of expenses and income. But like gravity, there's no escaping those unless you are already wealthy enough for it all to just be a hobby.
  • deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  • philipwhiuk 11mo ago
    Maybe you're not the biggest fan precisely because the endgame of that statement is to develop a business without any moral grounding.
    • engineer_22 11mo ago
      Gary's point is: sell what people are buying. But you think: that's immoral. What about a functioning market is immoral?
      • munificent 11mo ago
        You're still responsible for the consequences of what you produce and sell. Surely you would agree that making landmines simply because there are people who want to buy them would be an immoral choice.
        • engineer_22 11mo ago
          gary's point: embrace reality your argument: but what about this hypothetical?
• vicnov 11mo ago
  > we won’t work on product marketing for AI stuff, from a moral standpoint, but the vast majority of enquiries have been for exactly that. Our reputation is everything, so being associated with that technology as it increasingly shows us what it really is, would be a terrible move for the long term. It is such an “interesting” statement in on many levels. Market has changed -> we disagree -> we still disagree -> business is bad. It is indeed hard to swim against the current. People have different principles and I respect that, I just rarely - have so much difficulty understanding them - see such clear impact on the bottom line
• doug_durham 11mo ago
  The author has painted themselves into a corner. They refuse to do business with companies that use AI, and they try to support their business with teaching courses, which is also being impacted by AI. They have a right to do business with whomever they wish. I'm not suggesting that they change this. However they need to face current reality. What value-add can they provide in areas not impacted by AI?
  • johnnyanmac 11mo ago
    > However they need to face current reality. What value-add can they provide in areas not impacted by AI? I'm sure the author has thought much longer on this than I, but I get the vibes here of "2025 was uniquely bad for reasons in and outside of AI". Not "2025 was the beginning of the end for my business as a whole". I don't think demand for proper engineering is going away, people simply have less to spend. And oncestors have less to invest or are all in gambling on AI. It's a situation that will change for reasons outside the business itself.
• seanw265 11mo ago
  After reading the post I kept thinking about two other pieces, and only later realized it was Taylor who had submitted it. His most recent essay [0] actually led me to the Commoncog piece “Are You Playing to Play, or Playing to Win?” [1], and the idea of sub-games felt directly relevant here. In this case, running a studio without using or promoting AI becomes a kind of sub-game that can be “won” on principle, even if it means losing the actual game that determines whether the business survives. The studio is turning down all AI-related work, and it’s not surprising that the business is now struggling. I’m not saying the underlying principle is right or wrong, nor do I know the internal dynamics and opinions of their team. But in this case the cost of holding that stance doesn’t fall just on the owner, it also falls on the people who work there. Links: [0] https://taylor.town/iq-not-enough https://taylor.town/iq-not-enough [1] https://commoncog.com/playing-to-play-playing-to-win/ https://commoncog.com/playing-to-play-playing-to-win/
  • Ambix 11mo ago
    This [1] link is absolutely golden, thanks!
• scrozier 11mo ago
  I'm sure author's company does good work, but the marketplace doesn't respond well to, "we're really, _really_ good,", "trust me," "you won't be disappointed." It not only feels desperate, but is proof-free. Show me your last three great projects and have your customers tell me what they loved about working with you. Anybody can say, "seriously, we're really good."
  • etchalon 11mo ago
    They have a website. With a portfolio. That does that.
  • johnnyanmac 11mo ago
    the "trust me" has a trailer, testimony from industry experts, and gasp a good looking website that doesnt chug and still looks modern and dynamic. Bonus points for the transparency about 2025, we don't get much of that these days. It could still be trash, but they are setting all the right flags.
• A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 11mo ago
  'I wouldn’t personally be able to sleep knowing I’ve contributed to all of that, too.' I think this is the crux of the entire problem for the author. The author is certain, not just hesitant, that any contribution they would make to project involving AI equals contribution to some imagined evil ( oddly, without explictly naming what they envision so it is harder to respond to ). I have my personal qualms, but run those through my internal ethics to see if there is conflict. Unless author predicts 'prime intellect' type of catastrophe, I think the note is either shifting blame and just justifying bad outcomes with moralistic: 'I did the right thing' while not explaining the assumptions in place.
  • balamatom 11mo ago
    >I have my personal qualms, but run those through my internal ethics to see if there is conflict Do you "run them through" actual ethics, too?
    • A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 11mo ago
      See.. here is a problem. You say 'actual' ethics as if those were somehow universal and not ridiculously varied across the board. And I get it, you use the term, because a lot of readers will take it face value AND simply use their own value system to translate them into what agrees with them internally. I know, because I do the same thing when I try to not show exactly what I think to people at work. I just say sufficiently generic stuff to make people on both sides agree with a generic statement. With that said, mister ants in the pants, what does actual mean to you in this particular instance?
      • balamatom 11mo ago
        I don't know about ants (or pants) but > I try to not show exactly what I think to people at work. I just say sufficiently generic stuff to make people on both sides agree with a generic statement. basically the ethics of anyone who doesn't this
        • 11mo ago
• nickjj 11mo ago
  As someone who has sold video tech courses since 2015, I don't know about the future. I don't want to openly write about the financial side of things here but let's just say I don't have enough money to comfortably retire or stop working but course sales over the last 2-3 years have gotten to not even 5% of what it was in 2015-2021. It went from "I'm super happy, this is my job with contracting on the side as a perfect technical circle of life" to "time to get a full time job". Nothing changed on my end. I have kept putting out free blog posts and videos for the last 10 years. It's just traffic has gone down to 20x less than it used to be. Traffic dictates sales and that's how I think I arrived in this situation. It does suck to wake up most days knowing you have at least 5 courses worth of content in your head that you could make but can't spend the time to make them because your time is allocated elsewhere. It takes usually 2-3 full time months to create a decent sized course, from planning to done. Then ongoing maintenance. None of this is a problem if it generates income (it's a fun process), but it's a problem given the scope of time it takes.
