Thanks for sharing. I appreciated getting different perspectives. I come down on ultimately this is lying and I don't see how lying to oneself is going to be helpful.
But to push the analogy a bit. If you are rowing on a lake with motorboats, it is a totally different experience. Noisy, constant wake. We are part of an ecosystem, not isolated.
Growing up, the lakes in New England were filled with sailboats. There were sailing races. Now, its entirely pontoon boats. Not a sailboat to be found.
The lake is not however yours to dictate how others will move along. Imagine if the horse owners decided in such an analogy not to allow cars on the road because they noisy and "totally different experience".
You want a pre-AI experience? Feel free to code without it. It's definitely still doable.
nah. tell him, you're in a race. others are using motorboats. the last to reach the finish line loses their salary.
that's a better analogy, or at least what a lot of people think the analogy is.
From my experience in some large tech firms, you could easily cut 20% of the workers and not see much impact. There is so much bloat, process-people, meetings-people, etc... Even if the cuts aren't from AI, execs will use AI as a reason to make these cuts.
Yep - IME the trick is that fixing a bloated company is 2 parts: laying off bloat, and fixing the bad processes / restructuring the company to not need so much bloat in the first place.
I’ve worked at a company that pulled the layoff lever a lot but never did the hard work of investing in fixing the broken stuff… the layoffs actually just made everything worse.
If you have a team whose job is to put duct tape on the widget when it leaks, and you lay off most of that team without fixing the widget, your leak gets worse because you have fewer people with duct tape.
What you need is find people who can fix the widget, then fire all the duct tape people.
The duct tape people are generally drowning under all the work they're doing, and they'd be fine to keep doing other productive stuff.
There's always going to be duct tape stuff around, and you don't want the people who can actually fix widgets to wind up running around with their hair on fire applying duct tape to keep it running without any time to fix widgets.
And when there's too much duct tape jobs going around the widget fixers may take a look at it all and decide they don't get want to get stuck with applying duct tape once all the duct tape appliers are fired, so they just skip to some other job.
Every big company I’ve worked for has an immense about of bloat. Whole departments that exist just because someone wanted it to exist at some point in time.
The health of an organization is often linked in their ability to fire people.
Thank you for sharing this. I found some good articles in what you shared. The long lists of places to post are not that helpful. I've poured through 100 of them in the past and only the top 20 make a difference, you might want to update the list to prioritize. I tend to point Claude Code or Codex at these lists, have them evaluate the scores of the sites and give me a priority list.
This is not my experience either. If you put the work in upfront to plan the feature, write the test cases, and then loop until they pass... you can build a lot of high quality software quickly. The difference between a junior engineer using it and a great architect using it is significant. I think of it as an amplifier.
> If you put the work in upfront to plan the feature, write the test cases, and then loop until they pass...
it can be exhausting and time consuming front-loading things so deeply though; sometimes i feel like i would have been faster cutting all that out and doing it myself because in the doing you discover a lot of missing context (in the spec) anyways...
For me, the beauty of Lego was just a huge bin of interconnectable parts that I used to make whatever my imagination came up with. For my kids, Lego is pre-built model airplane set that they build one time and then display. I liked my Lego better :)
From experience there's a motivation, almost a compulsion, to follow the instructions to build the cool thing. Then... they sit there, those bricks never taken apart.
That compulsion doesn't seem present in freeform building, and there's been zero interest in it in our household. I know that's not true for all, but it seems like a lost art. Maybe it's because the IP sets show how but not the why it's constructed in a certain way, so given a bag of Lego most wouldn't know the process of creating something they can see in their minds eye within the constraints of the available bricks.
When I was a kid and I got a new set, I would build it according to the instructions, play with it, and then disassemble it and sort it into my brick collection. Occasionally I would get the instructions back out and re-build it, and other times I would kitbash and make random cool stuff.
My parents still have all my Legos from the 90s, including the instructions, and I've been able to rebuild a bunch of the space ships with translucent neon accents. It's pretty sweet and my kids love it.
Lego used to encourage building new things by putting alternate builds on the back of the box, but intentionally not giving you the instructions. Now they do 3-in-1 for certain sets instead, which misses the point of that.
Not really. Even LEGO Classic has way too many different colors (and only a few bricks of each), and too many weird shapes. Even if you buy a lot of it, it's hard to make your own designs that actually look nice (as in, not having that one incorrectly-colored brick in that one place, and so on).
I for the love of God can't comprehend why LEGO Classic has 4 shades of blue. It makes everything worse.
Maybe Lego needs to manufacture sets that are just "collections of bricks". In fact, I think they did that at least for a while. I know my past self would have loved to have a few sets that when put together would provide the kinds and variety of pieces used in books such as The Lego Play Book.
They still do that. I can go to the store right this very moment and get a bin of bricks. There's no problem here: people who want designed sets can get those, and people who want just bricks to use as building material can get those.
I'm excited about Agents helping many tiny teams succeed. There has been hype around the "who will be the first solo founder to a billion" but I am hoping for many small teams to succeed and I think this is the more interesting story.
I agree its in the 2-7 person range.
The challenge for those teams is distribution. They will crush at building, but I'm not sure how they can crack distribution. Some will, but maybe there is a way to help thousands of small teams distribute.
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