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| ▲ | whatever1 an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Where? I am not aware of any significant business improvement on the actual bottom line. We all feel more productive. But did your rust rewrite or my fancy react dashboard produce more value? | | |
| ▲ | Hnrobert42 an hour ago | parent [-] | | I advise a B2B startup that went from 4 developers to just the founder, who is technical but not a developer. It is now profitable and delivering just as many features with arguably better security. N=1 | | |
| ▲ | zrobotics 24 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | So how is this startup going to be a value add long term? If they can cut all the devs, what moat is there? What's stopping their customers from just prompting their own model? Seriously asking, why would this look like a good business model to be in? If they don't need anyone besides a technical non-developer to create the product, why would this look like a good business? If it's B2B, then most of their customers will have that type of IT person on staff. | | |
| ▲ | fn-mote 17 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | A dry cleaner and a car wash can be a good business. Outsource things that are not your core competency. A moat means you can defend it better, but in this case your business can capture the value of them not having the IT person on staff and not having to spend the tokens. It’s a good old fashioned business. | |
| ▲ | marcus_holmes 6 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | The question is "what business value is AI driving?" and the answer was "a solo founder cut all the devs and still delivered a product". Separate question: "now that AI is here and development isn't a moat any more, how does a business defend itself from competition?" That second question is a direct result of AI. Five years ago the amount of cost and effort spent on software development was a moat. Now it's not. So that answers the first question completely, I think. As for the second question - market sector knowledge, customer contacts and industry reputation, all the usual non-technical things that make a moat. Also, we may now be living in a world where software companies cannot expect to be monopolies in their markets any more. This company will have to compete with many similar competitors for market share, like in most other markets. I think this is a good thing. Less enshittification will ensue. |
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| ▲ | whatever1 44 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | So the price of the product will just fall by 80%, unless nobody else cares to compete. | | | |
| ▲ | bluefirebrand 38 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | A company doing more with less sounds great, but I personally view a shrinking headcount as failing | |
| ▲ | leptons 38 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | It's going to be funny when AI soon costs 4x or more than it does now, and that non-developer CTO can't understand the slop codebase the AI created. | | |
| ▲ | fn-mote 13 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I also hope that rising costs return software dev to an elite, lucrative career. I’m not making my 10 years plan based on that theory, though. Watch what the open weight models can do. Once they can manage your codebase, you’re safe from gouging. |
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| ▲ | asadotzler a few seconds ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Too dangerous to release was 2019. Today it's only very useful for coding and other niche industries. It promised to automate all work and to usher in a utopia. Instead it helps programmers further enshittify Big Tech offerings. That's well short of any promise or expectation set out by boosters, paid and otherwise, for the last 7-ish years. Where's the civilization upending change? Where's the Beef(tm)? | |
| ▲ | onemoresoop 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I know it sounds crazy but for the amout of investments AI has underdelivered. | | |
| ▲ | adventured an hour ago | parent [-] | | GPT 3.5 is 2022. In the past ~18 months the majority of all human software development has been wiped out and the models keep getting better rapidly. AI has already radically overdelivered and the biggest returns are in the next 10, 20, 50 years. It's 1987: The PC is underdelivering. It's 2000: the Internet is underdelivering. It's 2010: smartphones are underdelivering. | | |
| ▲ | afpx an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Models are finally good enough that I'm confident that I can repeatably build pretty much any software reliably in less than 2% of the time that I could before 2022. I wouldn't have made that claim 6 months ago. Even quantized local models like Qwen3.8 are good enough to handle a lot of drudgery. For example, I hooked my wife's computer up to a local model, and now she finally has a clean desktop. She just drops spreadsheets or powerpoints or whatever on her desktop and automation takes care of everything. The caveat is that I developed software for 30 years, so I understand most of what it produces and can guide it to make fewer mistakes and fix what it can't do. The biggest challenge has been keeping my requirements focused - it's very easy to gold plate everything and prematurely optimize. The biggest question I ask myself is why am I even still doing this. The smart people are probably already trying to figure out how to pipe raw matter and energy to their homes to build replicators. The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed. | |
