Have you seen his recent Bloomberg appearance? He's calm, collected, and matter-of-fact -- the complete opposite of how he presents himself on his newsletter and podcasts, but with the same argument. You wouldn't know from listening to him how spicy he usually is.
It's tuned to the audience. Bloomberg was traditionally for people who actually wanted information. People who were fallible and had limited knowledge.
Of course that mentality is obsolete. Now we all have infinite access to perfectly correct information via the internet.
_I_ certainly expected it, but what about the people who make budgeting decisions for this sort of thing? Or those who think LLMs are the greatest thing since sliced bread?
That is a good point; however, I'd treat it as a risk management. Instead of a long-term contract with a commitment, one side optimises their fiscal load by accepting the risk of an environmental or conditions change.
For those who think the LLMs are the greatest thing - _I_ cenrtantly assign myself to such a category. And I also see some correlation between Tim Berners-Lee's experiment with WWW and what is happening with all those LLMs (and what was built on top of or with the usage of LLMs). Not a direct 1-1, but in a part of adoption. It was new, it required adoption, and it was given (almost) for free. And it did work, and adoption is very high, and people would give up their favourite tool. When adoption grew enough, it came time to reap the benefits.
It's really not. As a one-person IT department I'm now able to build things in hours or days that it previously would have taken my weeks or even months to build (and thus they didn't get done). Things people have wanted for years that I didn't ever have the time for, I can now say "yes" to.
Yeah the ops alone is a huge win. It’s such a win I didn’t even think to mention it ha.
Dangerous too of course. So many times I’ve had subtle unexpected side effects. But it’s all about pinning thins down well and that’s what we’re all still figuring out well
> Is writing it by hand the old-fashioned way not on the table?
Of course it is. I started a (commercial) product in Jan, on track for in-field testing at the end of April.
Of course, it's not my f/time job, so I've only been working on it a/hours, but, with the exception of two functions, everything else is hand-coded.
I rubber-ducked with AI, but they never wrote the product for me (other than those two functions which I felt too lazy to copy from an existing project and fixup to work in the new project).
Absolutely not. I took on some thins that would normally take 5-10 people and many months.
Some people are turn out slop. I was really excited to try and make some impressive shit. My whole life has been dedicated to trying to embody what Apple preached in the early days.
I knew this was coming, but I thought I had a little more time to try and get them over the finish line, ya know?
Maintenance by hand might be achievable, but it’s extremely hard when you’ve built something really big.
I’ve only got so much savings left to live on.
I’m not saying anyone owes me anything, but we all need to pivot and in a lot less sure my pivot is going to work out now
> I took on some thins that would normally take 5-10 people and many months.
Based on what, exactly?
It's very easy to claim some software would've taken you months to make, but this is ridiculous. Estimating project duration is well known to be impossible in this field. A few years ago you'd get laughed out the room for making such predictions.
> I’ve only got so much savings left to live on.
Respectfully, what are you doing here?
Yeah sure, the Apple dream. But supposing AI did in fact make you this legendary 100x developer, so it would to everyone else including those with significantly more resources. You'd still be run out of the market by those with bigger budgets or more marketing, and end up penniless all the same.
I would strongly recommend you not put all your proverbial eggs in this basket.
I’ve pivoted to writing native iOS, macOS, windows, Linux apps. Most of my career has been front end web. It would take me awhile just to learn and practice, vs having my visions working in hours or days
I’m not ready to unveil the thing I alluded to, it’s important to me that it’s good and polished. But I’ve done quite well so far developing in Swift, Rust, Go, and coming up with marketing and design — things I definitely couldn’t do by hand without a lot more time and effort.
https://poolometer.com/
Is one of the things I’m almost ready to call ready. So much domain expertise or tedious math involved — I simply wouldn’t have bothered on my own, pre-AI
I agree it’s a huge existential risk that everyone is also amazing. So far that’s not true. I get hung up on a lot of little quirks, like getting Dolby Vision to play properly on Apple Silicon without Vulcan. Something I accomplished after about 2 weeks of relentless determination.
To be clear I’m just trying to answer your questions honestly. I understand the situation. It’s almost to my benefit the harder it is for non Software Engineers. But in our current reality, when I’m not launched yet, it’s more stress
> So much domain expertise or tedious math involved — I simply wouldn’t have bothered on my own, pre-AI
This is what I was alluding to. AI did not let you write software you couldn't otherwise make, or let you write it faster. You skipped doing the research because AI gave you plausible results, but without doing the research yourself you cannot be sure of it's accuracy.
That isn't faster software development, it's reckless software development, and nothing really stopped you from doing it before other than your own recognition that pulling numbers out of your ass is a bad idea.
> I agree it’s a huge existential risk that everyone is also amazing. So far that’s not true. I get hung up on a lot of little quirks, like getting Dolby Vision to play properly on Apple Silicon without Vulcan. Something I accomplished after about 2 weeks of relentless determination.
That would be "doing the research", and as you have observed, is the slow part then and now.
