matt_s

Its 10x code generation with .5x quality at best and all other parts of the SDLC are at 1.x or worse.

AI is not delivering 10x shareholder value, anywhere. Software developers have quite the level of hubris about how important they are to companies. Yes our work is very complex and takes a certain mindset to do it well. It takes a lot of other roles to have a successful business, many of those roles will use AI to help draft slide decks, emails, etc. and that's the limit for them.

Look at recent companies doing layoffs claiming its because of AI, like CloudFlare and Coinbase, do their reported financials paint the picture that they are crushing it with AI? No, its net losses into the $100's of millions.

If you want to look at facts (these come from yahoo finance): 36% of their stock is held by institutions, another ~9% by insiders. Ebay is 95% held by institutions (that sounds insane but I don't follow markets, maybe its normal) and it went up 11% yesterday. That sounds like institutional traders think this is real, right? Ebay is at or near an all time high so why would anyone want to buy at an all time high? Maybe this is a pump and dump on ebay by Wall St? Get retail traders hyped, your stock bumps 10% or more, then dump shares.

I don't understand how a smaller publicly traded company can buy a larger publicly traded company. Don't they need to have a majority of shares or enough to demand a board seat? A deal like that probably needs to have outside investors and/or some leverage of some kind.

Its always been like this, I think some of it is perspective. When you reach your early twenties you are likely exiting a childhood and schooling bubble where your focus has been friends, family and school. Once you emerge from that and start interacting with the workforce you become more attuned to things going on locally/globally where before it wasn't really a concern. Probably more so for your generation because of the internet and social media the speed of information sharing is much faster and more readily available.

My opinion on how things could progress in 5-10 years is it depends on how much the average people push back. It could be pushing back on AI data centers, loss of freedoms, CEO pay ratios, etc. The intensity of the push back could impact events.

That HN is turning into reddit with posts that don't contribute to the startups, tech, engineering, entrepreneurship, or science topics that its contributors used to focus on.

Reciprocal agreements aren't new, sometimes they're used to gain access to a market the other party already has established a foothold in for other industry segments. These companies operate in the same general industry: tech/internet so it could be complementary services they are each after.

So far both of these companies have shown they suck at support so we know that's not it. It could be that it might help Anthropic to leverage Gemini in their competition with OpenAI and Google will take compute commitments.

Anecdata: I'm finding a lot of my "type random question in URL/search bar" has decent top Gemini answers where I don't scroll to results unless I need to dive deeper.

I recall reading multiple AskHN posts about people trying to get attention from a cloud provider because they ran up thousands of dollars in charges accidentally. I've seen large companies do this too, even if you think something is just a dev environment, its the cloud provider's production environment and they will charge you per their ToS for everything you use, doesn't matter what the customer usage profile looks like.

I think you hit the nail on the head. This is a new VibeCodeBro culture where people are putting out a lot of media content about "building is easier than ever now and its a gold rush", "you can have the agents work for you while you're anywhere", etc. And they will make a lot of money from social media ads or pimping their courses or idea lists, etc. Its very similar vibe you saw with drop-shipping, and other "passive" income content, granted the VibeCodeBros aren't claiming its passive but the vibe online from content creators is very similar.

Most of the AI output I get is mediocre and needs human reviews, UI touch-ups, refactors, etc. There could be a strong case for AI slop cleanup businesses soon.

Agents, skills and rules are just text files with instructions to the LLMs on how you like your output. At this point I don't think it really matters what you call anything or where you put them in your system, as long as you tell the agent/clanker of your choice where these files are located.

The key point is you are breaking up the context of what you are building into smaller areas of focus. The smaller contexts allow agents to do work with only the context of what their tasks are, so you have less of a chance of hallucinations and they each get a larger context window than they would if you had all of your context written out into a single text file.

This is why a lot of folks call them junior engineers. You wouldn't ask a junior engineer to "act as a senior expert JS developer and build a front end for a SaaS project management app" and expect them to do it with good output. You need to define specific things you want done and how you want them done - "use react, call APIs for data, APIs should be RESTful, etc." You can add personas to them if you like and personalities but thats more for entertainment.

