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Comment by nikhizzle | Hacker News Reader

Multi startup CTO/CPO (including one yc, and one growth stage high growth). So AI has been interesting for me across the three businesses I am working on. For two of them, it has enabled us to do things which were not possible at high fidelity before (eg. unstructured data entry). For the third growth stage place, it is allowing us to increase the net margin as we scale by reducing the number of operators we need to hire.

I see the biggest impact in more traditional startups which involve a lot of manual labour. For us, LLMs are letting us scale much faster than we could before.

For the dev teams I manage, LLMs provide a lot of shortcuts whereas before we spent extensive time hand tuning parsers and simple automations.

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Of course, the industry has a long history of automating and abstracting tasks. Usually there's plenty more work to be done but it does tend to mean that a lot of low-level tasks get devalued over time and, if your value is mostly a willingness to roll up your sleeves and do a lot of low-value grunt work, well...

Needs also change. Someone somewhere is probably still hiring x86 assembly language programmers for embedded work but they're probably not the highest-paid jobs and you'd likely better be especially expert. And some skills and knowledge just don't matter much any more--at least if they haven't been transferred to newer domains where they can still be applied.Probably, no one want to hire the world's leading consultant on some specific obsolete proprietary architecture.

This is not related to the article, but as a multi startup CTO/CPO, how do you explain it to yourself when one or more of your companies fail when you know that, by working in multi startups, your attention and resources were divided?

My God, I can practically taste the salt emanating from this post.

I work alot of hours, and aim to solve organizational issues at the root cause with systematic solutions. This way, I minimize hands on management time.

I've seen plenty of these essays, and colleagues bashing LLMs online, making fun on mistakes the AI makes, sharing articles about energy usage, etc.

I use it to help me write code in languages never used before, to manage infrastructure, to summarize manuals, to explain me stuff, and what not. The savings of time and the productivity boost are huge and converts into real income and better understanding of various concepts.

Are the LLM perfect - of course no. Human programmers aren't perfect too, yet they hire them and pay them huge salaries. AI will change a lot of the business and writing essays and making fun on it online won't stop it at all.

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