- With LLMs we're all becoming managers. Good news is we'll get more done. Bad news is that we'll have to get way better at persisting mid-state process status (I sometimes ask my LLM "could you summarize what we were talking about and why"), tracking outstanding tasks (linear for our agents) and jumping between contexts.
I am also finding work is becoming more tiring. As I'm able to delegate all the rote stuff I feel like decision fatigue is hitting harder/faster as all I spend my time doing is making the harder judgement decisions that the LLMs don't do well enough yet.
Particularly tough in generalist roles where you're doing a little bit of a wide range of things. In a week I might need to research AI tools and leadership principles, come up with facilitation exercises, envision sponsorship models, create decks, write copy, build and filter ICP lists, automate outreach, create articles, do taxes, find speakers, select a vendor for incorporation, find a tool for creating and maintaining logos, fonts and design systems and think deeply about how CTOs should engage with AI strategically. I'm usually burned pretty hard by Friday night :(
- I have been coding on and off (more off than on) for 47 years. I kinda stopped paying attention when we got past jquery and was never a fan of prototypical inheritance. Never built anything with tailwind, Next.js, etc. After spending some time writing copy, user stories and a design brief (all iterative with ChatGPT) cursor one shot my (simple) web app and I was live (once I'd spent a couple hours documenting my requirements and writing my copy) in 20 minutes of vibe coding.
I've been adding small features in a language I don't program in using libraries I'm not familiar with thhat meet my modest functional requirements in a couple minutes each. I work with an LLM to refine my prompt, put it into cursor, run the app locally, look at the diffs, commit, push and I'm live on vercel within a minute or two.
I don't have any good metrics for productivity, so I'm 100% subjective but I can say that even if I'd been building in Rails (it's been ~4 years but I coded in it for a decade) it would have taken me at least 8 hours to have an app where I was happy with both the functionality and the look and feel so a 10x improvement in productivity for that task feels about right.
And having a "buddy" I can discuss a project with makes activation energy lower allowing me to complete more.
Also, YC videos I don't have the time to watch, I get a transcript, feed into chatGTP, ask for the key take aways I could apply to my business (it's in a project where it has context on stage, industry, maturity, business goals, key challenges, etc) so I get the benefits of 90 minutes of listening plus maybe 15 minutes of summarizing, reviewing and synthesis in typically 5-6 minutes - and it'd be quicker if I built a pipeline (something I'm vibe coding next month)
Wouldn't want to do business without it.
- If you live with your parent in a double wide in a trailer park and need to work at the local Target every night since high school to make enough money to help pay for groceries for the family, you might have a harder time working 100 hour weeks on the off chance that you'll raise a round and start a company. You probably also don't know many VC's or live too close to where they hang out.
Anyone can start a billion dollar business. Anyone who does so is probably extremely smart and extremely hard working. There are some very smart, hard working folks for whom the path to starting a company is harder than for others.
- If you're venture based and were expecting another round sometime soon. With higher interest rates there were more compelling alternatives for LPs than to invest in Venture, causing a trickle down chilling of the fund raising environment for venture backed companies and requiring them to come up with accelerated plans to reach profitability - including cutting staff and optimizing for survival over growth.
- To :+1: this, even if it's a book - there is a central thesis - a headline and a sentence that tells you whether you want to read more. "Your pet could save your life" - The six surprising reasons that people with pets live longer than others.
Then each chapter has the same: "Getting in touch" - why stroking your cat soothes your body. Etc
You may even have sections within the chapters and each can follow the same format.
Thousands of years ago it was enough just to write down stuff you've learned, call it "Meditations" and hope people would still be reading it in the distant future.
Now if it's just "stuff I've learned about coding" or "things that make me happy" you're going to need an extremely strong hook to tie that together and build an audience.
So start with a single thesis and decompose from there. Inverted pyramids all the way down :)
- Thanks for making my day :)
- He's right, but having failed a number of times, after you've put all your savings into the business, fired all your team, notified and disappointed all of your investors and customers, helped your team find new gigs, filed all the dissolution paperwork, handled all the taxes, disposed responsibly of all of the assets and you now find yourself out of work and often out of cash, occasionally you'll forget to jump through all the hoops to close down all of the SaaS accounts before you stop paying the bill personally to host the email accounts.
Of course perfect world you shut down earlier and in a more orderly fashion, but there are so many cases of companies almost failing and then not, it's hard to shutter a company when there is a chance you may go out of business - especially when you feel you're getting close to another raise or becoming default alive :(
- I think the parent poster was suggesting that a human driven uber was here now - not an autonomous one (hence the "chat buddy"/driver)
- If it stays private, not only do your existing shares appreciate (which would also happen if it was public), but as an existing investor if you have pro rata rights, you can buy more shares (vs them being sold in a public offering) increasing the number of shares you have that will appreciate.