I think this is a lot more common and I suspect people decide to do monthly and that they'll cancel after catching up on shows ... and then they don't cancel. So I'm sure the streaming services don't care that people do this because they might come out ahead anyways.

> Epic has many stable and valuable businesses

I don't think their approach is getting to stable, valuable businesses and keeping them that way. Their company name is Epic, not Mediocre BlueChipGameCo. I think their approach has been to make big investments into things, almost like Amazon's earlier approach where they would re-invest everything into the business and that might be where Epic now has to react to the market slowing for them and pull back.

I have to imagine AI is having an impact but not in the way people jump to about them using AI. How many people out there have ideas for games and can't execute them because they don't know the tech? How many people in the software industry were drawn to computing because of gaming?

If they built AI into Unreal Engine so that someone could approach it from a Game Producer/Designer role and not have to get deep into C++ programming or shaders and art assets, and produce games, games that go to the Epic Game Store and they take a cut? That would move the market in a way that would be more fitting for their company name.

Developers are going to be more productive, just not how you think. If history is going to rhyme, then the software industry will enter into a self-serving productivity craze building all sorts of software tooling, frameworks, ralph wiggum loop variants, MCPs, etc. much like the surge in JS frameworks and variants in the past. Most of those things will not have any business value. Software devs, myself included, love to do things "because I can" and not necessarily because they should.

Smart organizations will not just deliver better products but likely start products that they were hesitant to start before because the cost of starting is a lot closer to zero. Smart engineering leadership will encourage developers into delivering value and not self-serving, endless iterations of tooling enhancements, etc.

If I was a CTO and my competitor Y fired 90% of their devs, I'd try to secure funding to hire their top talent and retain them. The vitriol alone could fuel some interesting creations and when competitor Y realizes things later, their top talent will have moved on.

I have a CS degree and they taught class with Pascal, not exactly a marketable skill so I did tech support at first. Every day I still feel stupid about something, I think that just goes with the industry we're in. There is too much going on to be an expert in everything.

I also worked at a couple of F500 companies, they typically want people with Bachelors degrees at a minimum, mostly as a check-mark on their hiring list. If you're contracting with an agency/headhunter house then they may be the ones shortchanging you, not the company doing the contracting.

I think even if AI can help developer productivity, there are a lot of other elements to software delivery and speeding up developers isn't necessarily going to speed up overall project delivery. A hard question to answer then is, what is the ROI if an organization is spending $10k/month on AI tools but project deliveries are mostly the same as before?

If the AI tool companies increase their rates 2x, 5x, 10x, is it worth it? They aren't going to lower prices.

Consumer AI tool usage isn't going to get a lot of adopters that will pay, people outside of a work environment will see it as a fun toy, much like social media and will be fine with being served ads and letting their loss of privacy be the cost.

You asked for tools/methods.

> I've spent hours and hours unsubscribing, deleting, uninstalling, toggling settings,but then I find myself reinstalling, resubscribing

You already know the tools and methods. This is more of a psychology issue rather than technology. You need some sort of dopamine detox. I'm not a professional, there are probably professionals out there that can help but here's some random thoughts of what that might look like:

* Take a week off work and turn off all notifications. Tell work you are unavailable.

* Write anything important down on paper that happens in the next two weeks: birthdays, events, appointments, etc. so you don't miss them. A paper calendar planner works.

* Turn off the phone if you can. If you need it for travel - uninstall everything unnecessary and keep all the notifications off. Phone, maps, airline, Uber, SMS, web browser are really all you need. You could ditch the airline app and just get paper boarding passes.

* Do something, anything, that doesn't involve computers/phone and notifications.

Its more about being a servant leader and not a bottleneck than literally being "not needed". Its a mindset of wanting your team to be able to operate without having to check with you (the EM) on every little thing. I've also heard it called having IC's be a "manager of one" where they can independently work on things, get work finished, etc. without needing constant nagging.

A good manager I had once had the approach of setting guidelines and "just getting out of the way" and I try to follow that, it works well for most people.

