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The post reads like written by someone who read too much about AI rather than tried to build a startup with the help of AI that they advocate so much. I'm still

The post reads like written by someone who read too much about AI rather than tried to build a startup with the help of AI that they advocate so much. I'm still bounded by system design, UX, pricing and feature decisions, if not by the speed of code output, by the review time for sure. Yes, iterating is faster, but we're nowhere near agentic AI loops spitting out working products. Technically it's possible, but then you just spent that time planning and writing the spec up front, which you'd interleave with dev time otherwise. If the product is a simple CRUD database skin, then yeah, chances of success are lower I think, but this is not the type of startups the post seems to write about.

jnovek 6mo ago
Are you familiar with Steve Blank? What you’re describing really isn’t his MO at all.
- stickfigure 6mo ago
  I'm not, but this is not a great introduction. It's handwavy and makes the assumption that AI dev tools are much farther along than they are. I have seen this a lot lately; the farther up the management chain and farther away from putting hands on code, the more confident people seem to be in the power of AI tools. For big complex real world problems, and big complex real worlde codebases, the AIs are helpful but not yet earth shattering. And that helpfulness seems to have plateaued as of late. I am extremely skeptical of posts like this.
  - scyzoryk_xyz 6mo ago
    I will take a lot more hand waving from the 70-something year-old Stanford professor who co-created far-up the chain management paradigms that run a good chunk of the economy. That context kinda changes things but what do I know.
    - antonvs 6mo ago
      So you’re saying he’s majorly complicit in the ultracapitalist dystopia the US has turned into?
      - all2 6mo ago
        This is disingenuous at best. The man is an economist, not a crony operating at the federal level (one does not imply the other, and I know nothing of the man's background).
        stickfigure 6mo ago
        So in other words... he doesn't actually use the tools he's firmly convinced will automate the building of software. I don't agree with the parent; I think capitalism is doing a lot of great things for us and will continue to, even with AI. But man I'm tired of these hot takes from people with limited practical experience.
        all2 6mo ago
        > But man I'm tired of these hot takes from people with limited practical experience. I hear you there. There's a reason I limit what I say online. I know very little about very little.
        FreakLegion 6mo ago
        Steve Blank the startup whisperer and Steven Blank the economist are two very different people.
      - gottorf 6mo ago
        > the ultracapitalist dystopia the US has turned into Seriously, where do ideas like this come from? An "ultracapitalist" country that has about as much redistributive social spending as other developed economies[0]? A "dystopia" that millions of people from all over the world clamor to get into every year? [0]: https://www.piie.com/publications/policy-briefs/2016/true-levels-government-and-social-expenditures-advanced-economies https://www.piie.com/publications/policy-briefs/2016/true-le...
- alex_c 6mo ago
  I have a lot of respect for Steve Blank, but my heuristic by now is to ignore any breathless posts that state “teams are doing X with AI, if you are not doing the same you’re behind”. The much more useful posts are “my team and I are doing X with AI”. Of course, the challenge there is that the ones who are truly getting a competitive edge through AI are usually going to be too busy building to blog about it.
  - detourdog 6mo ago
    I really enjoyed reading his articles a while back. He wrote an article about about silicon valley's roots in microchip development. I can't remember the details but I reached out to point out how important Autonetics was to chip development and that was based in Los Angeles. From my perspective what made Silicon Valley significant was it's connection to wall street. I wanted to engage on the topic of Venture Capital might be the real product of silicon Valley. He could have ignored the email or engaged on the topic I introduced. Instead he sent me a wikilink to Autonetics. I was left with the feeling that he had no real interest in the topic he wrote about. It was really no big deal. He is a busy guy and doesn't need to engage with strangers. I never read anything by him again because I was left with the feeling he is just phoning these posts in.
coffeefirst 6mo ago
Yeah… also, it’s just weird. Interfaces are important, they contain information and affordances, everything should not become a chatbot.
- DrewADesign 6mo ago
  I usually find chatbot interfaces completely infuriating. I know the UX paradigm of click-reduction went the way of the dodo (and rightfully so, because it was based on bullshit research,) but I think it’s funny that completely removing the user’s agency and visibility into any process, and turning 3-click processes into 200 keystroke processes is the hot shit right now.
- pizzly 6mo ago
  Interfaces will definitely evolve. Visual graphs and representations are useful but speaking to an agent will become mainstream as its faster than typing. Also the ability for agents to code on the fly will open up different interfaces. For instance you could say "show me the impact that our marketing campaign x over this time period" and out comes graphs that were coded. Drawing might even make a comeback for instance when designing a website you just cross out things you don't want, draw boxes of where you want things, talk at the same time saying what you want in that box. Then some people are using virtual relativity. Not everything will become a chatbot but its definitely going to evolve with chatting being an integral part of the user interface.
