Thread

1. reticulates · 1790981347 · focus · HN ↗

   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.

   1. reticulates · 1790981803 · focus · HN ↗

      > 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.

      1. hibikir · 1790982435 · focus · HN ↗

         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.

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.