The End of YC
benn.substack.com
benn.substack.com
This person isn't an engineer. They think that they made something reasonable in a day or two that an engineer would take a month to do.
This is exactly how AI people look at say radiologists. Oh, they'll be replaced by some computer vision, they just look at pictures and say "good or bad", right?
This is why all of those surveys where people are asked how is AI going to impact some profession are garbage. They mostly ask people who don't know what that profession is, to guess.
Also
> Alas. Because, and I cannot stress this enough, I am not an engineer.
And then...
> Though it’s hard to benchmark how far I got in two days, this is my best guess: The app is roughly equivalent to what a designer and a couple professional engineers could build in a month or two.
I'm reminded of the bell-curve image that starts and ends with Apple Notes or a simple paper notebook. I always get the feeling that people who think that the technology is limiting their note taking abilities are looking for the wrong solution.
For me…”right” is everything that is apple notes currently but just add markdown support dammit!
It would not be surprised if I was the only person on the planet to consider this note taking perfection…or just give me a pen and moleskine that’s fine too.
This is no small thing, you had an idea, you were able to try it out, and found it didn’t work.
But this does give you an understanding, and you no longer need to keep wondering if your idea is the answer.
> I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.
As to the topic at hand, sounds a bit like hyperbole. AI tools are gonna make big changes, but there’s a hell of a lot more to running companies, and shipping products, than writing code. Some stuff will be enabled and multiplied by AI, some, not so much.
We’ll see what happens. The die is cast.
This is massively true. It's why I'm much more interested in hearing stories of business failure than business success: it's trivially easy to replicate a failure mode, but success isn't so transitive.
Comedy
Plus, everything needed to deploy it and monetize has been turned into APIs which the LLMs know, so this can be added too.
Can’t wait to see what this new era gives us!
I’ve been looking for the perfect word for what AI allows me to do and I think manifest is it. I can conjure things and it feels like magic. Like poof here it just is. Like it was always there and I’m just noticing it.
So much energy burnt to this.
I snicker when I hear "AI writes 85% of the code in our codebase". It has never worked for me.
If I ask the AI to generate any 80% of my code without my experienced programmer handholding on every line/few lines, it’s more likely than not hot garbage that takes me longer to fix than writing from scratch. I’ve also generated entire small projects that appear to work, but the underlying code is so poor it’s gonna implode if you keep iterating and adding complexity.