  - skydhash 6mo ago
    You're describing some Hollywood version of SF, not the real world. Speaking is not faster than pressing a key or turning a knob (like try to operate a CAD or a DAW without keyboard and mouse). And for most report/infographic, you mostly need to design a few dashboard and almost never change them, because those are your core metrics that you need to monitor. And the ability to sketch even a simple wireframe relies on a lot of knowledge that most people don't want to burden themselves with.
    - Daishiman 6mo ago
ryandrake 6mo ago
It's gotten to the point where, when I see yet another Thought Leadership article about software development, I search the page for the word "will". If I see unqualified predictions of the future (AI will change this and Agents will do that and developers will need to do thus), I think I can safely ignore the article. Who has the hubris to make such strong and unwavering statements about a future nobody can see?
- antonvs 6mo ago
  > Who has the hubris to make such strong and unwavering statements about a future nobody can see? LinkedIn influencers
- skeeter2020 6mo ago
  How come all the talking heads telling us AI has made whatever we've learned or built obsolete never point the lens back at themselves? I personally thing knowledge from entrepreneurs who learned their lessons in previous decades is valuable, but if what they're spouting is true it doesn't make any sense to listen to them, i.e. these thought leaders are desperate to tell you of their irrelevance. Same thing for every CTO who tells me AI replaces developers. That's a stretch, but if we could do that, don't you think it would be trivial to replace your job?
  - throwanem 6mo ago
    Someone is still needed to decide what the AI should do, and to harness and manage it. A CTO can do that with existing skills, and the resulting organization should converge quickly on near-zero need or want for human SWEs. So goes the thinking, anyway. It's why my couple decades of experience and I still occasionally get to hear from rando cold recruiters desperate to sell someone a "pivot to AI," probably thinking they can lowball me by holding my mortgage over my head in order to screw three times the work out of me that they'd pay for. I was in this business too long.
- marcus_holmes 6mo ago
  A local "thought leader" wrote a ridiculous piece about software leadership in a post-LLM world, when clearly they'd never actually used an LLM to build anything, or actually led a team using LLMs. Lots of hand-waving but obviously no real experience. As gp says, there's a big difference between theory and practice here, and a lot of the things we needed when we weren't using LLMs are still needed when we are, but it takes a bit of actual practice to work this out. It's still not at the stage where an Ideas Guy can make a real working product without someone on the team actually knowing how to develop software. At least in my experience, so far. But the world is changing fast.
dist-epoch 6mo ago
You are assuming a linear future while we are in an exponential. One year ago models could barely write a working function.
- kokanee 6mo ago
  One year before 1969 we had never been to the moon. In the 70s credible scientists and physicists predicted that large martian colonies would exist before the year 2000. If a metric goes from 0 to 2 it doesn't mean it's on a long-lived exponential trajectory.
  - 1718627440 6mo ago
    https://xkcd.com/605/ https://xkcd.com/605/
  - bluGill 6mo ago
    Even if there is a growth pattern that doesn't say how long it will continue. Some things can grow for a while and then hit a ceiling. Sometimes they are a fad that dies (when was the last time you bought a pet rock), sometimes everyone has one - you get a few sales of replacemets but no growth (you have a washing machine and won't buy another until the old wears out)
  - dfdsjsdklfjs 6mo ago
    [flagged]
    - cindyllm 6mo ago
      [dead]
    - linsomniac 6mo ago
      What if I fold you... that using 1960s technology it would be easier to just go to the moon than it would be to fake it? Have you SEEN a 1960s movie with SFX?
      - 6mo ago
PaulHoule 6mo ago
I think the AI backlash is strong enough that "AI-Free" might be a powerful marketing tool, whether that is fair or not.
- tinkelenberg 6mo ago
  Another option I like: organic.
  - daemin 6mo ago
    I like: hand crafted.
    - qingcharles 6mo ago
      I like: rawdogged.
  - djeastm 6mo ago
    "hand made" still seems applicable, too
hn_throwaway_99 6mo ago
I'm glad this is the top comment. I'm ambivalent about a bunch of writing I've seen from Steve Blank - some of his stuff I've loved and some I thought was awful. But this I just thought was vacuous. I agree with what you wrote, but more to the point, I didn't find any real advice about how a startup should actually change that passed my sniff test. I left the tech startup world about 2 years ago myself, and I'm glad I did, because I just think there are way fewer differentiable opportunities now. That is, even if I accept what Blank says is true, what are all these 2+ year old startups supposed to do - just create some model wrapper/RAG chatbot product like the million other startups out there? Even in defense, like the article says, there are now a bajillion drone companies, and it looks like a race to the bottom. The most successful plan at this point just looks like the grifter plan, e.g. getting the current president to tweet out your stock ticker. I'm honestly curious what folks think are good startup business plans these days. Even startups that looked they were "knock it out of the park" successes like Cursor and Lovable just seem like they have no moat to me - I see very few startups (particularly in the "We're AI for X!" that got a ton of funding in the past two years) with defensible positions.

