21,688 karma · joined November 3, 2013
hikingdave @ gmail.com
That is why the term "AI slop" exists. Not because AI cannot produce working code - we all know it can - but because it breeds a low-effort process where people just slap code into production with no regard to quality.
Bootstrapping your own thing will give you more of that, not less. It takes an established business to be stabile to the point where the surprises are minimal, the processes are standardized, and the team is built to absorb whatever is thrown at it to handle things without putting in extra hours.
It sounds like you need to find established companies who need some part-time help.
With the massive drop in quality that AI has brought to Show HNs, this is a great example of something that truly is cool... but would be equally cool without 'Show HN' in front of the title. We're failing to moderate the site well unless we recommend OP does what the guidelines say and "make a regular submission instead."
Overall, this is an impressive proof of capability. But I wouldn't take that proof as anything more than what it is.
FWIW, my most successful products had zero social media marketing. Barely any online marketing at all. Radio and in-person events was our jam.
> Can I ask people to upvote my submission?
> No. Users should vote for a story because they personally find it intellectually interesting, not because someone has content to promote. We penalize or ban submissions, accounts, and sites that break this rule, so please don't.
And from the Guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.
But if you built this to sell to others, you skipped the most important step: Researching the market to know what people want. Your first users come from your research - you call the people who you talked to and say: "I built it."
If you skipped that step, you are just throwing spaghetti against the wall and hoping it sticks. Fun for builders, not reliable for actual success.
Re-posting the same question just creates noise.
Call me crazy, but the smartest people I know have rejected maximizing their employer's revenue and profit as their goal. Or even their own company if they go that route. Find a niche, work it, enjoy it, and enjoy the rest of your life, too.
Undergrad is where you learn to learn, learn to think critically, and learn to adapt to changes in the world. Any coursework that fails to focus on those broader learning goals and just teaches vocational skills is an utter waste of their tuition money.
I'm not saying that such info is useless. I fully agree that it can be helpful. But don't burn tuition and college credits on that. Learn things in college that are more complex and require more engagement. Take yourself to a higher level of thinking, so instead of worrying about how some future interview at an insurance company would go, you never even have to step on the path that would make you want an interview at an insurance company in the first place.
I'm not even trying to be snarky. I just see that LLMs already work fine in almost every other use case. Better than fine - they have been implemented and they work, and don't need much more advancement. But coders are still fighting it, coming up with more and more elaborate setups, spending more and more money, just to get to a level of coding that is passable. Not great, not better than human, just a "CRUD apps work." level of passable.
Once the exec teams stop pushing the FOMO from down on top, I think people will settle down into a much lower level of AI assistance. It will continue to be used, but we'll have it boilerplate the simple stuff out for us, while we focus on the meatier problems. And that is not all that different than pre-AI: whip the easy stuff out, then work on the hard stuff.
You bill for your time. They pay for your time. That is all. If you find yourself coming up with edge cases where it doesn't seem like hourly billing is fair, you don't lie about your hours - you discuss it with your contact. Charging for different hours than what was actually worked is straight-up fraud.
And then that same person basically said, "I'll try a different model."
Lesson clearly not learned.
"Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity."
That doesn't give you the business. It give you no users, no market, no branding. You don't have the operations set up to run at scale, nor the customer base to even need it. Not to mention the leadership to build out a vision. "Clone someone else" is actually a bit of a red flag in terms of vision.
If anything, the ease of launching an MVP should prove what many folks already know - coding is not the bottleneck that prevents business success. It is the tool that allows you to step up to the starting line.
Using your machine "until I found out whether they were serious enough to properly supply the necessities." makes no sense whatsoever. They aren't. You don't need to waste any energy finding out, they fact that they asked gave you your answer.