The narrative that OpenAI could easily be a next Netscape/Yahoo/Myspace/RIM/Napster had been on the table since ChatGPT first broke into fame. Some could see that, and many refused to.
For whatever reason, the myth that being a "first mover" is critically advantageous seems to persist among technologists, even while our industry hosts so many examples of first movers exhausting themselves to clear the brush of exploratory research and market-finding only for some later entrant to confidently gallop through that now cleared path on horseback.
That sounds like papier mache more than bridge building, forever pasting more code on as ideas and time permit without the foresight to engineer or architect towards some cohesive long-term vision.
Most software products built that way seem to move fast at first but become monstrous abominations over time. If those are the only places you keep finding yourself in, be careful!
There are a wide number of small problems for which we do not need bridges.
As a stupid example, I hate the functionality that YouTube has to maintain playlists. However, I don't have the time to build something by hand. It turns out that the general case is hard, but the "for me" case is vibe codable. (Yes, I could code it myself. No, I'm not going to spend the time to do so.)
Or, using the Jira API to extract the statistics I need instead of spending a Thursday night away from the family or pushing out other work.
Or, any number of tools that are within my capabilities but not within my time budget. And there's more potential software that fits this bill than software that needs to be bridge-stable.
But the person I replied to seemed to be talking about a task agenda for their professional work, not a todo list of bespoke little weekend hobby hacks that might be handy "around the house".
You assume they were talking about a single product. at my job there is essentially endless amounts of small tasks. We have many products and clients we have many internal needs, but can't really justify the human capital. Like I might write 20 to 50 Python scripts in a week just to visualize the output of my code. Dead boring stuff like making yet another matplotlib plot, simple stats, etc. Sometimes some simple animations. there is no monstrosity being built, this is not evidence of tagging on features or whatever you think must be happening, it's just a lot of work that doesn't justify paying a bay area principal engineer salary to do in the face of a board that thinks the path to riches is laying off the people actually making things and turning the screws on the remaining people struggling to keep up with the workflow.
Work is finite, but there can be vastly more available than there are employees to do it for many reasons, not just my personal case.
The vision is "being compatible with protocols used in my field". There's hundreds over hundreds of those. Example: this app supports more than 700 protocols, hardware, etc. (https://bitfocus.io/connections) and still it's missing an AWFUL LOT and only handles fairly basic cases in general. There's just no way around writing the code for each custom bespoke protocol for whatever $APPLIANCE people are going to bring and expect to work. Even if each protocol fits neatly in a single self-contained class or two.
You think the business line stakeholder is going to patiently hang out in JIRA, engaging with an overly cheerful robot that keeps "missing the point" and being "intentionally obtuse" with its "irrelevant questions"?
This is how most non-technical stakeholders feel when you probe for consistent, thorough requirements and a key professional skill for many more senior developers and consultants is in mastering the soft skills that keep them attentive and sufficiently helpful. Those skills are not generic sycophancy, but involve personal attunement to the stakeholder, patience (exercising and engendering), and cycling the right balance between persistence and de-escalation.
Or do you just mean there will be some PM who acts as proxy between for the stakeholder on the ticket, but still needs to get them onto the phone and into meetings so the answers can be secured?
Because in the real world, the prior is outlandish and the latter doesn't gain much.
Businesses do whatever’s cheap. AI labs will continue making their models smarter, more persuasive. Maybe the SWE profession will thrive/transform/get massacred. We don’t know.
> Are you not concerned that model creation companies will bake this into their next model?
Usually, the business strategy when that's a concern is to court an acquisition.
Assuming that you're doing actual innovation and that the effort behind making it commercially mature is non-trivial, your company and its established assets/staff/insights/deals become valuable as a way to leapfrog in.
The people I know in real life, besides those that work in tech and use it for code assistance or for generating never-reviewed archival transcripts of meetings, mostly just laugh at AI foibles and faults and casually echo doomer-media worries about job replacement as a topic for small talk.
But admittedly, most of those people are established adults who've figured out an effective rhythm to their home and work life and aren't longing for some magic remedy or disruption. They're not necessarily weary, and they were curious at first, but it seems like they're mostly just waiting for either the buzz to burn off or for some "it just works" product to finally emerge.
I imagine there are younger people wowed by the apparent magic of what we have now and excited that they might use it punch up the homework assignments or emails or texts that make them anxious, or that might enjoy toying with it as a novel tool for entertainment and creative idling. Maybe these are some of the people in your "real life"
There are a lot of people out there in "real life", bringing different perspectives and needs.
Nah, LLMs and stable diffusion are being used everywhere by everyone hardcore.
I work at a coworking space. Most of the folks I've worked alongside had active chats in ChatGPT for all sorts of stuff. I've also seen devs use AI copilots, like Copilot and Codex. I feel big old when I drop into fullscreen vim on my Mac.
AI art is also used everywhere. Especially by bars and restaurants. So many AI happy hour/event promo posters now, complete with text (AI art font is kind-of samey for some reason). I've even seen (what look like) AI generated logos on work trucks.
People are getting use out of LLMs, 100%. Yet the anti-AI sentiment is through the roof. Maybe it's like social media where the most vocal opponents are secretly some of its most active users. Idk.
What I meant specifically was that I don't remember anyone complaining about AI features getting in the way or being shoehorned. That particular complaint seems popular only on Reddit or HN.
The adversarial tension was all that ever made any of it work.
The "Perfectionist Engineer" without a "Pragmatic Executive" to press them into delivering something good enough would of course still been in their workshop, tinkering away, when the market had already closed.
But the "Pragmatic Executive" without the "Perfectionist Engineer" around to temper their naive optimism would just as soon find themselves chased from the market for selling gilded junk.
