Comment by nlh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nlh | Hacker News Reader

Haven't RTFA (paywall) but an anecdote:

I know a startup founder whose company is going through a bit of a struggle - they hired too many engineers, they haven't gotten product-market fit yet, and they are down to <1 year of runway.

The founder needed to do a layoff (which sucks in every dimension) and made the decision to go all-in on AI-assisted coding. He basically said "if you're not willing to go along, we're going to have to let you go." Many engineers refused and left, and the ones that stayed are committed to giving it a shot with Claude, Codex, etc.

Their runway is now doubled (2 years), they've got a smaller team, and they're going to see if they can throw enough experiments at the wall over the next 18 months to find product-market fit.

If they fail, it's going to be another "bad CEO thought AI could fix his company's problems" story.

But if they succeed....

(Curious what you all would have done in this situation btw...!)

For the people who refused, why?

Not meaning to sound accusatory, just asking. Was it the tools provided that they didn’t like? Ideological reasons not to use AI? Was the CEO being too prescriptive with their day to day?

I guess I find it hard to imagine why someone would dig in so much on this issue that they’d leave a job because of it, but 1) I don’t know the specifics of that situation and 2) I like using AI tooling at work for stuff.

You ask a great question. My sense is that the engineers fell into three camps (as they do here on HN as well):

1) I don’t really like these AI tools I write better code anyway and they just slow me down

2) I like these tools they make me 10% faster but they’re more like spell check / autocomplete for me than life-changing and I don’t want to go all in on agentic coding, etc and I still want to hand write everything, and:

3) I am no longer writing code, I am using AI tools (often in parallel) to write code and I am acting like an engineering manager / PM instead of an IC.

For better or for worse, and there is much to debate about this, I think he wanted just the (3) folks and a handful of (2) folks to try and salvage things otherwise it wasn’t worth the burn :(

Personally I might choose to leave too. I just don't feel like taking responsibility of something iterated with AI. Something I will take the blame when it goes wrong.

This especially so after I have seen someone trying to use AI after I had provided simple and clear manual steps. Instead trying to do something different with very unfitting scenario. Where also the AI really did not understand that the solution would not have even worked.

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