It feels like someone asked an AI to read a year of output from a ruby link roundup newsletter and then had it write a report: many facts, minimal synthesis, and little-to-no useful opinion/summary.
I'm a big fan of this genre of "a person got rich in tech and spent their wealth making an unrelated thing they wanted to exist in the world, untethered from the need to be profitable or self-sustaining."
See also, Jamie Zawinski's DNA Lounge[0] in San Francisco
> if you have any code you actually care about I would watch them like a hawk, in a nice large IDE on the side.
This is about where I'm at. I love pure claude code for code I don't care about, but for anything I'm working on with other people I need to audit the results - which I much prefer to do in an IDE.
Yeah, this feels right on the cusp of being interesting. I think that, being charitable, it could be interesting if it turns out to be successful in hiring and coordinating several people and physical assets over a long time horizon. For example, it'd be pretty cool if it could:
1. Do some research (as it's already done)
2. Rent the land and hire someone to grow the corn
3. Hire someone to harvest it, transport it, and store it
4. Manage to sell it
Doing #1 isn't terribly exciting - it's well established that AIs are pretty good at replacing an hour of googling - but if it could run a whole business process like this, that'd be neat.
Is that actually growing corn with AI though? Seems to me that a human planted the corn, thinned it, weeded it, harvested it, and stored it. What did AI do in that process? Send an email?
It is trying to take over the job of the farmer. Planting, harvesting, etc. is the job of a farmhand (or custom operator). Everyone is working to try to automate the farmhand out of a job, but the novelty here is the thinking that it is actually the farmer who is easiest to automate away.
But,
"I will buy fucking land with an API via my terminal"
Who has multiple millions of dollars to drop on an experiment like that?
> [Seth is using AI to try] to take over the job of the farmer. Planting, harvesting, etc. is the job of a farmhand (or custom operator).
Ok then Seth is missing the point of the challenge: Take over the role of the farmhand.
> Everyone is working to try to automate the farmhand out of a job, but the novelty here is the thinking that it is actually the farmer who is easiest to automate away.
Everyone knows this. There is nothing novel here. Desk jockeys who just drive computers all day (the Farmer in this example) are _far_ easier to automate away than the hands-on workers (the farmhand). That’s why it would be truly revolutionary to replace the farmhand.
Or, said another way: Anything about growing corn that is “hands on” is hard to automate, all the easy to automate stuff has already been done. And no, driving a mouse or a web browser doesn’t count as “hands on”.
> all the easy to automate stuff has already been done.
To be fair, all the stuff that hasn't been automated away is the same in all cases, farmer and farmhand alike: Monitoring to make sure the computer systems don't screw up.
The bet here is that LLMs are past the "needs monitoring" stage and can buy a multi-million dollar farm, along with everything else, without oversight and Seth won't be upset about its choices in the end. Which, in fairness, is a more practical (at least less risky form a liability point of view) bet than betting that a multi-million dollar X9 without an operator won't end up running over a person and later upside-down in the ditch.
He may have many millions to spend on an experiment, but to truly put things to the test would require way more than that. Everyone has a limit. An MVP is a reasonable start. v2 can try to take the concept further.
This article makes a number of the standard arguments for hiring juniors and a couple new ones:
- Companies should hire juniors [at their own perceived detriment] to improve the overall industry
- Hire juniors because strong companies are resilient to junior mistakes [rather than hiring seniors and also becoming resilient]
- Juniors learning fast inspires others
- Juniors will teach your seniors how to use AI
Perhaps you can see why most companies don't find these terribly compelling.
Personally, I suspect we're going to have to wait for capitalism to fix this. Senior engineers will age out and the supply will drop. This will increase the cost of seniors until low-cost juniors start to look like a better option to the median hiring manager.
This post was so in-line with her writing that I was really expecting it to turn into an ad for Honeycomb at the end. I was pretty surprised with it turned out the author was unaffiliated!
> Selling to businesses is very easy. You go to a business and you say "hey, you like making money?" And the business will say "why yes, I do like making money" and you will say "great, I can help you make more money.
