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-industr...

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.

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.

> 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.

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…

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.

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.

> 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/

> 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?

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.

Isn't this a bit of an ad?

>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

> ... 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.

“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”

Nice to have the luxury of turning your nose up at money.

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

> we won’t work on product marketing for AI stuff, from a moral standpoint

Can someone explain this?

> 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.

This thread has some serious dickheads

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.

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

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.

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.

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46070842

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.

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.

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.