| 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. |
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| ▲ | wartywhoa23 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > 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. | | |
| ▲ | simianwords 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | >So let's all just give zero fucks about our moral values and just multiply monetary ones. You are misconstruing the original point. They are simply suggesting that the moral qualms of using AI are simply not that high - neither to vast majority of consumers, neither to the government. There are a few people who might exaggerate these moral issues for self service but they wouldn't matter in the long term. That is not to suggest there are absolutely no legitimate moral problems with AI but they will pale in comparison to what the market needs. If AI can make things 1000x more efficient, humanity will collectively agree in one way or the other to ignore or work around the "moral hazards" for the greater good. You can start by explaining what your specific moral value is that goes against AI use? It might bring to clarity whether these values are that important at all to begin with. | | |
| ▲ | vkou 19 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > If AI can make things 1000x more efficient, Is that the promise of the faustian bargain we're signing? Once the ink is dry, should I expect to be living in a 900,000 sq ft apartment, or be spending $20/year on healthcare? Or be working only an hour a week? |
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| ▲ | senordevnyc 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It’s completely reasonable to take a moral stance that you’d rather see your business fail and shut down than do X, even if X is lucrative. But don’t expect the market to care. Don’t write a blog post whining about your morals, when the market is telling you loud and clear they want X. The market doesn’t give a shit about your idiosyncratic moral stance. Edit: I’m not arguing that people shouldn’t take a moral stance, even a costly one, but it makes for a really poor sales pitch. In my experience this kind of desperate post will hurt business more than help it. If people don’t want what you’re selling, find something else to sell. | | |
| ▲ | easyThrowaway 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > when the market is telling you loud and clear they want X Does it tho? Articles like [1] or [2] seem to be at odd with this interpretation. If it were any different we wouldn't be talking about the "AI bubble" after all. [1]https://www.pcmag.com/news/microsoft-exec-asks-why-arent-mor... [2]https://fortune.com/2025/08/18/mit-report-95-percent-generat... | | |
| ▲ | classified 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Exactly. Microsoft for instance got a noticeable backlash for cramming AI everywhere, and their future plans in that direction. |
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| ▲ | nothrabannosir 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | How do you know? I give a shit. A ton of people in this thread give a shit. This blog post is a great way to communicate with others who give a shit. The only thing people don’t give a shit about is your callous and nihilistic dismissal. | | |
| ▲ | simianwords 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | What you (and others in this thread) are also doing is a sort of maximalist dismissal of AI itself as if it is everything that is evil and to be on the right side of things, one must fight against AI. This might sound a bit ridiculous but this is what I think a lot of people's real positions on AI are. | | |
| ▲ | techpression 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Yet to see anything good come from it, and I’m not talking about machine learning for specific use cases. And if we look at the players who are the winners in the AI race, do you see anyone particularly good participating? | | |
| ▲ | simianwords 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | 800 million weekly active users for ChatGPT. My position on things like this is that if enough people use a service, I must defer to their judgement that they benefit from it. To do the contrary would be highly egoistic and suggest that I am somehow more intelligent than all those people and I know more about what they want for themselves. I could obviously give you examples where LLMs have concrete usecases but that's besides the larger point. | | |
| ▲ | manuelmoreale 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > 1B people in the world smoke. The fact something is wildly popular doesn’t make it good or valuable. Human brains are very easily manipulated, that should be obvious at this point. | | |
| ▲ | simianwords 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Almost all smokers agree that it is harmful for them. Can you explain why I should not be equally suspicious of gaming, social media, movies, carnivals, travel? | | |
| ▲ | manuelmoreale 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | You should be. You should be equally suspicious of everything. That's the whole point. You wrote: > My position on things like this is that if enough people use a service, I must defer to their judgement that they benefit from it. Enough people doing something doesn't make that something good or desirable from a societal standpoint. You can find examples of things that go in both directions. You mentioned gaming, social media, movies, carnivals, travel, but you can just as easily ask the same question for gambling or heavy drugs use. Just saying "I defer to their judgment" is a cop-out. | | |
| ▲ | stavros an hour ago | parent [-] | | Ok, I'll bite: What's the harm of LLMs? | | |
| ▲ | manuelmoreale an hour ago | parent [-] | | We don't know yet? And that's how things usually go. It's rare to have an immediate sense of how something might be harmful 5, 10, or 50 years in the future. Social media was likely considered all fun and good in 2005 and I doubt people were envisioning all the harmful consequences. | | |
| ▲ | simianwords 29 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Sure continue to be skeptical of everything. Even on Netflix, even on music even on sports. Your type of people always existed, they were skeptical of homosexuality, intermarriage. Your role is essential to keep progress somewhat in check but that’s all there is to it. Progress will continue. |
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| ▲ | techpression 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I don’t do zero sum games, you can normalize every bad thing that ever happened with that rhetoric.
