An uninspired vision of the future. We have endless evidence through history that hiring the most engineers, producing the most output, raising the most money is not the path to success. The most successful businesses are those that deeply understand something about their customers, about how to sell to their buyers. The most has never mattered. An army of agents doing endless busywork is not the path to success.

Google isn’t successful because it has the best engineers, it has the best engineers because it is successful. Google is an extremely boring business: show adverts to make money. And they made so much money. The next Google is not going to be the company with the best “harness” it’ll be the company that has an obscenely profitable product.

Founder mode, what was considered a panacea just 12 months ago, is defined by a founder giving a shit about everything. You don’t succeed by handing everything off to an army of ~agents~ consultants.

This vision of the future is nonsense that will not pan out. You can add that to the HN AI predictions. At no point will real businesses be “harnesses” around AI models.

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reticulates 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> I think in-house AI developer tools (like the ones we’ve seen from Ramp, Stripe, DoorDash, etc.) are the beginning of this.

And on this, these are examples of tech companies filled with nerds who love novel new technology. Of course companies like Ramp and Stripe are spending huge amounts of time and money on taking this new technology to the extremes with “harnesses” and ”factories” because that’s what the nerds want to do. What the nerds want to do is not a sign of how the technology will be used in future, it’s a sign of what is most fun today.

	▲	hibikir 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's not always what the nerds want to do though: I know of what the insides used to look like in one of those on the list, and things were very custom, because some early technical decisions were outright landmines that were too expensive to move away from. So having custom harnesses to actually survive that codebase I remember seems like a baseline to get reasonable turnaround of AI helpers. The company had done cowboy development for way too long, and solved too many problems by creating bigger, more custom problems. So don't assume it's all nerds having fun. Now, is it what the future will look like for everyone? I don't think so, but that's because I expect AI is bringing us a more unified dev experience, with more developers than even Google has. This will make general programming harnesses very good, quite fast, solely because said harnesses can be differentiators in the AI race. So we are seeing some of the largest companies inthe world, with the largest research budgets, dedicating more money to the dev experience of their product than almost anyone else does.

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samtheprogram 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> The most successful businesses are those that deeply understand something about their customers, about how to sell to their buyers. The most has never mattered. An army of agents doing endless busywork is not the path to success.

You're talking about the best businesses. Arguably the article is talking about the mean of the "startup" tranche of businesses.

Google isn't a SaaS. That's (is or is tangential to) the kind of businesses this article is referring to. And they make decent money, they just aren't a unicorn that didn't die.

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2001zhaozhao 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't think your take is counter to the article. It is precisely the "founder giving a shit about everything" that will be amplified the most by a capable AI harness, because AI reduces the power of capital (e.g. hiring a lot of good engineers or buying a lot of data or ads) as a moat by amplifying good judgement.

(This is temporary until the AI gets better judgement than humans, then capital will therever be the most powerful moat in a market full of dystopic, consequentialist, incredibly long-sightedly-greedy companies)

	▲	reticulates 6 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The article is arguing that a company’s output will be entirely created by AI (via the harness) and only the input (developing the harness) will be human. My take is counter to that. My take is that success in business comes from the small important details, not the volume of output. You can develop a harness to produce 1000x more output than humans but that doesn’t matter because even today, most businesses fail, not because they didn’t produce enough output, but because their output was wrong. Long before A.I., tiny 10 person startups have been able to revolutionize industries.
	▲	redanddead 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		So you’re saying capital’s power is reducing until it suddenly, for whatever reason, inverses asymptotically Why wouldn’t capital simply lose its value even further, especially as capital globalizes further
	▲	sshh12 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Yeah 100% agree

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jmtulloss 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I didn't read it this way. I think I equated it most to "culture" in current companies. A culture that fosters excellence is necessary (but not sufficient) to have a great company. There are also many types of cultures that have been shown to work (ie there's not one right answer).

The article argues (and I think I agree) that how you choose to incorporate agents into your work will be a differentiator and most great companies will have a unique take on it.