I think a better analogy than building construction is cars. You need to do active maintenance and fix things on cars to keep them running, you may even change out a radio or wheels, etc. like minor feature development, but you're not likely to change out the design of the engine and transmission. You definitely don't need the design crew from the car manufacturer around, aka Product Mgmt, to do maintenance but you do need some semblance of a tech team or people that can do the tech work on contract.

At some point a tech product is "finished" as in a mature, stable product and adding new things to it isn't going to do 10x in revenue. Its probably really hard for the product and tech teams involved to admit though.

Some "yanks" align their identity with their vehicle. There are songs about trucks but yes a van or mini-van are more flexible.

There are many that buy trucks for off road capabilities but probably 70% or more of truck owners don't go off road more than once a year. Many pick up truck models, like stock versions with crew cabs, are too long and not equipped for serious off-road use. Shallow sand/snow they can handle but so can SUVs.

If its a 737 delivering pallets of dog food or humans in seats, the safety concerns are the same. They take off and land at the same airports and can collide with other airplanes. The stuff on the plane doesn't mean there are different safety checks.

Auto pilot can be used for nearly everything after take-off and before landing, so I think you'll need to define "AI" here. I see people using "AI" almost interchangeably these days for things that plain old computers have been doing for a while now. Auto-pilot is not AI, its just a set of instructions (aka programming) given to a computer.

Airports have designed approaches, large airports have multiple and there is a need for communication with other humans, reacting to dynamic environments including weather, other aircraft (both airborne and on taxiways) and having actual vision out the cockpit to see things.

The latest "tool" for me is just Apple Notes for me with a todo list of tasks on a page.

Its a struggle for me to get any momentum going on personal projects. I think its because I'm a person that is externally motivated - like I know I get paid, promotions potentially, etc. via my employment. When it comes to personal projects I can't get going. I only mention this because I would also change out what/how I use to manage the work thinking that would change and I'd get more done, its never worked. Things I've used along the way: trello, wiki, pen and paper, various apps like todoist, etc.

> That type of content drives brand and product hype via views/engagement

Product hype might be hard with developer/tech types of tools. Devs have very good BS radar and "hype" is sometimes all there is in a lot of content. I see and hear a lot of the "build in public" being promoted as the way to do things with the "build an audience" mantra.

There is a huge hurdle to produce good video content, it takes a lot of time to record, edit and publish quality videos. Publishing quality videos can help get traction/views/subscribers but that doesn't mean it will translate into paying customers either. Do people really want to watch software developers code or talk about it? There has to be other ways to market a product.

The rolling timeline seems like a good approach to not have free users take a ton of storage but I would think even allowing free users to post video/images content at all is going to consume a lot of storage. It might be worth thinking through ideas on how to encourage users to get their network to sign up.

It’s fundamentally not viable in the sense of mass adoption. Security conscious and tech nerds (like HN audience) might do it but mass adoption, aka crossing the chasm from early adopters and onwards, isn’t feasible because all the aunts, uncles and grandma’s out there aren’t going to pay for it or switch.

If those user types haven’t moved en masse off twitter to <insert some replacement> then what would compel people to move, and pay for something they don’t pay for with money?

If by existing relationships you mean only like 2 degrees of separation then its implied that there is no global posting, no viral capability and probably no businesses or politicians on it (all amazing features I would love). Basically a family and friends network. A huge difficulty would be how to price it, one time fee for a family tree? The largest costs are going to be bandwidth and storage. If you go no video/images then what pulls people in?

Company structure might be key too. If it’s built as employee owned and operated with a small profit goal, it might take longer to grow but odds are enshitification or corrupt management can be avoided.

Some honest, maybe hard to hear feedback: as a solo developer with no customers and no traffic you probably shouldn’t be doing anything with cloud services. Cloud providers have many scalable services that mostly come down to them being paid by traffic costs or CPU/RAM costs and they don’t care what you’re doing, if you have 0 customers or 1000, if its “dev” or “production” - its all production to them.

I’ve seen runaway cloud costs at my employer a few times, with a few different services and it took a fair amount of time to figure out the monitoring/alerting. They may change their service agreements or pricing structure in hard to decipher ToS, etc. If the cloud provider won’t refund or credit a company that has a representative, they aren’t going to pay any attention to a solo dev or small team.