Also, someone benefiting from something doesn’t make it good. Weapons smuggling is also extremely beneficial to the people involved. | | |
| ▲ | simianwords 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yes but if I go with your priors then all of these are similarly to be suspect - gaming - netflix - television - social media - hacker news - music in general - carnivals A priori, all of these are equally suspicious as to whether they provide value or not. My point is that unless you have reason to suspect, people engaging in consumption through their own agency is in general preferable. You can of course bring counter examples but they are more of caveats against my larger truer point. | | |
| ▲ | techpression 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Social media for sure and television and Netflix in general absolutely.
But again, providing value is not the same as something being good. A lot of people think inaccuracies by LLMs to be of high value because it’s provided with nice wrappings and the idea that you’re always right. |
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| ▲ | nothrabannosir 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | That's definitely not what I am doing, nor implying, and while you're free to think it, please don't put words in my mouth. | | |
| ▲ | simianwords 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | >The only thing people don’t give a shit about is your callous and nihilistic dismissal. This was you interpreting what the parent post was saying. I'm similarly providing a value judgement that you are doing a maximalist AI dismissal. We are not that different. | | |
| ▲ | nothrabannosir 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | We are basically 100-ϵ% the same. I have no doubt. Maybe the only difference between us is that I think there is a difference between a description and an interpretation, and you don't :) In the grand scheme of things, is it even worth mentioning? Probably not! :D :D Why focus on the differences when we can focus on the similarities? | | |
| ▲ | simianwords 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Ok change my qualifier from interpretation to description if it helps. I describe you as someone who dismisses AI in a maximalist way | | |
| ▲ | balamatom 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | >Maybe the only difference between us is that I think there is a difference between a description and an interpretation, and you don't :) >Ok change my qualifier from interpretation to description if it helps. I... really don't think AI is what's wrong with you. |
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| ▲ | 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | clickety_clack 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This is a YC forum. That guy is giving pretty honest feedback about a business decision in the context of what the market is looking for. The most unkind thing you can do to a founder is tell them they’re right when you see something they might be wrong about. | | | |
| ▲ | senordevnyc 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Are you going to hire him? If not, for the purpose of paying his bills, your giving a shit is irrelevant. That’s what I mean. | | |
| ▲ | nothrabannosir 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | You mean, when evaluating suppliers, do I push for those who don't use AI? Yes. I'm not going to be childish and dunk on you for having to update your priors now, but this is exactly the problem with this speaking in aphorisms and glib dismissals. You don't know anyone here, you speak in authoritative tone for others, and redefine what "matters" and what is worthy of conversation as if this is up to you. > Don’t write a blog post whining about your morals, why on earth not? I wrote a blog post about a toilet brush. Can the man write a blog post about his struggle with morality and a changing market? |
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| ▲ | Towaway69 12 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Arguing against progress as it is happening is as old as the tech industry. It never works. I still wondering why I'm not doing my banking in Bitcoins. My blockchain database was replaced by postgres. So some tech can just be hypeware. The OP has a legitimate standpoint given some technologies track record. And the doctors are still out on the affects of social media on children or why are some countries banning social media for children? Not everything that comes out of Silicon Valley is automatically good. | |
| ▲ | alextingle 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I think it's just as likely that business who have gone all-in on AI are going to be the ones that get burned. When that hose-pipe of free compute gets turned off (as it surely must), then any business that relies on it is going to be left high and dry. It's going to be a massacre. | |
| ▲ | BenGosub 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I understand that website studios have been hit hard, given how easy it is to generate good enough websites with AI tools. I don't think human potential is best utilised when dealing with CSS complexities. In the long term, I think this is a positive. However, what I don't like is how little the authors are respected in this process. Everything that the AI generates is based on human labour, but we don't see the authors getting the recognition. | | |
| ▲ | classified 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | > we don't see the authors getting the recognition. In that sense AI has been the biggest heist that has ever been perpetrated. |