  • csa 11mo ago
    Were most of your sales coming via your site and/or organic search? It sounds like you have a solid product, but you need to update your marketing channels.
    • nickjj 11mo ago
      Almost 100% of sales come from organic searches. Usually people would search for things like "Docker course" or "Flask course" and either find my course near the top of Google or they would search for some specific problem related to that content and come across a blog post I wrote on my main site which linked back to the course somewhere (usually). Now the same thing happens, but there's 20x less sales per month. I've posted almost 400 free videos on YouTube as well over the years, usually these videos go along with the blog post. A few years back I also started a podcast and did 100 weekly episodes for 2 years. It didn't move the needle on course sales and it was on a topic that was quite related to app development and deployment which partially aligns with my courses. Most episodes barely got ~100 listens and it was 4.9 rated out of 5 on major podcast platforms, people emailed me saying it was their favorite show and it helped them so much and hope I never stop but the listener count never grew. I didn't have sponsors or ads but stopped the show because it took 1 full day a week to schedule + record + edit + publish a ~1-2 hour episode. It was super fun and I really enjoyed it but it was another "invest 100 days, make $0" thing which simply isn't sustainable.
• engineer_22 11mo ago
  I noticed a phenomenon on this post - many people are tying this person's business decisions to some sort of moral framework, or debating the morality of their plight. "Moral" is mentioned 91 times at last count. Where is that coming from? I understand AI is a large part of the discussion. But then where is /that/ coming from? And what do people mean by "moral"? EDIT: Well, he mentions "moral" in the first paragraph. The rest is pity posting, so to answer my question - morals is one of the few generally interesting things in the post. But in the last year I've noticed a lot more talking about "morals" on HN. "Our morals", "he's not moral", etc. Anyone else?
• civilian 11mo ago
  Software people are such a "DIY" crowd, that I think selling courses to us (or selling courses to our employers) is a crappy prospect. The hacker ethos is to build it yourself, so paying for courses seems like a poor mismatch. I have a family member that produces training courses for salespeople; she's doing fantastic. This reminds me of some similar startup advice of: don't sell to musicians. They don't have any money, and they're well-versed in scrappy research to fill their needs. Finally, if you're against AI, you might have missed how good of a learning tool LLMs can be. The ability to ask _any_ question, rather than being stuck-on-video-rails, is huge time-saver.
  • johnnyanmac 11mo ago
    >Software people are such a "DIY" crowd, that I think selling courses to us (or selling courses to our employers) is a crappy prospect. The hacker ethos is to build it yourself, so paying for courses seems like a poor mismatch. I think courses like these are peak "DIY". These aren't courses teaching you to RTFM. It's teaching you how to think deeper and find the edge cases and develop philosophy. That's knowledge worth its weight in gold. Unlike React tutorial #32456 this is showing us how things really work "under the hood". I'd happily pay for that. If I could. >don't sell to musicians. They don't have any money But programmers traditionally do have money? >if you're against AI, you might have missed how good of a learning tool LLMs can be. I don't think someone putting their business on the line with their stance needs yet another HN squeed on why AI actually good. Pretty sure they've thought deeply of this.
• deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
• consumer451 11mo ago
  I'm just some random moron, but I just clicked on TFA, and it looks like a very pretty ad. What am I missing?
• capyba 11mo ago
  I feel for the author. I do both mechanical and software engineering and I’m in this career(s) because I love making things and learning how to do that really well. Been having the most difficult time accepting the idea that there isn’t a good market for people like us - artisans, craftsmen, whatever the term might be - who are obsessive about exceptional quality and the time and effort it takes to get there. In this day and age, and especially when LLMs look ever more like they can produce at least a cheap, dollar store approximation of the real deal, “doing things really well” is going to be relegated to an ever more niche market.
• derangedHorse 11mo ago
  > we won’t work on product marketing for AI stuff, from a moral standpoint I fundamentally disagree with this stance. Labeling a whole category of technologies because of some perceived immorality that exists within the process of training, regardless of how, seems irrational.
• liampulles 11mo ago
  I appreciate and respect that this org is avoiding AI hype work, but I don't know if there are long term reputational benefits. Clients are going to be more turned off by your reasons not to do work than your having a "principled business". From the clients perspective, it's their job to set the principles (or lack thereof) and your job to follow their instructions. That doesn't mean it's the wrong thing to do though. Ethics are important, but recognise that it may just be for the sake of your "soul".
• galfarragem 11mo ago
  LLMs themselves are not a fad or overhyped. Even my mum (almost 70) is using an LLM nowadays, and she hates computers. Adapt or die and I don’t say this happily. I hate that I have to use an LLM to stay competitive, something I’m not used to in my life. I was always competitive bare-mind. Now I need to be armed with an LLM.
• geldedus 11mo ago
  AI denialism hitting back.