Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
The first is getting market feedback.
The second is just getting opinions.
It does require you to think carefully about what constitutes validation or invalidation of your ideas, though.
Probably not so different from past hype cycles, except maybe this time it will be different!
The AI gave me unprecedented turn around time in experimentation. The same experiments would easily take me over a month in the past. Now it was a few days. But still, real progress is made only when my understanding catch up with reality.
Building technology to overcome relatable hardships and frictions is a worthy challenge full of meaning.
Using someone else's technology to erase frictions and hardships from your life can erode meaning.
On my worst days I am convinced programming and technological optimism is a theft of meaning; personal satisfaction at solving a human problem awkwardly mapped to technology, at the expense of users dating, socializing, or consuming with discomfort and therefore the possibility of growth and meaning.
Since starting to use LLMs, I have actually been spending more time, at the console, than before.
One reason is that I like to ship (as opposed to "code"). That means a lot of tedious, boring stuff. The kind of thing that I want to "take a break before tackling," so I may take 30 minutes, and watch something on TV for a while, before rolling up my sleeves.
Now, the LLM can take care of a lot of this stuff, so I am not motivated to "take a break," so much, anymore.
It doesn't actually feel bad, but I now have to schedule "downtime." I never used to have to do that, before. My work always involved a lot of "context switch" points; naturally set up for taking breaks.
This has been a problem since the beginning of tech startups. I worked in a dot-com in the late 1990s. Lots of investor money. New offices. Hundreds of employees. The product was well thought out, fairly well built, and it worked. But they had no customers. It's even in the same market niche as products that today have millions of users, but those folks weren't ready for it in 1999, at least not enough of them and quickly enough to matter.
Building something quickly is only a small part of what it takes to have a successful startup. You must solve a problem for people who are ready for your solution and willing to pay for it.
What's written above is self confirmation that you are better than AI and that you will always have a job because you are better because AI can't build something that works. That stuff about convincing yourself you're building something useful is actually the easy question.
Punching yourself in the face involves telling truths that are incredibly hard to stomach. That you don't matter, that all your years of coding and your identity is about to be consumed by a machine that is superior. The fact that you still hold a rank as a software engineer right now is only because that machine is slightly worse than you. But as it improves, your role becomes meaningless. The life you built your skills around becomes meaningless. It is less about what AI is now and more about the trajectory of AI and what the current AI says about the AI of the near tomorrow. We don't code by hand anymore and this came about in less than 5 years since the popular rise of LLMs. Think about what the next 5 years will bring.
That is punching yourself in the face with reality^^
Who is responsible for this mess? ;)
If you're doing something that isn't like how people are used to things being done, is novel, or is contra to common beliefs, there's a good chance that nobody will believe in you. And in such situations, their lack of belief is not a reliable indicator of whether what you're doing is valid or correct. Most people's negative responses in such cases are emotional responses, not rational ones.
In such situations, "Being honest with themselves about whether what they are doing is actually working or not" and "Having the courage to go on when nobody believes in you" are not opposites.
And something I wish the current crop of AI startups learn as well, just making XYZ agentic maybe isn't the answer to everything.
Same folks that said crypto will destroy traditional finance are now saying stuff like, AI will "destroy" all jobs and create a permanent underclass. Almost feels like every few years a new cult gets created with messaging perfectly designed to trigger the Gen-Z(/current college generation) into a frenzy and drinking the kool-aid.
Can't wait for it to be over (and then to do it all over again with something else). Being in my 30s helps. I care less :)
Before dealing with anything that might put me off. I can just ask the agent to do it for me. And then, do something else, take that break, but regardless in a few minutes I will have something to jump on instead of the same blank terminal with the same blinking cursor judging me. It really makes taking the first step, much easier and then the ball just gets rolling.
I see what his point is to be honest though, it's easy to say just one more week of polish, just 5 more features, etc.
I've been very pleasantly surprised. The combination of the compiler improvements in Elixir 1.20 and the structural guardrails from Ash seems to have led to very consistent, organized and readable code.
My current business is profitable. Almost everything we built was still useless. Since 4 yrs ago.
The amount of effort that went into that "almost" Is something that I don't think AI moved any needle for even though half of our journey was after AI coding took off.
Speed of coding was never the problem, still isn't even if AI allegedly 10x-ed it.
/usr/bin/vim on my machine begs to differ.
This doesn't even match with reality. I got laid off in January because of "ai" (scare quotes because it was really about the salaries of the US based teams being more expensive than the overseas teams, I think). I got hired at a new job with better pay within two months, and my team is still hiring software engineers, and we work on cutting edge stuff. And yes we use AI (tastefully), but nobody here expects it to replace them. Hacker News and twitter are a fricking echo chamber of the most obnoxious people trying to be "thought leaders", but it doesn't match my reality at all.
Once you have something concrete you can iterate on the prototype until it's a mess. But, hopefully, in that time you got closer to figuring out what you want. And even if the code for the prototype is a mess the "idea" of it should be cleaner. I like to have an LLM make a new spec at that point, and start fresh with it. You can clean up the abstractions and the UX there.