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wg0 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

My company can vibe code whole JIRA in two weeks even on a $200 plan and then they can stop paying the JIRA tax forever.

That's true for any product.

Who are they going to sell the product that this whole harness would produce? Any ideas?

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reticulates 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

We have evidence that this is not true. For years and years you have been able to self-host Zulip and Mattermost but companies still pay Slack millions of dollars per year. GitHub has billions in revenue, why not just use Gitea for free? So on and so forth. The ability to generate a (shitty) clone of software does not magically make the cloned software less valuable. Paying for software isn’t a “tax” when it produces value. If this vision of the future was true, cheap/free alternatives would have already destroyed the SaaS market years and years ago.

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wg0 6 hours ago | parent [-]

You'd agree that:

1. The quality of Mattermost and Zulip was NOT exactly as polished as Slack.

2. Deployment of such stacks was a problem. A complicate operational overhead.

These days, that's no more the case. Agents can:

1. Make pixel perfect clone of Slack or Jira with SQLite or ejabberd behind.

2. Or they can deploy the Zulip or Mattermost or GitLab for you just give them an SSH key to the machine and see them bringing the stack to life.

So now and back then are not the same.

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computably 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I doubt that agents can make a product as polished as Slack. The status quo would indicate that's not the case as the prediction that SaaS would die has not panned out at all.

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creata 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Agents can: Make pixel perfect clone of Slack or Jira with SQLite or ejabberd behind.

If it's that easy, then maybe you can do it and give the world a free and better-than-Zulip alternative to Slack?

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wg0 2 hours ago | parent [-]

You're missing the point.

Software in individual service doesn't have to scale, secure or maintainable.

Software is a thruway artefact now.

People are having hard time realizing that.

	▲	creata 27 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Software... doesn't have to be secure? I have to admit, I really am having a hard time realizing that.

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KronisLV 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> The quality of Mattermost and Zulip was NOT exactly as polished as Slack.

Mattermost isn't actually all that bad and its mental model is pretty close to Slack, at least compared to Zulip. I actually prefer Mattermost to Teams, and would view it in the same ballpark as Slack.

> Deployment of such stacks was a problem. A complicate operational overhead.

Not at all! Their stack is actually very reasonable and quite easy to setup: https://github.com/mattermost/docker/blob/main/docker-compos...

Nowhere near the nightmare that self-hosting Sentry is like: https://github.com/getsentry/self-hosted/blob/master/docker-...

I'd say that in Mattermost's case the group calling functionality was locked behind a subscription as well as some other stuff last I checked, which makes it dead on arrival for many. It was quite nice software though, even before being able to vibe code your own (though tackling videos sharing and RTMP will be anything but trivial).

> Make pixel perfect clone of Slack or Jira with SQLite or ejabberd behind.

There's A LOT of functionality and features in Jira, the only thing that saves claims like that is that you probably don't use 80% and can just build what your company needs. I more or less did that for the hell of it (MariaDB + Garage + Dropwizard/Java + Angular/Spartan) and there was still so much supervision an changes that were needed - after pulling the Jira DB scheme and throwing about 60% of it in the trash (didn't need the automation), there was still A LOT of stuff to do and even the plans eat up a whole bunch of the context of the coding tools you intend to use, no matter how many checks and scripts you write to automate guardrails for when the models simply don't recall everything that is relevant.

For people who want to self-host something basic, there's already the excellent https://kanboard.org/ (very very fast)

For those that want something similarly depressingly slow to Jira while still locking some stuff behind a subscription (at least in the versions I tried) there's the passable https://www.openproject.org/

If those don't fit and you don't see anything exactly like what you need, you might try to build your own. But yeah, not a weekend project.

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6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]

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sscaryterry 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Google isn’t successful because it has the best engineers, it has the best engineers because it is successful.

I think you missed the part where Google was successful because it had the best engineers, and then went all Alphabet.

There is such a thing as too big too fail.