jnovek 6mo ago

Are you familiar with Steve Blank? What you’re describing really isn’t his MO at all.

stickfigure 6mo ago
I'm not, but this is not a great introduction. It's handwavy and makes the assumption that AI dev tools are much farther along than they are. I have seen this a lot lately; the farther up the management chain and farther away from putting hands on code, the more confident people seem to be in the power of AI tools. For big complex real world problems, and big complex real worlde codebases, the AIs are helpful but not yet earth shattering. And that helpfulness seems to have plateaued as of late. I am extremely skeptical of posts like this.
- scyzoryk_xyz 6mo ago
  I will take a lot more hand waving from the 70-something year-old Stanford professor who co-created far-up the chain management paradigms that run a good chunk of the economy. That context kinda changes things but what do I know.
  - antonvs 6mo ago
    So you’re saying he’s majorly complicit in the ultracapitalist dystopia the US has turned into?
    - all2 6mo ago
      This is disingenuous at best. The man is an economist, not a crony operating at the federal level (one does not imply the other, and I know nothing of the man's background).
      - stickfigure 6mo ago
        So in other words... he doesn't actually use the tools he's firmly convinced will automate the building of software. I don't agree with the parent; I think capitalism is doing a lot of great things for us and will continue to, even with AI. But man I'm tired of these hot takes from people with limited practical experience.
        all2 6mo ago
        > But man I'm tired of these hot takes from people with limited practical experience. I hear you there. There's a reason I limit what I say online. I know very little about very little.
      - FreakLegion 6mo ago
        Steve Blank the startup whisperer and Steven Blank the economist are two very different people.
    - gottorf 6mo ago
      > the ultracapitalist dystopia the US has turned into Seriously, where do ideas like this come from? An "ultracapitalist" country that has about as much redistributive social spending as other developed economies[0]? A "dystopia" that millions of people from all over the world clamor to get into every year? [0]: https://www.piie.com/publications/policy-briefs/2016/true-levels-government-and-social-expenditures-advanced-economies https://www.piie.com/publications/policy-briefs/2016/true-le...
alex_c 6mo ago
I have a lot of respect for Steve Blank, but my heuristic by now is to ignore any breathless posts that state “teams are doing X with AI, if you are not doing the same you’re behind”. The much more useful posts are “my team and I are doing X with AI”. Of course, the challenge there is that the ones who are truly getting a competitive edge through AI are usually going to be too busy building to blog about it.
- detourdog 6mo ago
  I really enjoyed reading his articles a while back. He wrote an article about about silicon valley's roots in microchip development. I can't remember the details but I reached out to point out how important Autonetics was to chip development and that was based in Los Angeles. From my perspective what made Silicon Valley significant was it's connection to wall street. I wanted to engage on the topic of Venture Capital might be the real product of silicon Valley. He could have ignored the email or engaged on the topic I introduced. Instead he sent me a wikilink to Autonetics. I was left with the feeling that he had no real interest in the topic he wrote about. It was really no big deal. He is a busy guy and doesn't need to engage with strangers. I never read anything by him again because I was left with the feeling he is just phoning these posts in.

coffeefirst 6mo ago

Yeah… also, it’s just weird. Interfaces are important, they contain information and affordances, everything should not become a chatbot.

DrewADesign 6mo ago
I usually find chatbot interfaces completely infuriating. I know the UX paradigm of click-reduction went the way of the dodo (and rightfully so, because it was based on bullshit research,) but I think it’s funny that completely removing the user’s agency and visibility into any process, and turning 3-click processes into 200 keystroke processes is the hot shit right now.
pizzly 6mo ago
Interfaces will definitely evolve. Visual graphs and representations are useful but speaking to an agent will become mainstream as its faster than typing. Also the ability for agents to code on the fly will open up different interfaces. For instance you could say "show me the impact that our marketing campaign x over this time period" and out comes graphs that were coded. Drawing might even make a comeback for instance when designing a website you just cross out things you don't want, draw boxes of where you want things, talk at the same time saying what you want in that box. Then some people are using virtual relativity. Not everything will become a chatbot but its definitely going to evolve with chatting being an integral part of the user interface.
- skydhash 6mo ago
  You're describing some Hollywood version of SF, not the real world. Speaking is not faster than pressing a key or turning a knob (like try to operate a CAD or a DAW without keyboard and mouse). And for most report/infographic, you mostly need to design a few dashboard and almost never change them, because those are your core metrics that you need to monitor. And the ability to sketch even a simple wireframe relies on a lot of knowledge that most people don't want to burden themselves with.
  - Daishiman 6mo ago

ryandrake 6mo ago

It's gotten to the point where, when I see yet another Thought Leadership article about software development, I search the page for the word "will". If I see unqualified predictions of the future (AI will change this and Agents will do that and developers will need to do thus), I think I can safely ignore the article. Who has the hubris to make such strong and unwavering statements about a future nobody can see?

