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Comment by smartmic | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. And I wonder why Paul Graham is jumping on such a statement. Of everything I've read by him so far, this has the least substance.

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An instant to ruin reputation that took decades to build. )':

Social media is, paraphrasing Jon Stewart, ultra-processed shit that's not good for most people.

I suppose VC love it. They want to lower the bar to building products, and make them cheaper. They want a steady line of investable companies with cheap hiring down the line.

More generally, it's weird. 10 years ago, the technical aspects would legitimately be seen as a major, perhaps main obstacle to building a product. It's questionable whether that is really gone (can you really, really build a software product now with just LLMs? With deployment, security etc).

But for sure the technological bar is now much lower, it might disappear altogether, and what remains is actually finding a useful product, marketing, finding clients etc. Which I'd argue were actually always the biggest step to overcome.

> 10 years ago, the technical aspects would legitimately be seen as a major, perhaps main obstacle to building a product.

Yeah I think that this was really more the advancement of frameworks, tooling and SaaS software. I see it all the time with non-technical people at work who demo something they built with LLMs and its always Next.js, Supabase and Tailwaind that are actually doing the heavy lifting, with the LLM invoking some commands for them. This all gets attributed to LLMs though since this is often the first exposure to those tools for non-technical people. Most engineers also knew how to scaffold a SaaS with Rails, Django or Next.js, Stripe etc. without writing much code.

> Most engineers also knew how to scaffold a SaaS with Rails, Django or Next.js, Stripe etc. without writing much code.

Most web engineers do, certainly. But I work in data, so I didn't. And for me, LLM based tools have made it much, much easier to build relatively simple frontends for my data stuff that make my life a lot easier.

I'm partial to the notion that LLMs don't really raise the ceiling, rather they raise the floor by making web n00bs like me more effective at shipping stuff that can be used by others.

To be fair though, I'm much handier at Django now than I used to be, and am slowly learning JS/browser stuff as a result of these projects.

It might also mean overproduction which is bad for economy.

"Shame about the recession, here's a portfolio of innovative companies ready to 10x while the stock market tanks"

> VC love it. They want to lower the bar to building products, and make them cheaper.

Yes! VCs want to make it so cheap and easy to build that you don’t need VCs anymore!

VCs fund companies. For them, employee compensation is a cost against their profits. In tech, this is the largest cost by far. The owners of capital deeply deeply deeply want a future where they can earn their billions without paying the rabble anything. AI is selling this idea to them.

and the rabble deeply wants a future where CEOs are deprived of billions because AI has taken their job.

Hey, who wants to start a project for CEO.ai?

Unfortunately, it isn't actually about being able to replace somebody from a technical perspective. CEOs are picked by capital and selected from amongst capital. An effective "CEO.ai" wouldn't be used for all the same reasons that an ineffective "Employee.ai" will be used.

huh?

he would be extremely pleased to pay for (and have to listen to the complaints of) far fewer programmers.

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