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Comment by gwbas1c | Hacker News Reader

I would take this with a grain of salt.

Recently I read about a company (nameless for reasons that will become clear) that was giving a small team unlimited tokens to work on a very ambitious project. (IE, they'll probably spend a few million on tokens.)

Here's the thing: I once worked with the (nameless) exec who was named and interviewed in the article. (And I have a significant amount of respect for this exec.) The problem is, the exec (when I worked with them) significantly misinterpreted the mobile trend and nearly killed the company jumping on the mobile bandwagon. (We had a desktop product that only needed a simple companion mobile app. This was painfully obvious at the time.) This exec is blindly jumping on another bandwagon again, wasting money that might be better spent elsewhere.

Why do I say this? I question if a lot of big AI spenders are really getting value from what they're doing with AI, or is it just for show?

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Friction is good. I've been in this for fifteen years, and I can't name a company whose product would have been better if they somehow had a magic wand to instantly implement even half of those 5 years, 600 tickets deep backlogs.

> Friction is good.

The nameless exec said that to me the last time we met, roughly a week before they were pushed out; precisely for that belief. (And at first I suspected you were the exec.)

And yes, the product that I worked on did have a ~600 ticket deep backlog, and plowing through it wouldn't have made the product better. At the time, the product was in a steady growth phase, where addressing customer pain points was just as important as building features.

Where the exec goofed (by jumping on the mobile bandwagon) was misunderstanding disruption, market needs, and how mobile would effect us. Ultimately, we were a "bolt-on" accessory, and the incumbents in our industry slowly pushed us out until our niche, (which had nothing to do with mobile) was our core differentiating feature.

Basically, the issue was allocation of resources. Too much were put into mobile, not enough into building features where we could compete against the products we were "bolting on to," and not enough into addressing customer pain points. The "friction is good" approach also severely hurt us, because too much time was wasted haggling instead of doing. (I specifically told the exec, the last time we met, it felt like he was running the air conditioner and heater at the same time.)

This exec is making a similar mistake by basically giving a small team unlimited tokens, instead of understanding how other players in the industry tackle these same problems with AI. It's not that their overall idea is bad, it's that they are probably starving the rest of the business on an unproven experiment / poorly chosen risk.

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