Those companies weren’t multiple person teams. They were one person teams with contract work. Maybe you know the details of the kind of money they were paid or how involved they were with the work but that could mean so many things.

I’d have to say when I hire someone in Fiverr to make a logo for my app I’m not suddenly a multi-person team. If I use AI to make my logo instead of paying a human $50 to make one I didn’t exactly experience a productivity revolution.

The other thought that popped into my head is that offshore contractors have access to AI, too. So shouldn’t we see their output go up and prices go down? Again we have another facet of this lack of market indicators.

▲ CharlieDigital 2 days ago | parent [-]

They were multi-person teams.

Some had employees (which were let go when they pivoted). Some were contractors doing all of the engineering work.

▲ dangus 2 days ago | parent [-]

The majority of businesses fail within 5 years.

Are they using AI because it’s better or because they have no other choice?

If I hire two sandwich artists for 6 months but nobody buys my sandwiches, I don’t have much choice but to fire them.

This word “pivot” is strong.

▲ CharlieDigital 2 days ago | parent [-]

    > Are they using AI because it’s better

Because it's better (versus the engineers they were able to hire).

    > If I hire two sandwich artists for 6 months but nobody buys my sandwiches

Pivot is strong and in both cases where they went n -> 1, the pivots were dramatic. One went from building a (credit) card switching SDK to building a legal assistant AI. One went from building a fin-tech compliance product to a CRM for managing collections.

Because they went back to the drawing board, they ended up letting go of their teams and started using AI to build MVPs and then found that they could ship faster and better.

▲

dangus 2 days ago | parent [-]

This now seems like even less useful information than before.

They literally changed to doing an entirely different business.

This would be like saying I hired two sandwich artists, but sandwiches don’t sell well, so I fired my sandwich artists and now I run a coffee shop on my own.

	▲	CharlieDigital a day ago \| parent [-]
		You can choose to bury your head in the sand with word games. Or acknowledge that LLM is enabling single person startups. Up to you. I'm sharing information, not presenting an argument. You seem to want to argue that... something, but it is not apparent to me what it is. Whatever you choose to do with this information, it did not change reality.