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| ▲ | senordevnyc 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Totally agree, but I’d state it slightly differently. This type of business isn’t going to be hit hard by AI; this type of business owner is going to be hit hard by AI. | |
| ▲ | rob74 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I don't know about you, but I would rather pay some money for a course written thoughtfully by an actual human than waste my time trying to process AI-generated slop, even if it's free. Of course, programming language courses might seem outdated if you can just "fake it til you make it" by asking an LLM everytime you face a problem, but doing that won't actually lead to "making it", i.e. developing a deeper understanding of the programming environment you're working with. | |
| ▲ | otabdeveloper4 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | AI is not a tool, it is an oracle. Prompting isn't a skill, and praying that the next prompt finally spits out something decent is not a business strategy. | | |
| ▲ | classified 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Seeing how many successful businesses are a product of pure luck, using an oracle to roll the dice is not significantly different. | |
| ▲ | rob74 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Do you remember the times when "cargo cult programming" was something negative? Now we're all writing incantations to the great AI, hoping that it will drop a useful nugget of knowledge in our lap... | |
| ▲ | tonyhart7 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | "praying that the next prompt finally spits out something decent is not a business strategy." well you just describing an chatgpt is, one of the most fastest growing user acquisition user base in history as much as I agree with your statement but the real world doesn't respect that |
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| ▲ | classified 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > And the type of businesses that survive will be the ones that integrate AI into their business the most successfully. I am an AI skeptic and until the hype is supplanted by actual tangible value I will prefer products that don't cram AI everywhere it doesn't belong. | |
| ▲ | balamatom 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Sure, and it takes five whole paragraphs to have a nuanced opinion on what is very obvious to everyone :-) >the type of business that's going to be hit hard by AI [...] will be the ones that integrate AI into their business the most There. Fixed! |
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| ▲ | lmm 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > 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. | | |
| ▲ | gloosx 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It's not as simple as putting all programmers into one category. There can be oversupply of web developers but at the same time undersupply of COBOL developers. If you are a very good developer, you will always be in demand. | | |
| ▲ | ben_w 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | > If you are a very good developer, you will always be in demand. "Always", in the same way that five years ago we'd "never" have an AI that can do a code review. Don't get me wrong: I've watched a decade of promises that "self driving cars are coming real soon now honest", latest news about Tesla's is that it can't cope with leaves; I certainly *hope* that a decade from now will still be having much the same conversation about AI taking senior programmer jobs, but "always" is a long time. | | |
| ▲ | tonyhart7 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | waymo and tesla already operate in certain areas, even if tech is ready regulation still very much a thing | | |
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| ▲ | yungwarlock 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I'm young, please when was that and in what industry | | |
| ▲ | habibur 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | After the year 2000. dot com burst. An tech employee posted he looked for job for 6 months, found none and has joined a fast food shop flipping burgers. That turned tech workers switching to "flipping burgers" into a meme. | |
| ▲ | forgetfreeman 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | .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 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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 |
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| ▲ | _DeadFred_ 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Some people will lose their homes. Some marriages will fail from the stress. Some people will chose to exit life because of it all. It's happened before and there's no way we could have learned from that and improved things. It has to be just life changing, life ruining, career crippling. Absolutely no other way for a society to function than this. |
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| ▲ | indemnity 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I haven’t visited StackOverflow for years. | | |
| ▲ | nrhrjrjrjtntbt 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I stopped using it much even before the AI wave. | |
| ▲ | ido 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | It became as annoying as experts exchange the very thing it railed against! |
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| ▲ | m463 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | buggywhips are having a temporary setback. |
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