| ▲ | malfist an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > In the past ~18 months the majority of all human software development has been wiped out What the hell does this even mean? Literally half of the code in operation I the world is still COBOL. The fuck is this nonsense wiped out | | |
| ▲ | p-e-w 23 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | > Literally half of the code in operation I the world is still COBOL. There’s no way this is even remotely true. JavaScript alone is probably 90+%, considering it’s on almost every website. | |
| ▲ | adventured an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | It means in corporations across the globe, the majority of code is no longer being written by humans. That is over and it will only keep dwindling by the quarter. | | |
| ▲ | malfist an hour ago | parent [-] | | Writing lines of code by hand is all of human software development? Pretty sure in all of those companies its still software engineers writing the code, even if they're using LLMs to do it. Unless you're making the claim that software engineers aren't involved or that only writing code is software development. |
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| ▲ | eudamoniac an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Making your engineers use AI with little to no measurable improvement, but with very measurable high cost, is not delivering | | |
| ▲ | adventured an hour ago | parent [-] | | Astra, Fable, Opus 5.5 are drastically beyond the capabilities of the median software developer. It's not remotely close. The bottom 2/3 of the human market is entirely dead. Their jobs are gone (AI-shored) they just haven't all gotten the forced retirement or pink slips yet, while they click a few more prompts for a few more pay checks. The frontier pushing forward will knock out most of the remaining top 1/3 without breaking a sweat over the next few years. The really good developers will graduate into babysitting AI as managers. It is legitimately sad, it's millions of high paying jobs just in the US alone. It's going to be brutal on the housing market. Automation came for another field. | | |
| ▲ | yeeeloit 21 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Do you, personally, have a plan for the future? Like what are you doing about this, or are you hoping to be in the 1%? | | |
| ▲ | fn-mote 6 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I am improving my Spanish and staring at the massive savings that I have built up from my SV job. When my job goes and the industry is in flames, I am moving to Bolivia. If you have a big mortgage and no savings, it’s going to be tough. Stop taking the Waymo now. |
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| ▲ | BobbyTables2 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The latest Claude models are spooky. About 100x faster then a senior developer snd utterly spooky in the speed and depth of analysis. This isn’t the “hallucinate everything” style of model like the earlier GPT models… | |
| ▲ | lovich 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | What AI lab is profitable? And in before ‘JumpCrissCross chimes in about inference being profitable while ignoring all the investment costs needed to get inference to where it is. | | |
| ▲ | cosmicgadget 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Profitability is an awfully narrow metric. | | |
| ▲ | zrobotics 6 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | >> Profitability is an awfully narrow metric. I mean, if anything summarizes where we have gotten to as an industry this quote is sure it. From Uber using VC funds to subsidize growth to where the AI players are at... | |
| ▲ | gradus_ad an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | It's a powerful metric. It captures to what extent something is sustainably possible today. | | |
| ▲ | fn-mote 3 minutes ago | parent [-] | | The full balance sheet captures the info. If the AI companies suck up all of our salaries and spend that money on R&D/training, they still aren’t profitable, right? |
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| ▲ | redwood 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Anthropic as of a few months ago. | | |
| ▲ | gamblor956 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | That explains the 80 Billion loss on their IPO disclosures. | | |
| ▲ | cscheid 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I mean, it literally does. Something like 70+ billion of those 80 billion are accounting adjustments because their debt is supposed to be handled in stock and their stock price skyrocketed. | | |
| ▲ | gamblor956 an hour ago | parent [-] | | While I was being facetious, Anthropic is nowhere close to being profitable in the normal, i.e., GAAP meaning of the term. It's only using unicorn fantasy lalaland financials that they are "profitable." Before someone else jumps in talking about "unit economics": unit economics only matters if you can sell the units long enough to make the initial (capitalized) investment (i.e., R&D) back. Models aren't commercially viable long enough for the unit economics to work. |
