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. wg0 · 1790981742 · focus · HN ↗

      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?

      1. reticulates · 1790982117 · focus · HN ↗

         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.

         1. wg0 · 1790982410 · focus · HN ↗

            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.

            1. computably · 1790983534 · focus · HN ↗

               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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