mijustin

Agreed! I get inspired just by seeing him talk through his approach to design problems.

Yes! And having too much of one in a given week (meetings vs. online chat) can throw off the balance too, especially for remote teams.

I also think there’s a benefit to being in-person depending on your age and career stage. Young people gain a lot from being around other humans. So much gets learned just by being in the room: how people talk to each other, how decisions actually get made, what good work looks like up close. You miss out on all that stuff in Slack.

100%

(Author of the post here) I think the key point is that even bad businesses take time and effort to create!

The distinction is between "low-hanging fruit" ideas ("Let's start a cafe!" "Let's start a WordPress theme business") and "high-value, high effort" ideas ("It's 2003. Let's build VoIP software.").

What’s changed now, with AI, is that you can have compressed learning cycles. Folks can build, deploy, and learn faster now than ever before.

Admitting when you don’t know something has always been important; but the ability to build, deploy, and find out has never been greater.

Instead of theorizing about what might work, you can just build it and find out.

I definitely think teams will be getting smaller, and will become even more outcome oriented.

100%. There are tons of vulnerabilities in JavaScript that are happily patched.

XSLT has a ton of value, especially if we want a more diverse/robust web.

Lots of kids still making games with engines like GameMaker Studio!

I think lots of kids will start playing around with Claude Code in this way as well.

Missed this! Nice to see an old piece I'd written resurface here.

This video is really well made!

I appreciate that Al describes what AI is bad at, what it's good at, and what types of products/work are at risk of being replaced.

Overall, I think building sophisticated apps/SaaS is safe because LLMs can't generate the overall quality experience that customers want.

But I agree with Al that AI allows people to generate apps for personal use and low-quality website templates.

100%. You need informed human actors generating "valuable" prompts.

This is true! However, "age" might be less of a deciding variable than experience, connections, and resources.

Here's the research on older entrepreneurs being more successful: https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/younger-old...

> "Among the very fastest-growing new tech companies, the average founder was 45 at the time of founding."

However, the deciding factor appears to be experience:

> "founders with three or more years of experience in the same industry as their startup are twice as likely to have a one-in-1,000 fastest-growing company."

"In a study published in the journal Nature Aging in August, a team of Stanford scientists described “waves” of aging, where major biomolecular shifts happen in the body around ages 44 and 60."

Source: https://www.wsj.com/health/wellness/feeling-suddenly-older-s... Mirror: https://archive.ph/7C1Wl#selection-2469.0-2473.75

I'm the author of the post. I think you've discerned the central tension I was exploring here.

Part of what I'm identifying is a simple truth: in your 40s, you don’t have that same kind of “raw firepower” you had when you were younger.

That doesn't mean you can't still be ambitious or leverage your accrued wisdom, network, and resources to launch a company; it just means the dynamics are different.