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| ▲ | adventured an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Why have they needed to worry about profitability? They have been chasing extreme growth with cheap money. That enabled them to hyper scale at a pace the world has rarely seen before. They have made the correct choice so far. The absolute dumbest thing they could have done up to this point is slow down to try to turn a profit. They have not needed to. Market capture is the sole thing they should be focused on. Here's a hint: how many users does GPT have now versus three years ago? There appears to be very widespread confusion about what purpose turning a profit serves and how business operations actually work. Go back in time and tell Uber in ~2013-2015 that it needs to immediately become profitable and not focus on capturing the market. | | |
| ▲ | leptons 29 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Market capture didn't work so well for Uber, and it won't work for AI, and even less so for AI because you can't get a driver in China to take you to LAX airport, but you can use cheaper Chinese AI. Uber has to pay back all the billions of dollars it wasted trying to get people to use their platform, and now I can't afford most Uber or Lyft rides, it's way too expensive. So did market capture really work if they had to raise their prices so much as to make the service unworkable for most people? The only time I take uber is if my company pays for it, and that is getting less often. AI is also going to have to become way too expensive so they can pay back the billions (trillions?) it is borrowing. And, when everyone is laid-off or fired because AI took their job, then who's going to be paying for AI? I guess the companies that lay off all the humans will, but when the wealthy business owners realize they've replaced everything with AI and nobody is buying what they are selling because there's no more jobs, then what? Sounds like they should worry about profitability, and a lot of other things too. |
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| ▲ | aplummer 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Can you name 3 ways is positively impacted the average non tech persons life in a meaningful way? Meaningful would be more than the invention of the microwave, but not as important as a vaccine. | | |
| ▲ | ozim 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I am not going to make up 3 things but it meaningfully replaced Google search that became unusable crap. Downside is that OpenAI is already having ads on their chat interface, so I guess it will be crap any time soon. | |
| ▲ | hdgvhicv 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Microwave took decades from invention to being normal. VHS took weeks. The difference was pornography. | | |
| ▲ | jgalt212 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Microwaves are still of limited utility. | | |
| ▲ | lesuorac 37 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Microwaves are incredibly useful if you can do anything besides 100% power. | |
| ▲ | ButlerianJihad 20 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Microwaves, or microwave ovens? Because I can name all sorts of ways that microwaves have improved communications. So many long-haul telco links, and remote radio/TV stations, have been accomplished by microwave. It's a powerful method of transmission. Unless you're specifically meaning microwave ovens, which are of "limited utility" in a full-service kitchen. I'd have to agree there. My previous microwave oven was so intensely powerful, that I needed to dial down the power to "7/10" so that it would not destroy my frozen meals. I could never run it at 10/10. My current appliance is very nice, and has an automatic button to run until doneness. Works every time now. | |
| ▲ | malfist an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | What's your point? What doesn't have limited utility? |
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| ▲ | gamblor956 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Microwaves were popular from the beginning after residential models became avaliable in the 1960s. |
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| ▲ | IshKebab 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | We're at the dot com boom stage of AI. You could say it didn't deliver because boo.com didn't make a profit or because the average person still used paper maps, but that was just because of momentum. It's the same with AI. The technology is here now. My friends in financial advice and market research have not lost their jobs immediately, because of momentum. | |
| ▲ | vuurmot 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 1. destruction of the digital arts (music, 2d/3d art) industry 2. greatest hacking tool in history 3. greatest corporate espionage tool in history (stealing of Navier-Stokes solution) 4. greatest accountability transfer tool in history (whoops it was the AI that shot those missiles) 5. greatest capital raising tool in history (we use AI in our startup, and you should give us money) 6. greatest scamming tool in history (cloning people voices for scam calls, etc..) Edit:Whoops, I didn't read "positively" | |
| ▲ | redwood 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Democratization of information. I think it's a similar jump a pre-internet search to internet search... | | |
| ▲ | skeeter2020 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I find it kind of odd that you equate a small oligopoly of intermediaries gatekeeping information as "democratization". Similarly Google maybe made it easy to find for a while, but that was/is not democracy either. | |
| ▲ | vuurmot 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | google?
anna's archive?
arXiv? "democratization of information", maybe if you were too lazy to click on a google link |
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