I'm curious to see what you've built with all that extra productivity.
The reality of companies out there is much simpler than the challenges of a startup that needs to build systems that are state of the art, scale for millions of users, etc There are companies out there that make millions, in areas you‘ve never heard of, and their core business does not depend on software development best practices.
In our company we have an IT team with the median age of fifty, team members who never have developed software, just maintain systems, delegate hard work to expensive consultants.
Now in that setting someone coming from a startup background is like someone coming from the future. I feel like a wizard who can solve problems in days, instead of weeks or months waiting for a consultant to solve.
The thing is that those don't typically take weeks and months to build with conventional tooling. And I find it hard to believe that all you're doing is this type of integration work. But I suppose there are companies that need such roles.
> There are companies out there that make millions, in areas you‘ve never heard of, and their core business does not depend on software development best practices.
That is true.
I do think that this cowboy coding approach is doing these companies a disservice, especially where tech is not their main product. It's only creating more operational risk that on-call and support staff have to deal with, and producing more technical debt that some poor soul will inevitably have to resolve one day. That is, it all appears to work until one edge case out of thousands brings down the entire system. Which could all be mitigated, if not avoided, by taking the time to understand the system and by following standard software development processes, even if it does take longer to implement.
What you describe isn't new. This approach has existed long before the current wave of AI tooling. But AI tools make the problem worse by making it easier to ship code quickly without following any software development practices that ensure the software is robust and reliable.
So, it's great that you're enjoying these tools. But I would suggest you adopt a more measured approach and work closely with those senior and junior engineers, instead of feeling like a wizard from the future.
I absolutely agree with you! Alas, management in those companies (I have worked for some) does not understand the necessity of solid software engineering work. It’s way above their head. That’s why they have systems that constantly cause problems. And then expensive consultants are called in to fix symptoms, not solve root causes. Shocking to see that in lots of otherwise very successful companies.
It sounds like you are moving very fast and probably have people just clicking "approve".
Good luck for the future to who ever owns your company!
In that setting someone with solid software engineering background using AI to solve problems is like a wizard from the team‘s perspective.
When I worked for startups I was constantly panicking to miss the latest tech trends, and I feared that I would be not marketable in case I didn’t catch up. But in mature companies things work much slower. They work with decades old technology. In that setting not the latest tech counts but being able to solve problems, with whatever means you can.
> Who's reviewing all the code you are churning out with ai?
Writing code is the most tedious part, not reviewing.
Personally I've had mixed experience when I let Sonnet 3.7 document my (and its) code and write commit messages, for some wip stuff it's alright but it soon gets out of hand and because it doesn't really have a direct view in my mind it ends up documenting what it sees instead of the intention behind it, which is totally fair but eh.
So yeah, mileage varies and agentic tools usually spit out more code and redundant comments than I'd like to review. I'm still waiting for a company to develop some sanity check for this somehow but snapshot testing and manual review aren't enough sadly.
I build most of not all of my stuff for work, and I ain't sharing that.
It's no panacea, but is there something to be had there? Abso-fucking-lutley. All of this would have been complete scifi at the beginning of this decade.
But I am exceedingly tired of phrases like “complete the work of weeks and months within days”. If AI is making devs 5x to 10x faster then I’d like to see some actual results. Internet is full of hypesters that make bombastic claims of productivity but never actually shown anything they’ve made.
Just putting this here because a lot of times AI coding seems to be dismissed as smth that can't do actual work ie generate revenue, while its more like making money as a solo dev is already pretty rare and if you're working in a corp. instead you're not going to just post your company name when asked for examples on what you're using AI for.
It's irrefutable that AI tools can be used to create software that generates revenue. What's more difficult is using them to create something that brings actual value into the world.
Patio11 famously built, ran for a number of years (profitably) and then sold a "wrapper for a random number generator" (bingocardcreator.com)
Value is in the eye of the beholder, and only tangentially related to the technical complexity or ingenuity.
My point is that the perceived value of a service or product is directly related to its competitive advantage, product differentiation, and so on. When the service is made from the same cookie cutter template as all the others, the only value that can be extracted from it is by duping customers who don't know better.
There are entire industries flooded with cheap and poorly made crap from companies that change brand names every week. Code generation tools have now enabled such grifters to profit from software as well.
You're conflating "underlying tech" and "cookie cutter template".
The fact that something uses the same LLM under the hood as some other product doesn't mean it's not differentiated.
I'm only half joking.
There are lots of people that only use LLMs in whatever UI the model companies are providing. I have colleagues that will never venture outside the ChatGPT website, even though with some effort they could make their tooling richer by using the API and building some wrapper or UI for it.
Also its easy to criticize from the sidelines but, do you have products that you made by yourself that are used by hundreds of thousands of people? I have 5 such sites, 2 of which I named above
Good on you for learning how AI tools work, but there's no way for anyone to tell whether your backend is self-managed or not, and practically it doesn't really matter. I reckon your users would get better results from proprietary models that expose an API than self-hosted open source ones, but then your revenue would probably be lower.
> Also its easy to criticize from the sidelines but, do you have products that you made by yourself that are used by hundreds of thousands of people? I have 5 such sites, 2 of which I named above
That's a lazy defense considering anyone is free to criticize anyone else's work, especially if they're familiar with the industry. Just like food and film critics don't need to be chefs and movie producers.
But I'll give you credit for actually building and launching something that generates revenue. I admit that that is more than I have managed with my personal projects.
thanks for sharing.
I'd consider that a liability, not an asset, but they were pretty happy with it.
AI is often used to pump out sites and apps that scam users, SEO spam, etc. So there is definitely a revenue stream that makes scammers and grifters excited for AI. These tools have increased the scope and reach of their scams, and provide a huge boost to their productivity.
That's partly why I'm curious about OP's work. Nobody who's using these tools while following best software engineering practices would claim that they're making them that much more productive. Reviewing the generated code and fixing issues counteracts whatever time is saved by generating code. But if they're vibe coding and don't even look at the code...