Comment by LogicFailsMe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by LogicFailsMe | Hacker News Reader

The only thing worse than 100% inhabiting your own cave is trying to fit into someone else's. I had a conversation this weekend with someone in an emerging startup that I initially wanted to join but increasingly didn't as I realized I had gone from starring cast to somewhere between entourage and sub 1% equity NPC. And at that point, startups are horrible bets when you have any sort of sure thing IMO.

But it was instructive to watch him neg, criticize, and dismiss all of my own ideas that weren't in service of his vision thing, occasionally pivoting to deflecting any criticism of the potential for his own vision to succeed. This week I pitched my vision to my current employer. They loved it. Case closed. Ideas are cheap, it's executions that deliver value. And I have a superb record on that.

Conclusion: if you poke your head up for feedback now and then, there's nothing with spending most of your time in the cave to avoid the samsara of influencers, rage bait, and social media algorithms. Anyone telling you otherwise is 'sus.

Missed out a crucial word: there's nothing - wrong - with spending most of your time in the cave.

I agree 100%.

A small correction though. Because of AI I'd argue that execution is cheap while the best ideas are valuable.

No, ideas are still cheap. Now implementation is cheap. So, software will be worth less than ever.

It's a bit more complicated than that isn't it? Every time you remove a bottleneck things advance until a new one appears, right? Previously ideas were cheap, good ideas were hard to come by, accurately distinguishing between good and bad without an implementations was an incredibly rare skill that many people wrongly believed themselves to have (the same as how everyone naturally thinks that their preferred language is the most powerful, etc, etc), and implementation was expensive.

Now you can distinguish sufficiently simple ideas by means of slop, but accurately determining what will eventually mesh well with the wider world is still extremely difficult.

There's also a complexity ceiling. It's been raised but it's still there. For example it will presumably be a while yet before a feature complete project on the scale of LLVM can be quickly slopped together.

It's also cheaper than ever to clone a piece of software once someone else has done the hard work of figuring out the general shape it should take. So I'm not sure how viable services without strong network effects will be going forward.

My take is that if you can clone what you need from a piece of existing software with a coding agent, it wasn't a particularly high moat in the first place. Whatever moat was there IMO was likely the bundling of it with everything else in the product you neither want nor need. Consider the godawful deal that was cablevision/DirectTV/Dish before streaming channels existed. Don't fight the future, run with it.

I truly do not understand the mindset that defends the status quo and its ridiculously wealthy overlords. They're going to screw you anyway, it's the American way after all, but embracing AI toolchains and mastering them is a near sure thing path out of the poverty trap.

As a controversial example, somewhere out there is the Robert Rodriguez of AI filmmaking. And it's going to be amazing when they emerge. And oh the bellyaching that will ensue from the bottom of the film industry foodchain, but it will not change the outcome that people who master the tools now will be the next generation of overlords tomorrow, equally in need of overthrow by revolution when that day comes.

Code != execution or engineering or product.

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