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I'm a small software business owner in Europe. I have to assume my competition is willing to pay for any business advantage they can get. And so I also have to
by Sammi 4mo ago
I'm a small software business owner in Europe. I have to assume my competition is willing to pay for any business advantage they can get. And so I also have to pay for the SOTA model, whatever it is.
- 1over137 4mo agoNonsense. Do you buy state of the art pens, pencils, printers, paper, computers, disks, etc.? No. You buy whatever is the best value for the case at hand. That’s often not the SOTA option.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- admax88qqq 4mo agoSure but that's orthogonal. Yes you use the right tool for the job. But if the job requires the best intelligence you can get with an LLM, then you use that. Taking as an assumption that the quality of your product is a function of the quality of the inference you are using: if you use an inferior model because "what if it gets export controlled again" and your competitors don't, then your competitors are likely to win. If you don't need frontier models for you job then this is all moot, but the thread started with > You cannot build a business critical function on top of American SOTA frontier model Which is silly. HN likes to roleplay bringing everythgin "business critical" in house because sometimes vendors mess up. Self host, don't use the cloud, run open models locally, built redundant supply chains in case of another covid, etc etc. Sometimes the risk is real, but most of the time the risk is rare and the cost of an interruption event is less than the cost of bringing everything in house or using lower quality vendors "just in case"
- Sammi 4mo agoArtists that need the best quality output use the best pens and papers. Call me a coding artist then haha. But seriously I don't have the time for anything less than SOTA.
- brazukadev 4mo agodo you think your current operation and niche is so optimized that not using Fable would put you out of business? Or is this a hope that using Fable will allow you to stay in business?
- cjbgkagh 4mo agoI am on track to commoditize my niche industry, and I hope I can do it before anyone else beats me to it. I'm working at panic speeds.
- parodysbird 4mo agoThis is a great recipe for going out of business.
- halfmatthalfcat 4mo agoAnd thus, capitalism continues to roll on. Businesses are suppose to go out of business, its a feature.
- teleforce 4mo agoNearly spit out my coffee, thanks for the chuckle.
- whatever120 4mo agothey’re not supposed to, they’re just able to
- adrianmonk 4mo agoIf the competitive risk is real, then are choosing between supplier risk (AI model access) and competitive risk. When there isn't a zero-risk option, the question becomes which risk is smaller.
- slim 4mo agoYou can compete by being smart and using less-than-sota models and build a more solid business around them
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- jdlshore 4mo agoWhat concrete business advantage are you getting from LLMs?
- echelon 4mo agoSpeed.
- K0balt 4mo agoThis x 10 . I don’t understand how people are saying you can’t use LLMs to get crazy productivity gains. If you can’t write quality code with LLMs at ludicrous speed, you’re holding it wrong. You will have occasional bad days and regressions. But overall you’re still going to be able to 4x your progress.
- cjbgkagh 4mo agoI wonder if the people getting 10x productivity gains are spending less time on HN and more time tending to their agents. Personally I now spend so much time productively arguing with agents that it feels like an utter waste of effort arguing with humans, if people can't see the value in LLMs by now I'm not sure what I could say to change their minds.
- dboreham 4mo agoDefinitely enjoying the lack of eye-rolling, being asked to explain obvious things multiple times, and stopping things being done for resume-stuffing reasons.
- sscaryterry 4mo agoExactly, no ego (I know I'm anthropomorphizing)
- vhantz 4mo agoWe must then assume you're not getting those 10x gains
- codybontecou 4mo agoUnless you have concrete evidence via evals that SOTA is actually needed, you’re just buying into the hype.
- SwellJoe 4mo agoThe good news (for you and most everyone other than the current leading AI companies), the gap between the SOTA and the near-frontiers is getting smaller every week or two. The leading Chinese models are only a few months behind now (GLM 5.2 tickles the tail of GPT 5.3 or 5.4 and Opus 4.6, according to benchmarks and the vibes among heavy users who've spent some time with it), where they were a couple of years behind a year ago.
- rafram 4mo ago4.6 was released at the beginning of February, so if the Chinese models only "tickle its tail," that means they're >5 months behind.
- trvz 4mo ago> The leading Chinese models are only a few months behind now
- PeterStuer 4mo agoI hear that often, but what does that even mean? I am a great proponent of open weights models. I do believe they are the only reason we have not stagnated into a collusion of halting (public) model releases. But exactly which point in time is z.ai compared to claude.ai? Consistently bring "6 months behind" in an exponentially acellerating evolution means the gap is growing exponentially wider, not constant.
- SwellJoe 4mo ago"an exponentially acellerating evolution" Oh? Exponentially accelerating, huh? That's quite a surprise, to me.
- PeterStuer 3mo agoSure we can nitpick semantics, but how would you describe the evolution in GenAI SWE capability over the last 18 months?
- cedws 4mo agoThis thinking that every task must be stuffed into the most 'advanced' (expensive) model out there is idiotic, and it's not only you unfortunately. At $JOB I have warned higher ups we should try to keep our expenditure under control, educate people that document slinging doesn't require Fable every time and demo the capabilities of the cheaper models, and been snubbed for it. When Fable is available once again our bill is going to be eye watering, relative to what it should be.
- fakedang 4mo agoThis! I've found that for most coding, Sonnet is pretty good as it is. Yeah, you might need to finesse your prompt a bit more, and you'll probably be spending a bit more time on the computer, rather than a more hands-off approach, but at the end of the day, you'll save a lot more simply because you're using a good-enough model. If you're the one-shotting type, obviously then Fable might be useful, but I think only marginally. You don't need to bring a MANPADS to a duel at high noon.