You're right that there do seem to be some execs, in the naive optimism that defines them, eager to see if this technology finally lets them bring their vision to market without the engineer to balance them.
That's a nice balanced wholesome take, only the problem is that the "Pragmatic Executive" is more like "Career-driven frenzied 'ship it today at all costs' psychopath executive".
You are describing a push-and-pull / tug-of-war balanced relationship. In reality that's absolutely exactly never balanced. The engineer has 1% say, the other 99% go to the executive.
I so wish your take was universally applicable. In my 24 years of career, it was not.
>The engineer has 1% say, the other 99% go to the executive.
This has also been my experience. Not to mention "fighting back" usually comes at personal cost in various ways from reputation to creating more unpaid work for yourself, including the time you spend on trying to make things right that now means you are behind on your "real work".
Don't forget you "no longer work well with others" if you start standing up to mediocrity that everyone else is either too stupid to notice, or too afraid to fight back against because they don't want to harm their career.
I am mostly starting to make my peace with all this and learning when is a good time to really fight (hint: almost never).
And I don't quite buy HN's group-think of "find a better job, duh". The market has been difficult in the last years and also the "better jobs" are nowhere nearly as accessible as privileged people believe.
Best way to handle things, I have found, is to dress the decisions in money and time. Position yourself as a realist who speaks numbers and if you are lucky -- meaning you don't get contested by other techies who simply want to shine in
front of the boss -- then you will have at least the product people on your side.
All that being said, of course at one point you should leave. In no form of relationship, work, friends, intimate, should you let yourself be walked all over for a long time. Start fighting the good fight in the company... and start polishing your resume and go do interviews.
What do you think the noise is like in your future city? How many cameras and microphones are constantly streaming everything they see and hear into some corporation's private cloud? How many advertisements do we see on our pleasant bike ride? What's it like when a blizzard or flood drives the environment far outside of training norms? Have the debris-collecting drones already been deployed to clean up e-waste when the built-to-be-abandoned delivery drones lose battery or guidance, or is that a V2 thing? Are the police equipped to track down to track down the hacker that overrode my delivery drone?
We used to have books exploring scenarios like this. They were great books, a lot of time, but the most convincing ones didn't paint your future to be a very pretty, peaceful, or equitable one. You might want to read some, at least to understand why some people might be inclined to "hate this idea".
40 years ago, those were the same people who "hated" how cavalier the French supposedly were regarding marriage and sex. That is to say, these are people who don't really care about Europe in the first place. They weren't watching French cinema or mingling with Parisians then, regardless of France's actual culture, and they're not watching Eurovision now.
They're already just nationalist folk reaching for for an example of what makes their culture the better one. Those people exist all over the world, and will always exist in some influential share, and don't change their mind based on fiddly little details like who wins a little talent search pageant they never cared about in the first place.
These people do need to be engaged with if we want international fraternity and open trade and stable military relationships, but that engagement is about finding reasons for those nationalists to think bigger to to make sure they can see benefits to pursuing those ends with weirdos half a world away, because the people half a world away are always going to look like weirdos when that's what you want to see.
It's rare than a third-party SaaS can approximate one of these "core sheets" and most of the exceptions have already been explored over the last several decades years.
You have to remember that an SaaS, just like shrink-wrap software, reflects someone else's model of of a process or workflow and the model and implementation evolve per the timeline/agenda of its publisher.
For certain parts of certain workflows, where there's a highly normative and robust industry standard, like invoicing or accounting or inventory tracking, that compromise is worthwhile and we've had both shrink-wrap and SaaS products servicing those needs for a very very long time. We see churn in which application is most popular and what it's interface and pricing look like, but the domains being served have mostly been constant (mostly only growing as new business lines/fashions emerge and mature).
Most of the stuff that remains in a "core sheet" could benefit from the attention of a practiced engineer who could make it more reliable and robust, but almost always reflects that the represented business process is somehow peculiar to the organization. As Access and FoxPro and VBA and Zapier and so many tools have done before, LLM coding assistants and software building tools offer some promise in shaking some of these up by letting orgs convert their "core sheets" to "internal applications".
But that's not an opportunity for SaaS entrepreneurs. It's an opportunity for LLM experts to try to come in and pitch private, bespoke software solutions for a better deal than whatever the Access guy had promised 20 years ago. Because of the long-term maintenance challenges that still plague code that's too LLM-colored, I wouldn't want to be that expert pitching that work, but it's an opportunity for some ambitious folks for sure.
The media ecosystem many of us had lived in included that but was not almost entirely that.
We had local newspapers, weeklies, and magazines, with local owners and editors, printing at local print shops, subsidized by local advertisers, dropped in boxes and stacked at local community hubs by local kids. Same for local radio stations and local television networks, although these had such high capital and regulation requirements that many of them were already being soaked up into larger networks more quickly.
As the online stuff emerged, we had local BBS's, and local forums and websites and blogs operated by local people, made known through the above local media channels or just through word of mouth.
Writers and editors and artists and merchants would be real people that circulated in the community, who would encounter readers/viewers/consumers face to face. Earnest small businesses that served a niche in the community could call up and get a reasonable price for an ad slot or classified listing without always having to bid in an auction against against an national brand with an effectively unlimited budget.
The last 10-20 years of the Internet, of social media and consolidation and the "Creator Economy", didn't just "scale up what we already had" -- it scaled up one small thing that we already had and displaced more or less everything else.
Craigslist killed off the classified section which was a big income source for newspapers. People didn't mind because Craigslist was free for most users.
For whatever reason, the myth that being a "first mover" is critically advantageous seems to persist among technologists, even while our industry hosts so many examples of first movers exhausting themselves to clear the brush of exploratory research and market-finding only for some later entrant to confidently gallop through that now cleared path on horseback.