>> But from now on, I'm either gonna be a successful founder, or I'm not. And if I'm not, I'll have to deal with having broken with the expectations that people had of me.
Don't worry, they expected you to fail. They hoped you'd succeed, but expected failure. Statistically most businesses fail, and failure rates are faster when your customers are VCs not users.
I say this as encouragement, not criticism. Accepting that failure is (by far) the most likely outcome is both realistic and freeing. The anxiety of failure is gone.
Frankly, your lack of marketing experience would worry me. Without the ability to reach users (much less customers) how can you do anything but fail? New businesses are not bounded by technical ability (especially in the age of AI) they are bounded by Marketing.
Leaving aside for the moment yesterday advertising and marketing are very different functions (advertising is easy, marketing is hard);
If your target customers are "VC funded companies" then sure, getting in bed with as many VCs as possible is certainly one marketing approach (and probably a good one.)
Certainly you're are a lot of products targeted at businesses who are flush with cash and eager for kit like fancy chairs.
The important part of marketing is knowing who your potential customers are, and the best way for them to get to know you.
I've got solar. We switched things like pool pump, hot water and so on (things already on timers) from night to day.
Dishwasher can also gave a programmed start, so that can also shift from after-dinner to after-breakfast.
I also work some days from home, so other activities can be moved from night to day. We use a bore-hole for irrigation, laundry in the morning etc. Even cooking can often be done earlier in the day.
Aircon is the least problematic- when we need it, the sun is shining.
So yes, habits can shift. Obviously though each situation is different.
This might be true for games, but its not universally true for software.
Clearly the Windows NT kernel is older than 25 years, and is still making money.
And it's not alone. My own company is still actively developing and selling a program first released in 1998. Even if we wanted to Open Source every build 25 years after it's release, it might be difficult to figure out how to store the code that long.
We originally backed up on tape. Good luck restoring that now. Then writable CDs; those have likely degraded (and we'd need to find an old CD Drive to read them.)
Even most hard drives of the era are no longer usable - MFM, SCSI ,ATA none of those interfaces exist, and drives were tiny. If you had to choose a media today, that you'd be confident would work in 25 years, what would you pick?
Sure, our active code survives because we simply clone the archive every time we replace the server, but we don't have a history if every build ever.
Seems like a million years ago I wrote some games. The source code is long gone. (Well it's on 5.25 floppy disks in my garage for 30 years, so functionally gone.) The compiler to make it is long gone. The OS and physical hardware is long gone (although emulators exist. ).
I'm sorry to say, but making laws for old software is basically pointless.
>Clearly the Windows NT kernel is older than 25 years, and is still making money.
Not the one from 25 years ago.
>Seems like a million years ago I wrote some games. The source code is long gone. (Well it's on 5.25 floppy disks in my garage for 30 years, so functionally gone.)
Legal requirement would have ensured great care in preservation of said source.
>I'm sorry to say, but making laws for old software is basically pointless.
If it's pointless, then copyright should expire much earlier.
um yes, that one. updated, yes. added to, yes. But a huge chunk of the code that shipped then is still shipping now.
>> Legal requirement would have ensured great care in preservation of said source.
Um, no. The cost of that "great care" would simply have to be built into the initial release. More likely we'd just ignore the problem (who expects this thing to last 25 years anyway?) and then in 25 years, assuming we're still around, we'll wait for someone to what? Take us to court? "Sorry judge, source has gone in the great fire of 07"). Judge does what? issues us a fine? (Said fine being anyway lower than the cost of the "great care" you mentioned....)
Copyright serves a very different purpose. It protects the binary from being copied by others for commercial gain. That's not a law for "old software" - (nobody cares about Visicalc), it's a law for current software (ie, it's still illegal to pirate Windows 2000).
About half our road fatalities are pedestrians. About 80% of those are intoxicated with alcohol. When you're driving at 40mph, at night, and some drunk guy chooses to cross the road, no amount of safety features or liabilities can save him.
Sure, cars can be safer for light collisions with pedestrians where the car is going slowly. Especially in the US where half the cars have a very high hood. But where I live the problem is not safer cars, it's drunk pedestrians.