- baq 4mo agoSonnet is dogshit at coding unless you eval the exact niche to be fine and still watch it like a hawk.
- Sammi 4mo agoIf I am working on something simple and want the speed boost then I'll drop the thinking to low or minimal and still get the SOTA model output quality. But for what I work on I mostly need high or xhigh SOTA model quality output. I don't have the time to deal with anything less.
- pmontra 4mo agoI don't know if you write software for your own products or if you code for your customers. Anyway, are you going to compete on the speed of your code writing AI or on deploying the features your customers need? One useful feature is better than a hundred ones nobody really care about. And a good relationship with customers is better than any feature. Example. Yesterday I listened the technical lead of a customer of mine digging himself into a hole by not understanding what it would mean exposing AWS EFS to their on premise server over NFS. It was just too many unknown unknowns for him and he had no time to ask the AI (and even if he did I'm not sure that he could understand.) His boss, which actually used NFS, had to stop him. I didn't speak a word. So, he could have coded the migration of a server from AWS to on premise, asked Claude to write also all the configuration scripts and policies but then what?
- Sammi 4mo agoI'm making a micro SaaS product. Code quality and code production speed are actually both super important. I don't have the time for non-SOTA model output.
- slopinthebag 4mo ago> Code quality You care about this but use LLM's to slop out features anyways?
- zombot 4mo agoSo the panic generators ("You will be left behind!") are winning. Creating a sense of urgency that makes you switch off the higher rational functions is a key element in every successful scam.
- hk__2 4mo agoNo you don't; it's often overkill to use the SOTA models. People want SOTA because it's shiny, but there are a lot of tasks where it's cheaper and more efficient to use other models.
- jiggawatts 4mo ago> but there are a lot of tasks where it's cheaper and more efficient to use other models. Sure… but which ones? How can you know ahead of time? I just did a “simple” upgrade project where both me and the AI kept tripping over dead code, subtle typos, and difficult-to-trace live versus dead code. Many times I used “Medium” thinking I got bitten, but not every time, and I couldn’t predict when. So “Extra high” it was, for the entire project. Far fewer nasty surprises!
- PeterStuer 4mo agoIn my experience: anything of open-ended complexity (software development, research, product design, ...) benefits from wathever the frontier can offer. 95% of Line of Business automation and workflows can be handled by even a reasonably small open weights generalist model flanked by a few even smaller specialized models. Yes, designing such a setup takes more knowledge and work dan just chucking it all over the api with prompts. But that is how I can run a system here for <$30/month vs >$1.000 month. As an added bonus, no model server can shut me down at the drop of a hat.
- Sammi 4mo agoExactly. I simply don't have the time to deal with non-SOTA model output.
- jfim 4mo agoFor programmatic usage oftentimes SOTA isn't useful. For example, I have software that summarizes articles and classifies links on webpages to build a synthetic RSS feed, both of which use LLMs, neither of which need a SOTA model. I'll probably use LLMs to bootstrap a dataset of native ads in articles, and there again, I don't really need a SOTA model. If it's for more open ended tasks like writing code though, I agree that at this point SOTA models make more sense to use.
- ferrouswheel 4mo agoIf you can't figure out what model to use your business is already dead.
- lelanthran 4mo ago> I'm a small software business owner in Europe. I have to assume my competition is willing to pay for any business advantage they can get. And so I also have to pay for the SOTA model, whatever it is. If you make money from doing anything like "produce software with as little human involvement as possible", then sure, you need SOTA models. In that case, though, the value you add is very little and you probably don't have a sustainable business. OTOH, if you make money by getting clients to pay for features, there is very little difference in time-savings from using Anthropic/OpenAI SOTA over GLM-latest. IOW, if you business can only make money by one-shotting software, you probably don't have a business in the first place. Regards, another small business owner.
- midasz 4mo agoYou also don't really need LLM's, we still have software engineers too. Everyone is focusing so heavily on the speed gain producing code, but in my experience clients of established products aren't really waiting for massive changes and gigantic features to be added. We aren't taking the time to think things through anymore.
- goyozi 4mo ago> clients of established products aren't really waiting for massive changes and gigantic features to be added In some cases they do. I work in a B2B vertical SaaS company and there’s both features that competitors build or rough edges around our features that make clients go „either we get X or we sign with someone else”. I agree though with the general sentiment that you don’t need SOTA models to build those - humans or humans + mid pack strong model will do.
- resonious 4mo agoI have clients waiting for very gigantic features and the agent harnesses are a godsend.
- Sammi 4mo agoI'm the only dev. I simply don't have time for dealing with the code from non-SOTA models. I'm doing all I can to keep this business afloat.
- raverbashing 4mo agoReducing your costs is also an advantage, but I'm not surprised such binary thinking is present here
- ZeroGravitas 4mo agoFor businesses where this is true, they also need to be able to switch provider quickly in case the best provider changes. It's almost identical to the possibility of one model getting shut down for a business that doesn't care about SOTA.
- Sammi 4mo agoYeah I have both the Claude and Codex 100 dollar subscriptions and I try to use both. I also keep the 20 dollar Cursor subscription as there I can play around with everything. I also refuse to use any harness specific features. Claude is particularly annoying with this in that it's the only one that doesn't respect open config standards like .agents/skills