When writing code is cheap figuring out what you want to write is the hard part. It always was, but the barrier of getting the code written and working made that less obvious.
It is a little alarming the way people treat AI as another human relationship, yes.
But AI is also a pretty useful research partner and rubber duck for ideas so long as you know going into it that it’s going to have a bias toward agreeing with you.
This situation reminds me of Calvin and Hobbes comics that mock the idea of Calvin’s dad’s idea of building character.
For example, I was debating ECC memory and cheap used business workstation hardware for a homelab recently with an AI. It helped me pick a system out of some eBay listings and verified whether the model and Xeon processor SKU supported ECC.
When I went to buy the RAM, it actually caught a mistake where I thought a listing was for UDIMM when it was actually RDIMM.
It’s not going to build my character or build my growth and meaning to buy the wrong thing from an online store.
Does anyone want one?
The article says to stop building and go outside!
And actually, talking about climbing apps with fellow climbers is a great way to be outside.
So you have two options, be good at making people want to spend money on something. This is pretty hard and a rare capability.
The other is to watch trends and catch what people want now, and be ready to deliver a product that does that....
Clear goal, share context, delegate but verify. Running a team of engineers also inevitably generates pages and pages of material, design spec, code, test, review. Just that we now do that with agents and agents are way less trust worthy
People who solve problems while being profitable do not take investment money unless they want to expand or sell.
"What is the exit?" that is the question for every startup.
The revelation to me was that I used to code what I know, now I could code what I don’t know. The common path is that when I face something I don’t know, which is quite often, to move forward I have to level up my understanding.
> talking about climbing apps with fellow climbers is a great way to be outside.
Indeed. The climbers I met are very supportive. They helped me scan the gym, shared their own climbing footage, which is what I'm trying to do, visualize climbing in a 3D scene.
Usage is metered/billed by the token. This suggests a few possible hypotheses for why they might tend to be verbose.
I've known some people who can never stop talking. Maybe they are overly represented in the training set.
dealing with the consequences of my mistakes sounds like growth to me
Same story as building a house. There’s so many unknowns.
As much as you would have aspirations to be a pro soccer player, badly enough broken leg can prevent you from ever being good enough.
Your imagination of being pro player does go away when in reality you’re not fit for the purpose.
The problem with objective reality is 1. it changes. 2. it can be different for different people in different places.
If I live in rural India, there is probably not a tiger behind the bush. If I live in downtown Chicago there is almost certainly not a tiger behind the bush. This leads to the hard problem of probabilistic thinking which requires a lot more energy than black and white thinking.
Lastly, humans are real, and even incorrect belief systems create a reality you have to live in. God, for example, is almost certainly not real. Saying that in a forum will have some percentage of people downvote you and try to reply with a relatively poor argument. Saying it in the wrong place and time outside of the internet can most certainly get you killed. So just because something isn't real doesn't mean you should open your mouth at an inopportune time and learn the reality it created.
Maybe "things going bad suddenly in the near future" is just such a captivating idea to the human mind that those narratives will always find a way to dominate vs "everything will continue to slowly get better".
It's not different than when coding by hand, often we take shortcuts by hand that we then have to pay for later. It really just becomes a judgement call on when to stop prompting new features and start service what you have.
I think with AI and vibecoding its tempting to assume the output is good and chase the dopamine hits of more features, more features, more features, but eventually you get stuck.
That being said AI is also a great tool at paying down tech debt. It's great at helping you read a codebase and can be great at making the mechanical changes you want. And I think there is some truth to the story that newer models will be able to pay down debt (fix the slop) of older models. But its all shades of grey, newer models are better than older ones, but can I emit slop with 5.6 faster than 5.7 will be able to fix it in the future? Nobody knows.
It's not like human projects are devoid of bad code, its all tradeoffs and shades of gray. But to be honest I haven't written a line of code by hand in a while.
Pain is part of reality. Suffering comes from wishing reality was different to how it is.
You are overthinking this. Reality exists in a point in time and space, same point where you are. That is the only problem you face.
"I should run my purchase decisions past an AI in the future."
The number of mistakes you can make is infinite in comparison to the number of correct choices you can make. Since you don't have infinite lives and time there must be some manner of problem space reduction to ensure you get anything done.
Luckily for us humans evolution has spend quadrillions of hours doing just that for us. Modern technology has made it so you don't spend your entire life trying to get something to eat every waking moment of the day. This leads to some problems of your ideology of hardships lead to growth. Which hardships? Which growth? Should you go back to living in a cave like a mammal to get the full experience?
I think it’s possible that this concept that AI is an easy shortcut is a form of gatekeeping.
We had the same reactions to StackOverflow and web search when those technologies came around. And there’s certainly partial truth to it. Maybe reading a full book really does make you more well-rounded than googling your answer, but sometimes blowing a lot of time searching an index in a physical book hoping to find the piece of knowledge you need is just spending time for sake of spending time.