I wonder how a Waymo would do with your drunks? Really the answer for that is probably more a different road layout so the drinking is separate from the traffic. I live near Soho in London which is full of drunk people in the streets but most traffic is blocked off there or doing 10 mph.
I’ve been paying more attention to Waymos recently.. and noting that it stops to let people cross that i didn’t even see first.
And sometimes at places that aren’t even a cross walk.
Im in DTLA frequently and I am almost even developing a secondary instinct to cover my brake and have an extra look around when a Waymo stops in a street.
Because it may be dropping off or picking up a rider or it saw something or someone I didn’t. Just happened Saturday in fact. I saw it do an abrupt stop when I was yielding to it at a “T” intersection and expected it to have the right of way and keep going. I didn’t proceed until I could figure out WHY it had just stopped, like “okay WHERE’S the passenger”
and then five or so people started running across the street in front of it that I would not have seen if that Waymo wasn’t there and I was clear to turn left.
As an added bonus it stayed stopped after they all crossed and I decided to be a jerk and turn left in front of it. It stayed stopped for me too. There’s no driver in it. It ain’t mad. XD
I have a good eye for spotting uber drivers who are about to load or unload too,
Especially if they have some common sense and are trying to line up to do that so their passenger can get on or off curbside. A Waymo is just.. way more immediately identifiable that I can react that much faster to it or just be like.. alright. I’ll take a cue from it, it’s usually right.
And hell even if it’s wrong, maybe this isn’t a good time to pull out in front of it anyway!
I saw someone use the term "orchestration", which seems to be the word for building the software using LLM tools.
It made me think of the conductor, seemingly the most skillless job in the orchestra. All you do is wave the batton, no need to ever play a instrument. If LLMs are doing the hard part (writing code) then we can be the conductor waving the batton.
But of course the visuals are misleading. Being conductor doesn't take the least skill, it takes the most. He hears every instrument individually, he knows the piece intimately, and through his conducting brings a unique expression to a familiar work.
LLMs have made the musician part automated. They'll play whatever you want. No doubt a powerful tool in the hands of a skilled conductor. And a incredible tool for someone who can't play to generate music for themselves.
There's no shortage of "I built it and they won't come" posts here on HN, predating LLMs by decades. Because code has never been the hard part of "software as a business ". LLMs have driven this point home. Code has never been cheaper. Business has never been harder.
> Being conductor doesn't take the least skill, it takes the most.
I agree with the gist of your comment, but I have to push back on the above statement. Conducting an orchestra is a different skillset than playing virtuoso violin, but it is not more difficult or more important. Its just different. The same applies to any leadership or management position. A very skilled orchestra can in even hide the fact that the conductor is a bit crap. Same with a company or sports team performing so well that they overcome the weaknesses of a lackluster manager. Even though they will still often get the credit.
Conducting an orchestra is not a mechanical activity. In many/most cases, the conductor is doing a live mix of the piece. They control the tempo of the whole orchestea, the volume and accent of different sections and players. They cue in percussion and embellishments. A conductor must know and fully understand the entire score being played. That's upward of a dozen musical threads peing played by 20, 30 people all at once. A conductor's job is to hear each one of these threads individually and simultaneously to shape the music into the final performance they want.
If a conductor's job can be reduced to a metronome, why hasn't it? I've had a credit card sized metronome in my instrument case for 15 years. Most professional musicians carry metronomes. We've had perfectly accurate metronomes for something like 500 years, so why is "conductor" a profession at all?
If you're talking about the original vibe coding, sure.
But there are many ways to apply LLMs in the development flow.
Only specifying features broadly is like a product manager might is definitely highly luck dependent wrt how buggy it will turn out.
But understanding the feature and determining what needs to be done broadly, then ask the LLM to do so and verify after if the resulting change makes sense according to your mental model of the software is definitely not that.
Also, I disagree with your implied message. I frequently struggle to articulate solutions even if I know how they'd work
This should apply to art even more, because art is strongly supported by emotions - and people may know the feeling of the emotion (of the image), but not have an explicit framework for it yet
People are trying to use Vibe Engineering for when you know what needs to be done and how, but are using an LLM as a tool to write the code faster and more efficiently.
The OG definition of Vibe Coding is just playing a client who wants $thing, but doesn't need how to write a line of code.