This is so wrong it hurts. You'd be amazed at how often "I will save you $X, guaranteed, or your money back" is a non-starter when selling to companies.
I've spent a career very slowly gaining respect for enterprise sales people - going from "Ugh, sales people are all snakeoil salesmen" to "I can't believe what they do is even possible, much less regularly done" over about 20 years.
Selling software to large organizations involves finding a champion within the org, then figuring out the power structure within the org via an impressive sort of kremlinology. You have to figure out who loves your product in the org, who hates it, who can make the buying decision, whose approval is needed, who's handling the details of the contract, and so on. You need to understand the constellation of people across engineering, procurement, legal, leadership, and finance – and then understand the incentive structures for each.
Then you have to actually operate this whole complex political machine to get them to buy something. Even if it's self-evidently in the interest of the whole organization to do so, it's not an easy thing to do.
Anyway, all that to say: "b2b sales are easy" is... naive... to say the least.
I've been watching this process with a keen eye as a technical consultant, and one thing I've learnt is that naive models of large organisations as Profit=Revenue-Costs is totally inadequate for enterprise sales. Yes, it is true that saving money anywhere will improve profits, but you can only sell that to an individual who's personal KPI needles move because of this! If the cost is in dept X but the profit is recorded in dept Y, then don't bother. You won't get a sale, even if it's tens of millions of dollars of saved costs or increased revenue. At best, you can find their common manager and try to sell it to that person, but even that has pits of failure you can all too easily fall into.
Yes. But that's like saying "a racecar would gain a competitive advantage by being faster."
Getting your internal structures right and aligning your incentives is one of the main challenges of building and running a large company! If it were easy, you wouldn't see nearly so many massively-inefficient corporate giants. :)
A big part of that is “I will save you X” is a non-starter. That is not making the business more money. If you have something that will actually make the business more money then they will go “Great if I pay you twice as much will it make me 2X?” and if the answer is yes, that will be a sale every time.
Given how much some companies spend on their cloud services bills without batting an eye, I definitely believe this. They care about making more money, not so much about spending less, even though both are ways to increase profits.
yes, and I think one big reason enterprise might not buy your product even if it is guaranteed to make/save $X is $ is often NOT most important thing to the people make buying decision, specially when it is not your own money to save or gain
This is very true. Look no farther than the perennial problem of department heads spending all their budget to keep their budget. Decision makers rarely care about saving money in isolation.
I might be overstating it, but here's what I see at my company. "Sell" is very different in all of these situations.
- Sell to the champion.
- Sell to the rest of the org.
- Sell to procurement.
- Sell to the implementation project team.
- Sell to the users and get adoption up.
Then constantly demonstrate that you're providing value in whatever terms that department / org thinks is valuable that year.
This is what I’ve seen; it’s hard work, and if you fail to make any one of those sales, it can all fall apart. And you didn’t even mention getting your foot in the door in the first place. I used to chat with our business development guy in the lunchroom. He spent hours on the phone every day getting told no. It took a ton of work just to get from “no” to “maybe later,” and that’s when they didn’t just hang up in him. I think he understood what made our company tick better than anybody else, better than the CEO.
> going from "Ugh, sales people are all snakeoil salesmen" to "I can't believe what they do is even possible, much less regularly done" over about 20 years.
I mean, it still sounds like snake oil salesmen. It's just that that's what it takes these days to even get noticed (let alone make a pitch). rubbing hands trumps a quality product 99% of the time.
Can confirm. At one point in my career (after reflection on the situation) I realized I had been made a champion by a subsidiary of IBM for one of their products. I found myself in some really bizarre meetings with our execs and their executive sales people that left me feeling like a puppet that was made to tell our CEO that we needed this. They really took us apart, It was all very slimy.
This is one of my next learning goals: getting a better feel for which models to use when. "100% claude 4 Sonnet" worked pretty well, but I want to keep pushing myself out of local maxima.