I would build locally on your laptop and start with a $5/month VM until you get a paying customer and know what size your system needs.

How is this any bigger than Disney and all the media channels they own?

Can you elaborate more on your last sentence and running VMs? How does 32GB set aside for VMs and GPU accelerated let you run native Windows? Is there special/newer VM software that is used? Is it still virtualbox?

Outside of docker containers for servers and work I haven't delved into VMs on PCs in a while but this sounds compelling to run linux and windows at once from the same hardware instead of a dual boot.

There is something to be said about what the ROI is for normal (i.e. non AI/tech) companies using AI. AI can help automate things, robots have been replacing manufacturing jobs for decades but there is an ROI on that which I think is easier to see and count, less humans in the factory, etc. There seems to be a lot of exaggerated things being said these days with AI and the AI companies have only begun to raise rates, they won't go down.

The AI bubble will burst when normal companies start to not realize their revenue/profit goals and have to answer investor relations calls about that.

> feeling trapped and bound to the golden handcuffs to try and survive this expensive world while being forced to work on things I have little care for

I consider this just work. I've worked my entire career for other people, in corporate settings, doing the work they want me to do for a paycheck. I enjoy some aspects of my job, enjoy working with many of the people but when it comes down to it, I'm just a worker bee. Many people in many industries do this. I think social media and the tech culture of "passion" and "save the X" mission statements probably contribute some to thoughts that if you don't have those things that its bad or depressing. Work for humans hasn't changed much in a long time, you're usually working for someone on things they prioritize. The fact that you have "golden handcuffs" means you at least have the perspective that you're better off than most. If someone (or combined with a partner) makes $200k gross they are in the top 1% globally of earners, probably top 5% in the US.

I like building things in software and have found building physical things enjoyable as well, lots of problem solving and usually a finished project that you can look at. Try taking up a hobby or spending time outside of work on things you enjoy.

AI tools are super helpful if you know what they are good for and where the limits are currently. If you work at a place where your expected "time" is constant, aka has a good work/life balance, then its important to be more productive because your competitors will certainly be.

There are parts of the SDLC that cannot be made more productive with AI - all the human parts, communication about changes, testing often involves manual work, etc. So if you have management that just thinks a blanket X% more productivity is achievable across the board, find someplace else to work, its about as smart as a RTO mandate because they like seeing butts in seats.

Cloud is not losing ground but also Cloud computing is also not suitable for every business problem. Its killer feature for businesses with fluctuating usage profiles and "busy" seasons. Think like a tax related application for businesses, in the US, they have to file quarterly and annual. There are probably busy seasons where there would likely be more activity so a cloud compute environment where you can scale up to handle the load with a couple commands is ideal and then scale it down (and lower your costs) during slow times.

Indie hackers and small < 10 people startups don't need cloud. However its easier to get moving and scale up and you can just tie in all sorts of other services to make your life easier. If you're on-prem or managing VMs you need to figure out a lot of infrastructure things, networking, security, logging, failover, etc.

Then there is transferring risk. If you host your own infrastructure and you have an outage unrelated to HW or data center, that is entirely on you and to be honest will probably happen more frequently than using cloud. When your cloud provider is down, if its a household name, everyone already knows because everything else they use is probably having issues too. Much easier explanation to customers, they likely won't leave over a cloud outage.

I think this is the key thought process for purchasers of software/SaaS. For comparison, an average daily meal expense of $30/person for business travel exceeds the pricing of a lot of SaaS offerings. SaaS is so simple and the cost level doesn't require RFPs, lawyers and accountants. It would have to be really compelling and niche to warrant custom install software these days (to OP, many retail POS systems are old school textUI too).

In the pre-SaaS times, a software business would have to somehow guess/calculate the lifetime value of a customer and bake that into the price of the software when it was buy once. Custom software also was often charged in $/seat, required IT people to do updates and that style of software often requires sales people and convincing CxO's to do purchases. SaaS can just be a CC swipe and expense report.