> LLMs have made the musician part automated. They'll play whatever you want
I like your metaphor even as someone who can be a bit skeptical of the overly broad promises of LLM’s/AI. But I do think this statement is too generous. It implies way too much actual musical ability. It also means that everything I can imagine musically is possible which it just isn’t, as there are limitations just like with real musicians.
If we want to really make the metaphor work, it’s an orchestra full of very informed people who have read a lot about music and have an idea of what their instrument should sound like and can even make whatever they’re holding sound like the appropriate instrument most of the time sort of. With our direction, our “conducting,” their success goes up.
But ultimately: they aren’t real musicians, they aren’t holding the right instruments, and they haven’t actually been taught how to read music. They are just often good at sort of making it work in a way that approximates what we want.
Yes, I agree, the musicians aren't mystros. And their technique could use improvement.
But I think the analogy holds (from an output point of view), the musicians will continue to improve, and some sections play better than others. The overall effect is "pleasing" although perhaps not concert quality.
I agree, and the corollary of this would be that the most senior engineers (who might be at a staff/principal level at a given company) who have the most amount of domain knowledge, deep understanding of various software architectures, and a product/customer oriented mindset may stand to benefit the most from AI-assisted coding, despite some narratives being peddled around by executives that they could do without senior engineers.
Unfortunately, for junior engineers the CS path has likely become more arduous, and we'd probably see something more of a doctor-like career path for CS students, where they specialize to obtain deeper architectural knowledge, before receiving employment.
One likely impact of LLM coding is a huge increase in the amount of custom software as it will become cheaper. That could lead to more work, not less, just with a different skill set.
True. The market for "coders" will likely go down. The market for developers will remain the same (which means go up, the market for developers has always gone up.)
This "orchestration" software is about people trying to increase productivity by running many instances of a coding agent on the same project, without stepping on each other too much. It doesn't seem to be fully baked yet. A "shared nothing" architecture where you work have each instance work on a distinct project seems simpler if you want to spin more plates.
Conductor of an orchestra and current skillet of managing a coding agent feels intuitive to me which addresses understanding the differences in management and skill set. Great analogy.
So then why did MIDI not replace musicians and conductors many decades ago? Why do we even bother thinking in terms of sheet music, or programs in terms of code?
It kinda sorta did. Decades ago, all music was played by live players. Today, there are lots of albums, lots of background music on television, radio, etc., that is made mostly or entirely using MIDI-controlled virtual instruments. No longer do you need to book an actual chamber orchestra for a little 30-second spot on some cooking show.
So those musicians are no longer getting booked for that bit of music. Instead, one person produces it in their home studio. But, there’s now an industry for creating software tools that support that workflow, and there are a lot more opportunities for such music than there used to be. The amount of music used in background spots on television is astounding.
Things changed. Some jobs diminished (studio players?) or went away altogether (music copyists?). But new work came into existence.
Yeah my point was that there's not much existing software within a business that's the equivalent of an ad jingle, unless you really split hairs and start counting excel macros or something.
Will there be new software like that? Maybe, but you'll never hear about it. Not only because it's throwaway code, but because the best interface is probably no code at all. The chatbot will instead spin up a VM behind the scenes and never even show the code it generated unless you dig for it.
On the other hand, if there is budget available, like on real movies and bigger television projects, real musicians are still used. And across the board, except for musical styles that explicitly call for electronic sounds, most people agree that using live players would be preferred if only they had the time and money.
I wonder if there’s any parallel to that in software?
I think the equivalent to "live players" are frontend app devs.
It's a deeply unpopular opinion around here, but if a human has to interact with anything that's where most of the effort and budget is going to go. They're still the "rock stars".
That skill set is not merely writing code. It's more about collaboration with all the stakeholders and making a ton of deliberate decisions and compromises. It doesn't matter how "good" an LLM is at writing code for the web. That's subjective, and that's my point. We've had all kinds of no-code solutions for a very long time.
An experienced frontend dev is necessary when the project isn't just for other devs or internal use.
I think the benefits of "low fat" may have been dulled by how literally people took that message, and what companies replaced the fat with.