- As mentioned by someone else, estimating how much of the company you have depends on seeing the complete cap table (redacted for names is fine) along with a copy of all of the major financing documents to validate liquidation preferences, participation mechanisms, sweeteners for i-bankers and various other instruments. Good luck getting that information as a dev.
Given that, I tend to join the group that value options in an early stage private company as "worthless". If the cash comp doesn't work for me, it's unlikely the options will move the needle as I'll probably need to be there 5-9 years to actually see a positive event and I'll need to do that 5-10 times to have a solid chance of a couple of meaningful wins. Of course, some of the failures you can drop out after a year or two, but it's still many decades to have a reasonable possibility of a return from options.
It's hard enough for VCs who do this for a living and can make 10-50 simultaneous bets to come out well ahead - and the good ones have access to insane deal flow and all the docs during due diligence. Good luck being confident that you will beat that serially with limited deal flow and limited due diligence access.
To be clear, a certain proportion of people here DID beat that and are doing great with stock options, but the odds are not in your favor . . .
- The challenge with substantial take home tests is that they have the potential skew your applicant pool in a number of ways that are not ideal for your business.
Firstly, as a general rule of thumb, the very best developers who are in the highest demand are unlikely to jump through the hoops, so immediately you're filtering out the very best applicants. As a business owner, that's not something I want to do.
Secondly, and equally importantly, you are likely to get more, young financially stable people with less outside of work commitments (including families which naturally correlate with age which in turn correlates with experience).
If you want to over-index on people with less experience and at the same time reduce the number of applications from people for whom the time commitment is problematic (including but not limited to females who statistically take on a disproportionate percentage of child care responsibilities and some members of traditionally under represented minorities) all you do is reduce the likely diversity of talent you might otherwise get to pick from for your dev team.
- Adding value. Lets say there is something in your life that you care about and costs you $100 a month. If I find a way to provide you with the same value for $20 a month and manage to do it at a cost of $10 a month, if I can persuade you to do business with me, you get the same value for $80 a month less and I get $10 a month in profits. If I manage to convince 100,000 people to also save $80 a month, I get $10 * $100,000 or $1m a month - not by taking away from others, but by saving them money.
Of course, plenty of people get money in ways that doesn't align with this ideal, but as an entrepreneur, that's the way I think about things and I have no problem with receiving $1m a month if I do so by saving others money and/or providing them with goods or services that they choose to purchase and that makes them happy.
- I saw it around the dot-com days along with a lot of other extremely dubious terms for extremely desperate founders - at least in NYC.
Agreed that more than a 1x liquidation preference these days would generally be surprising, but in a low end scenario or with a few big rounds, all it takes is a 1x to wipe out any upside for founders and employees, but if you're deemed worth it, the acquiring company can offer you a worthwhile incentive to stick around.
- And I think it's even a little more than this. I've certainly seen college grads come up with impressive algorithms and "solve hard problems". For me senior is having seen other people solve hard problems in the past and fail spectacularly when their math meets implementation details. Maybe the approach requires too much precision from data entry clerks., Maybe it's particularly sensitive to GC pauses or doesn't distribute well given potential bandwidth issues between DC's. Maybe its a awesome but future devs will find it so terse as to be un-editable. A lot of being a senior to me is having seen many production systems and learned the weird ass ways they can go wrong.
Still not saying you can't do that at 18, but you probably needed to quit high school and start consulting for teams at 14 to get the experience in by then!
- Huge fan of just including an environment.yml for a conda virtual-env in the repo you store your notebooks in, but the challenge there is that it's OS specific reproducibility. I've had no luck creating a single yml for all OS's and the overhead of creating similar yml's for (say) Mac and Win is a lot unless you plan on sharing your notebook widely.
- Maybe I've been lucky, but I've always found these principles to just be an effective way to enjoy life, build a great team and maximize business value.
Every day, I get to check in on my team and figure out how I can help them to be happier while also delivering more value to the business. And I find the longer I do it the more great surprises I get and the less I actually need to do to build and manage the org.
- Especially for remote first teams, standups are as much a social connection as an accountability, information sharing and blocker highlighting opportunity. I'm a huge fan of synchronous standups and really like zoom to get the added connection of video and audio with "async standup checkins" being the exception case if someone is at the doctors or whatever. All of this assumes a team with at least some timezone overlap.
Slack is great, but it doesn't completely replace the ability to see and talk to people once in a while!
- Don't see whats fraudulent about building something people want, use and presumably get value from.
- Beat me to it :)
Its like the fallout when a waymo kills a "beloved neighborhood cat". I'm not against cats, and I'm deeply saddened at the loss of any life, but if it's true that (comparable) mile for mile, waymos reduce deaths and injuries, that is a good thing - even if they don't reduce them to zero.
And to be clear, I often feel the same way - but I am wondering why and whether it's appropriate!