If you're not convinced - sign up and pay by the token of a high or highest level model. Anthropic or Grok for example. The vendor isn't the concern. The quality of what can be done. Then, find an agentic 'harness' that is written in a language you can read. There are several (pi, opencode, crush, etc) and then clone that repo or one of yours you don't mind having exposed and then point your agent to that repo.
Now ask questions: what api calls are made by this repo? Where are secrets stored and sourced from? Do an adversarial investigation and list the bugs. Then fix the bugs.
Then review the work and determine the value and how to wield this new tool. It replaces reading, writing, and editing - not thinking.
Magnitude pedantery incoming: 1 billion years is "only" about 10 trillion hours.
Saying, "Experiencing some friction is good for building character" is not equivalent to saying "We should demolish all technology and force babies to survive on their own in the woods."
That the extreme position is wrong does not strictly imply that the moderate position is too.
Maybe you never learn to check your own details. Maybe that's ok.
Think of combined manpower. If you have 2 people working an 8 hour shift you've spent 16 hours.
/Pedantry crisis averted.
This is the particular problem with deciding a position, it's all shades of grey.
200 years ago a good number of humans thought that owning other humans was a-ok. Today that's mostly not true. In 200 years it's likely the vast majority of humanity will look at eating meat and owning pets at the same level of horror. Which is the extreme position? Which is the moderate?
The year 2000 problem is a good example of this. The year 2000 problem was not a problem. Not because it wasn't a problem, but because a shitload of people did a lot of work to make sure it wasn't a problem. If we didn't have news saying 'oh no, this is a problem' before Jan 1 2000, would it have been taken so seriously?
In February 2021 Texas was so incredibly close to losing the grid that it should strike terror into the hearts of anyone that lives there (see Practical Engineering episode on black starts). Simply put this would have been a massive humanitarian disaster in the 3rd largest state in the US of a size the US has not seen in the modern era. Thousands would have died from the extreme cold that was occuring. Thousands more from a lack of medicine. Fuel would have been trapped in the ground, and ran out quickly anyway. The loss of refining capabilities on the coast would have crippled the entire US. Because of the stupid design of the Texas grid it would have taken weeks or months to get everything back online.
The modern world has become very fragile due to long supply lines of necessary supplies. Covid did a good job of showing some of these weaknesses. I don't think the "did bad thing happen or not" is the way we should be looking at this. It's "How can we reduced the impact of bad things happening". And we're doing a terrible fucking job at it by consolidating companies and industries even further.
Maybe we should actually be worried about a billion+ death event in the near future because of our stupid decisions at a global scale. Maybe we should turn that fear into doing something into preventing it.
Fun math!
[0]Crockford et al. (2023) estimate about 10^30 cells exist today, and between 10^39 and 10^40 cells have ever existed on Earth.
Who can punch themselves in the face with reality the most? This is who will win in the age of AI.
I think there are two ways to use AI. You can just go off the deep end and start building a crazy amount of things. While it can be fun with your dozens of Claude and ChatGPT and agents and all that, most of it will be abandoned and not get used by anyone in the long term. And this is where you start getting things like AI slop and psychosis and all the things that people are starting to hate about AI generated anything.
And the other way is to take a step back and decide that okay, in the previous world, I would have had to spend all this time just to take the first step. Now with AI, I can take that first step much faster and actually get back to the real problem.
I have seen way too many startup founders delude themselves into building more and more for months without a single conversation with a real user. The builders and the technical people really struggle with this. If all you know is how to build, and you just use AI as an excuse to keep building more and more and more, you are just procrastinating and avoiding reality. And the thing is that you were probably procrastinating before AI as well. And now it has just become much more obvious when you do it with AI.
What is already easy for everyone will not create any lasting value for you. I don’t think building a successful startup has gotten any easier with AI. It’s just that certain parts of it have gotten faster. I don’t think speed of coding or having the right landing page copy or the right deck or presentation was ever the bottleneck in getting your startup off the ground, anyways.
There are so many failed startups and founders who spend so much time building something that didn’t work out. You will almost always hear that even before the AI era, they built way too much and they built too many irrelevant things. Instead of really being honest with themselves about whether what they are doing is actually working or not.
And the things that make a startup work, that make anything work, have always been hard and continue to be hard today.
What is hard are things like:
Did AI make any of these easier? I don’t think so.
I know you want to use AI as an escape. It is so tempting. You get to sit in your bubble and imagine everything and see it come to life and your agent buddy will keep cheering you on while you get nothing done with your life. And I think that’s the biggest danger of AI. You convince yourself that you are doing something useful when you are not.
Don’t lose sight of what is real. Figure out why you were put on this earth. What do you need to do with your life? What kind of impact do you want to create? What are the projects that need you the most? What are you naturally good at? What can you do that other people will want?
I think in the AI era, the only delta left will be in relentlessly chasing the truth. And the only way to get it is to punch yourself in the face with reality again and again.