Most available "low fat" products compensated by adding sugar. Lots of sugar. That way it still tastes nice, but its healthy right?
Just like fruit juice with "no added sugar" (concentration via evaporation doesn't count) is a healthy alternative to soda right?
In truth your body is perfectly happy converting sugar to weight, with the bonus that it messes up the insulin cycle.
At a fundamental level consuming more calories than you burn makes you gain weight. Reducing refined sugar is the simplest way to reduce calories (and solves other health issues.) Reducing carbohydrates is next (since carbs are just sugar, but take a bit longer to digest). The more unprocessed the carb the better.
Reducing fat (for some, by a lot) is next (although reduce not eliminate. )
Both sides want to blame the other. But the current pendulum is very much on the "too much sugar/ carbs" side of things.
Agreed, this is a big part of the problem. The average person doesn't have anything resembling a coherent mental model of nutrition, and vague conflicting nutritional advice only adds to the confusion. The average person doesn't even know what a carb is, much less understand the biochemistry of how their body processes one.
Does "reduce fat consumption" mean a proportional reduction (i.e. increase carb/protein consumption) or an absolute reduction (i.e. decrease overall caloric intake)? In either case, what macros and level of caloric intake relative to TDEE are the assumed starting point? Who knows, but the net effect has been multiple generations hooked on absurd concentrations of sugar and UPFs.
The timing and pricing of investor selling is different to residents selling.
Residents sell (mostly) for reasons other than profit. They might be moving up, or moving away, or whatever. There's some pressure to "get it done" so they can move on. They can't really afford to "time" the market.
For investors there's much more "buy in the down, sell in the up". Except that it's been going up for a while, so there's no motivation to sell at all. It would be uncommon for them to accept a loss. Even unoccupied it's (mostly) better to hold rather than sell at a loss.
As mentioned elsewhere, overall market penetration by investors differs wildly by market, and segment. So 3% overall might sound low, but 20% of a dwelling type in a specific market is plenty to alter market forces.
I say this as someone who has owned property as an individual, and also worked in a business that invested in property.
Returns are better on the lower end of the market, and demand for rent there is higher. Which is why most residential investment is at the bottom end, not the top end.
In most markets I'm guessing an 800k house is at the higher end of the market.
That aside, housing portfolios always plan for a certain amount of unoccupied space. It's built into the model. (That's partly why small investors who own 1 or 2 properties get hit harder by this.)
Equally, even if the house is empty, there's usually some capital gain going on.
Investing in property is a long-term investment. The cost of buying, or selling is very high. So it's about getting quality units, in the right market space, and then leveraging that for a decade or more.
Yes there are lemons. And yes they'll get sold, perhaps at a loss. But being unoccupied for a bit doesn't make it a lemon, and being unoccupied won't necessarily trigger a sale.
Institutional investors are much more experienced and thus also a lot more likely to not buy lemons in the first place. Most "mom and dad with a second property" investors either inherited a place, kept an earlier property they lived in, or bought another property in their own neighborhood. They're typically gonna make some mistakes along the way.
Not sure why the downvotes, it's a coherent post, and certainly there is a perception that food, and particularly beef, is a partisan issue.
Of course Democrats haven't actually taken any steps to penalize beef farming or consumption. But that doesn't stop Republicans claiming they want to. And if beef consumption drops, well, we just get the (Republican) health dept to recommend it.
I would agree that comments like "sunset beef production" intrinsically sounds bad to those who eat beef. But farmers farm profit, so as long as people buy it, farmers will farm it. (And at least some proportion of land used for beef farming is unsuitable for anything else.)
>> But from now on, I'm either gonna be a successful founder, or I'm not. And if I'm not, I'll have to deal with having broken with the expectations that people had of me.
Don't worry, they expected you to fail. They hoped you'd succeed, but expected failure. Statistically most businesses fail, and failure rates are faster when your customers are VCs not users.
I say this as encouragement, not criticism. Accepting that failure is (by far) the most likely outcome is both realistic and freeing. The anxiety of failure is gone.
Frankly, your lack of marketing experience would worry me. Without the ability to reach users (much less customers) how can you do anything but fail? New businesses are not bounded by technical ability (especially in the age of AI) they are bounded by Marketing.
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