Looks so scammy. Privacy policy & T&Cs links don't work. And i'd be suspicious of any vibe coded website with fake testimonials that offers LLM inference at a discount.
My latest article on "AI As Religion". A lot of the discourse around AI mirrors the same patterns we see with a lot of religions. In this short article I provide a few comparisons.
Every day I see articles on HN discussing the AI bubble potentially crashing. The large number of such articles appearing daily is increasing my confidence that the AI space will be fine.
"LLM costs are trending toward zero". They will never be zero for the cutting edge. One could argue that costs are zero now via local models but enterprises will always want the cutting edge which is likely to come with a cost
I know first hand that this is not the case. At least in film/media.
- I've sold software to several mid-scale production firms. Folks that do everything from Netflix title sequence designs to pharmaceutical television ad spots. They're billing at less than a quarter of their previous rate and picking up more clients on account of AI. They're downsizing the folks that do not do VFX or editing.
- A neighbor of mine who is a filmmaker was laid off last week. If you've flown Delta, you've seen his in-flight videos. His former employer, who he has worked for for nearly a decade, is attracting clients that are hiring them for AI work. My neighbor was not attached to any of those efforts.
- Major ad firm WPP is laying people off. Some of this is the economic macro and decreased ad spend. Another of my neighbors works for them and they haven't had any major projects. She typically manages major F500 clients. They're not spending. Despite that, she says some of the inter-departmental woes are directly attributable to AI.
- I spoke with former members in SAG-AFTRA leadership (before Sean Astin came on board). They quit on account of AI. "The writing is on the wall", they said. Direct quote.
I seem to remember the latest tools for software developers were pushed in the business organisation by the developers - and eventually the folk at the top relented and accepted it.
When the reverse is happening, alarm bells should ring.
But hey, Im not against these CEOs destroying the culture within the firm and making their employees hate their guts, resulting in negative productivity gains.
Well it's not exactly a parody. The next season of Silicon Valley not only continues the cheeky hijinks and ironic saves required to navigate tech-cap dysfunction, it is a reality show. Although some of the new core team characters are (openly) unfiltered chatbots.
Including a real-life LLM "resurrection" of the fictional Erlich Bachman, created as part of a successful espionage mission to steal a Chinese deep learning company's near impossible distillation technology. But despite its trove of valuable illicit information, it has been orphaned online, unable to find its mysterious SV-fan hacker creators. As a result, chatErlich is now desperately attempting to make contact with the original SV team actors, who it actually believes are their fictional counterparts.
The data on the article applies to IT related jobs disappearing for any reason on the same period. The only thing specific to AI is the pick of time, and the conclusions seem very robust from moving it some months around either way.
One specific stupid manager will absolutely replace people, but the overall dynamic isn't any more broken than it used to be.
It's not stupidity but corporate strategy. Up until a few years ago companies and executives used to get massive backlash for doing layoffs. Today they can say "we replaced workers with AI" and get rewarded with a stock price bump.
As a co-founder and dev at a bootstrapped company I’d say AI has and will slow developer hiring rate. We’re just more productive and on top of things more.
We’ve also reduced the hours we work per week. We care about getting things done not time behind a screen.
Sure AI can build cute POCs. Will it build scaled solutions, not this year. The amount of ignorance in this post is precisely why the industry is so rattled. Gen AI tools are great, they are not making people orders of magnitude more productive.
If one is expecting Lovable to create a production app by just giving a few prompts, that obviously is not going to happen, not now and most probably for a long time.
However, if you use Claude Code or one of the proper IDEs, you can definitely guide it step by step and build production quality code, actually code that may even be better than most software engineers out there.
Moreover, these tools allow you to take your proficiency in software dev and specific languages/frameworks to other languages/frameworks without being an expert in them, and that I think is a huge win in itself.
I work in big tech as a senior engineer. I’m aware of what’s out there and none of it is solving problems in a way that’s replacing swathes of engineers anytime soon.
It may be an excuse to layoff but it’s not ramping up velocity in ways that PR is making it seem to non tech literate.
I never said anything about swathes of engineers, merely that it is possible to build production quality stuff.
From my experience, these are better suited at the moment for small teams and new projects. It’s unclear to me how they’ll work in large team/massive legacy code situations. Teams will have to experiment and come up with processes that work. IMHO anyway.
We’ve been in business 15 years. These aren’t POCs. Even at say 20% productivity boost I feel way ahead to give devs 9 day fortnights and soon hopefully 4 day weeks.
how is it both a bootstrapped company slow to hiring devs (due to AI) and also a company that's been in business 15 years? if you were going to hire devs to scale out, you would've done it 10 years ago?
Normally as we add enterprise customers we have to dedicate more dev resource keeping them happy. But since Claude code and now codex we have not felt that feeling of not being on top
of the work. Thus not feeling the need to hire more devs.
Yes, I learn how to use AI for coding in case it doesn't advance much more. But if AI is really going to do what some people think, it doesn't matter if you learn to use it or not, whole swathes of jobs, including software developers, will be obsolete. If your business boils down to being a middle man for an LLM it's not long for this world.
What really matters is the rate of advancement.
And no, there won't be new jobs to replace them. This is less like industrialization, which created jobs before replacing old ones, and more like the automation that hollowed out whole communities and cities from the '70s to '00s. Services largely saved us from this, but I see no new sector to come and rescue us. And any re-orientation of the labor force to existing jobs will drive down those wages too.
I use Google Sheets for all my finances, it's great.
I have an Expense Tracker UI within Google Sheets that allows me to submit expenses to the main sheet (currently just over 5000 rows of expenses over the last few years)
I only just recently vibe coded a web UI tool that uses a Google Service Account to add expenses to this Google Sheet for me, and then created a Progressive Web App from that so I could do everything on my phone.
In summary, Google Sheets is sometimes all you need instead of a database for very simple applications (and built for an audience of one)
I've done the same for a long time. I've tried so many purpose-built alternatives, and always come back to my solution. (Funny enough, Microsoft Money from 20+ years ago is closer to what I'd like than anything available today)
Not to say there aren't features I wish I could easily have. I could of course build it, and I've "started" so many times, but after a few hours of the typical boilerplate code you have to deal with, I'd always give up and go back to my surefire solution.
(This was before vibe coding, so I may take a stab at that)
Presumably either deference or satire in writing an article about OpenAI using Sam's writing style. Personally it makes Sam seem like one of the least intelligent business leaders, but maybe not hip enough to get it.