antonvs 6mo ago
> Who has the hubris to make such strong and unwavering statements about a future nobody can see? LinkedIn influencers
skeeter2020 6mo ago
How come all the talking heads telling us AI has made whatever we've learned or built obsolete never point the lens back at themselves? I personally thing knowledge from entrepreneurs who learned their lessons in previous decades is valuable, but if what they're spouting is true it doesn't make any sense to listen to them, i.e. these thought leaders are desperate to tell you of their irrelevance. Same thing for every CTO who tells me AI replaces developers. That's a stretch, but if we could do that, don't you think it would be trivial to replace your job?
- throwanem 6mo ago
  Someone is still needed to decide what the AI should do, and to harness and manage it. A CTO can do that with existing skills, and the resulting organization should converge quickly on near-zero need or want for human SWEs. So goes the thinking, anyway. It's why my couple decades of experience and I still occasionally get to hear from rando cold recruiters desperate to sell someone a "pivot to AI," probably thinking they can lowball me by holding my mortgage over my head in order to screw three times the work out of me that they'd pay for. I was in this business too long.
marcus_holmes 6mo ago
A local "thought leader" wrote a ridiculous piece about software leadership in a post-LLM world, when clearly they'd never actually used an LLM to build anything, or actually led a team using LLMs. Lots of hand-waving but obviously no real experience. As gp says, there's a big difference between theory and practice here, and a lot of the things we needed when we weren't using LLMs are still needed when we are, but it takes a bit of actual practice to work this out. It's still not at the stage where an Ideas Guy can make a real working product without someone on the team actually knowing how to develop software. At least in my experience, so far. But the world is changing fast.

dist-epoch 6mo ago

You are assuming a linear future while we are in an exponential. One year ago models could barely write a working function.

kokanee 6mo ago
One year before 1969 we had never been to the moon. In the 70s credible scientists and physicists predicted that large martian colonies would exist before the year 2000. If a metric goes from 0 to 2 it doesn't mean it's on a long-lived exponential trajectory.
- 1718627440 6mo ago
  https://xkcd.com/605/ https://xkcd.com/605/
- bluGill 6mo ago
  Even if there is a growth pattern that doesn't say how long it will continue. Some things can grow for a while and then hit a ceiling. Sometimes they are a fad that dies (when was the last time you bought a pet rock), sometimes everyone has one - you get a few sales of replacemets but no growth (you have a washing machine and won't buy another until the old wears out)
- dfdsjsdklfjs 6mo ago
  [flagged]
  - cindyllm 6mo ago
    [dead]
  - linsomniac 6mo ago
    What if I fold you... that using 1960s technology it would be easier to just go to the moon than it would be to fake it? Have you SEEN a 1960s movie with SFX?
    - 6mo ago

PaulHoule 6mo ago

I think the AI backlash is strong enough that "AI-Free" might be a powerful marketing tool, whether that is fair or not.

tinkelenberg 6mo ago
Another option I like: organic.
- daemin 6mo ago
  I like: hand crafted.
  - qingcharles 6mo ago
    I like: rawdogged.
- djeastm 6mo ago
  "hand made" still seems applicable, too

hn_throwaway_99 6mo ago

I'm glad this is the top comment. I'm ambivalent about a bunch of writing I've seen from Steve Blank - some of his stuff I've loved and some I thought was awful. But this I just thought was vacuous. I agree with what you wrote, but more to the point, I didn't find any real advice about how a startup should actually change that passed my sniff test. I left the tech startup world about 2 years ago myself, and I'm glad I did, because I just think there are way fewer differentiable opportunities now. That is, even if I accept what Blank says is true, what are all these 2+ year old startups supposed to do - just create some model wrapper/RAG chatbot product like the million other startups out there? Even in defense, like the article says, there are now a bajillion drone companies, and it looks like a race to the bottom. The most successful plan at this point just looks like the grifter plan, e.g. getting the current president to tweet out your stock ticker. I'm honestly curious what folks think are good startup business plans these days. Even startups that looked they were "knock it out of the park" successes like Cursor and Lovable just seem like they have no moat to me - I see very few startups (particularly in the "We're AI for X!" that got a ton of funding in the past two years) with defensible positions.