I built and grew a SaaS from $0 to $200k ARR in the last year. Putting aside that AI is at the core of the product (we replace some low-skill human labor in a super niche market), I never could have built this product in this timeframe without AI. So when I got laid off from my big tech job six months ago, I'd have just gone to look for another job.
I also know multiple non-technical people who have built little apps for themselves or for their company to use internally that previously would have purchased some off the shelf software.
This seems really vague. What does "totally unreliable" mean?
If you mean that a completely non-technical user can't vibe code a complex app and have it be performant, secure, defect-free, etc, then I agree with you. For now. Maybe for a long time, we'll see.
But right now, today, I'm a professional software engineer with two decades of experience and I use Cursor and Opus to reliably generate code that's on par with the quality of what I can write, at least 10x faster than I can write it. I use it to build new features, explore the codebase, refactor existing features, write documentation, help with server management and devops, debug tricky bugs, etc. It's not perfect, but it's better than most engineers I've worked with in my career. It's like pair programming with a savant who knows everything, some of which is a little out of date, who has intermediate level taste. With a tiny bit of steering, we're an incredibly productive duo.
I know the tech is here to stay, and the best parts of it are where it provides accessibility and tears down barriers to entry.
My work is to make sure that you don't need to reach for AI just because human typing speed is limited.
I love to think in terms of instruments versus assistants: an assistant is unpredictable but easy to use. It tries to guess what you want. An instrument is predictable but relatively harder to use. It has a skill curve and perhaps a skill cap. The purpose of an instrument is to directly amplify the expressive power of its user or player through predictable, delicately calibrated responses.
AI makes starting easier but finishing harder. You get to 80% fast, then spend longer on the last 20% than you would have building from scratch - because now you're debugging code you don't fully understand.
I run a SaaS solo, and that hasn't really been my experience, but I'm not vibe coding. I fully understand all the code that my AI writes when it writes it, and I focus on sound engineering practices, clean interfaces, good test coverage, etc.
Also, I'm probably a better debugger than AI given an infinite amount of time and an advantage in available tools, but if you give us each the same debugging tools and see who can find and fix the bug fastest, it'll run circles around me, even for code that I wrote myself by hand!
That said, as time has gone on, the codebase has grown beyond my ability to keep it all in my head. That made me nervous at first, but I've come to view it just like pretty much any job with a large codebase, where I won't be familiar with large parts of the codebase when I first jump into them, because someone else wrote it. In this respect, AI has also been really helpful to help me get back up to speed on a part of the codebase I wrote a year ago that I need to now refactor or whatever.
"There is definitely a trade-off, no matter where your preferences lie."
That's a much more reasonable position than the idea that sharing your journey on Youtube "ruins" it, or "kills the adventure". Different people prefer different things.
I live in Manhattan, and don't own a car, so I get where you're coming from. The reality here is that America doesn't like trains and isn't going to build trains in any kind of a timeframe that's helpful to me. I'm about to move to Westchester, but I need to get to the Upper West Side every day. Yes, I can take the train from Westchester, but it goes into Grand Central, so then I need to take another train from there. And I'll have my kid with me.
So my options are:
1. Drive, walk, or bike with my kid to the train station in Westchester, ride to grand central, switch to subway, drop her off at school, then take the subway to my office. Total time about 90 mins.
or
2. Drive 35-45 mins.
I'll be driving.
There's talk of having one of the train lines go into Penn instead of Grand Central, with stops on the Upper West Side! But that'll be a decade or more, if it ever happens, and it won't be relevant to me anymore at that point.
This is such a wild take. Waymo is expanding to cities across the country, doing millions of paid rides every month. Meanwhile Tesla's "Robotaxi" is tooling around Austin with a few cars, every one of which has a driver in the front seat. On the personal vehicle side, Tesla hasn't done anything new or interesting in years, and sales are slumping. FSD never seems to actually become good enough to actually be "full self driving", it's just year after year of Tesla stans coming in here to tell us how "the latest version is incredible, actual full self driving is just around the corner!"
Waymo is delivering millions of paid rides per month all over the country with no one in the driver's seat. Tesla still can't manage that in one small city without a backup driver in the front.
But yes, just like the dozens of other times I've read this comment for years now, I'm sure "the latest version of FSD" is so groundbreaking, and it's all about to change!
It is evil, the vast majority of people don't become rich without exploiting other people, and just about everyone in that position then leverages their wealth to exert even more power over people and politics.
Do you have any evidence to back this up? The cutoff for being in the richest 1% globally is about $1 million. What's the evil and exploitation you attribute to the average person with $1mm, who statistically is probably a retiree who had a pretty normal job?
We run sweatshops in poor countries, exploit their people and natural resources to death, then we send them a few crumbs of aid to paint ourselves as the good guys for the history books, how noble of us!
Can you name some of those countries that we've exploited over the last twenty years? Do me a favor and also look up their GDP per capita, or whatever other measure of financial well-being you prefer, and tell me how it's changed over the past two decades. I suspect what you'll find is that they've grown way, way faster than the developed countries who are "exploiting" them.
I'm not suggesting the world doesn't have problems, or that richer countries don't take advantage of poorer countries. But this "rich = evil" drivel is cartoonishly lacking in facts.
Please start by reading the title that contextualizes my comment instead of posting a snotty response that takes things out of context — The number is 0.001%, not 1%.
What do you get out of these childish straw man arguments? I made it perfectly clear which group I was talking about and you're asking me to defend an argument I didn't make.
Did you comment on the wrong post? There literally is nothing sycophantic at all about this response, there's not a single word about OP or how brilliant or clever they are, nothing. There's enthusiasm, but that's not remotely the same thing as sycophancy.
I wouldn't use that adjective but I think it fits in the strict definition - it's the style of someone overly willing to please, like a servant currying favour with their master.
I'd probably describe it as saccharine. Or dare I say it [USA] "American"? Over the top, gushing, enthusiasm. It's off-putting to me (from UK) as it's, well, more the sort of thing you'd hear from a toady or, yes, a sycophant. It just seems insincere -- and it is in this case because there is literally no emotion behind it.
> Because really we can split into three or more. US on one side, EU, middle and far east on the other. East of Madrid is booming, West is in decline.
But the EU is "the west". Europe is where "the West" started. It's bizarre you would group EU with the middle east and far east rather than with the US.
Your comments make no sense. India, China, Nigeria, etc may have their own film productions, but they all watch american films. But that's not true of indian, chinese, nigerian films which are consumed locally. Beyond film production, what is india, china or nigeria's equivalent to netflix or hulu or amazon prime?
I also know multiple non-technical people who have built little apps for themselves or for their company to use internally that previously would have purchased some off the shelf software.
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