MattGaiser

A VC backed tech is focused on ideas that can go to a billion. A billion dollar idea was always worth pursuing. There is no reason that AI would result in significantly more of these ideas.

AI really enables all sorts of tiny stuff that would never have been worth building and for starters, is not really worth maretking. I have a dozen tiny pieces of software that are used by myself or maybe up to 10 people that that I don't push around or market or release in any meaningful way.

I built a tool to make HTML driven PowerPoints. Claude is great at beautiful HTML, so why not just do the slides as HTML convert them to images? An absurd project before given that HTML used to be work to write, but it is no longer work, making it a great slide design language.

I sell flight deals as a side hustle. Built an automated pipeline so I am just dropping in the link.

I built a tool for a PM friend to let Claude Code automatically sync all his meetings and let him query his transcripts for action items and give him advice on what to do about certain things. Nobody else uses that.

I built another tool for a PM friend that is basically AI for product managers who want something more structured than Claude Code and don't want to handroll their stuff. He and a few others love it, but there's been no attempt to sell it or anything.

I built an accreditation management system for a university here in Canada with a friend. We could try and sell it, but we have no idea how to do that really, haha, so it ended up being a one off to replace a more expensive SaaS subscription.

I have a custom event discovery calendar where I have a database and AI try to fill in empty spaces where I am interested in doing stuff. Again, no users other than me, but great for me.

> What do you think the real bottleneck is now? Ideas, distribution, taste, persistence; or something else?

Probably someone to take it to market. I am sure you could find customers for some of the things I have or at least users, but idk how to do any of that.

The real bottleneck to me seems like you mostly gave superpowers to the engineers, but none to the salespeople. Nor did you give the engineers problem discovery and go to market superpowers, so lots is getting built but nobody is really pushing it out there.

Are you a single agent user?

At least in my case, flow is gone. It’s all context switching now.

It would be up to you. These people who are lonely otherwise have lives.

You would be free to decide, instead of having it being biologically required that you socialize.

> If they implement something with a not-so-great approach, they'll keep adding workarounds or redundant code every time they run into limitations later.

Are you using plan mode? I used to experience the do a poor approach and dig issue, but with planning that seems to have gone away?

You would need to expand your capacity to find and define the work. I imagine that would be a major challenge.

Is there a reason you don’t use a hook to make all code pass your linters before you look at it?

I can see someone who is very particular about their way being the right way having issues with it. I’m very much the kind of person who believes that if I can’t write a failing test, I don’t have a very serious case. A lot of devs aren’t like that.

The writing with the 5 models feels a lot less human. It is a vibe, but a common one.

The typos are a bit different, but that’s one reason I hate the command line as a human.

You want me to hand type a file name? I’ll flip a letter or skip one!

I think there will be more people working in software than there are today, but they will not be the same people.

People who struggle with the product side will be pushed out.

Eh, it can get a lot worse. The horrendous quality of government IT in much of Asia for example.

I imagine a lot has to do with motivation. Canada has UXO that it doesn't clean up as land is abundant.

> To this day I walk into the office each morning thinking today may be the day I get laid off. My wife doesn't think it's a healthy mentality, but I'm not sure I know another path of life.

Why? It lets you plan your actions accordingly.

Even if they are right about quality, people on here vastly overstate the value of quality. From socks to dishwashers to airfares, slop is a valid product as long as it is cheap. Security from a business perspective has been proven not quite optional, but it is hardly catastrophic if it fails.

> with the fact that humans are a cooperative species and survive the best when they are cooperating.

I dispute that this is a fact. Maybe within a small group, but startups shouldn't be possible if masses of more cooperating people led to better outcomes. A large company should always win there and that does not happen.

> What is the point of organizing socially if not for the benefit of all society members?

We don't come anywhere close to this on a global scale. Most countries aren't this way on a national scale.

Up until last year they owned Helly Hansen. That would be my bet for the source of the data. Also own a bunch of product brands.

He misunderstands what Canadian Tire is. It is a pretty large conglomerate of businesses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Tire

One of the well defined failure modes for AI agents/models is "laziness." Yes, models can be "lazy" and that is an actual term used when reviewing them.

I am not sure if we know why really, but they are that way and you need to explicitly prompt around it.

> We pay huge communication/synchronization costs to eek out mild speed ups on projects by adding teams of people.

I am surprised at how little this is discussed and how little urgency there is in fixing this if you still want teams to be as useful in the future.

Your standard agile ceremonies were always kind of silly, but it can now take more time to groom work than to do it. I can plausibly spend more time scoring and scoping work (especially trivial work) than doing the work.

Trying to blackmail cops is incredibly poor judgement.

> A big part of the story, as she tells it, is that American kids used to be hungrier at mealtimes

This is putting it extremely mildly. There are entire groups of nutritional health concerns that virtually nobody knows of today that were common at the turn of the 20th century. Rickets, Pellagra, Goitre, Xerophthalmia, etc.

All of these are caused by poor nutrition. Children back then were much smaller, again, due to lack of food and poor nutrition. During the world wars, double digit percentages of recruits were rejected due to being malnourished.

> Children in the 19th century happily consumed wild plants and organ meats. What happened?

They were starving.

It depends on the field, but it would be sufficient to demonstrate interest that someone is willing to buy the product.

Sales or money. Bring in customers or investors.

Does it matter?

"Security" and "performance" have been regular HN buzzwords for why some practice is a problem and the market has consistently shown that it doesn't value those that much.

Yeah, I would be curious if there is anyone out there paying for Teams. Teams wins as Teams is free with your other Office stuff.

Anecdotally, all the non-technical people I know are adapting fine to the console. You don’t need to know how bash commands work to use it as you are just approving commands, not writing them.

Some companies swear by this. CP Rail is notorious for training everyone to drive a train.

This is ridiculous. There are numerous multi billion dollar software companies with customers less than half that age.

> It's a common sign of snake oil when something claims to be the cure for a ton of completely unrelated conditions.

Except this is coming from the opposite direction. The drug is being noticed to seemingly cure unrelated conditions. The vendor is not selling it as that.