vanuatu

+1

its surprising to HN tech crowd but a well implemented support agent gets higher reviews and successful resolutions than humans

the bulk of the context engineering for users of these ai support platforms is done in the platform

and the amount of context needed to automate f500 is non trivial, plus you usually cant use reasoning because latency would blow up and you get escalated on

if this was so easy as you claim theres many millions for you to be made selling it to enterprises, but you wont

fwiw i heard Fin and Agentforce frequently lost to deca and sierra, their product / team / funding weren't as good

Seems like a catchup play by Marc

the whole value prop of these companies is they can build you agents that perform actions (e.g process refunds, live troubleshooting, claims etc) without being manipulated

the company that implemented it (e.g fin) is liable, which is why customers pay for them

sierra is the most popular private support tool (16B)

this is very bullish for decagon and sierra

I wouldnt be surprised if the big labs become semi-nationalized commodities a la electricity / railroads due to national security, with the best models gatekept from outsiders trying to distill it

And I'm generally bearish on Chinese models catching up at this point, American labs are pulling away especially with mythos-tier models, and early signs of RSI (not to mention the benchmaxxing going on from the chinese labs). If mythos allows users to execute agentic cybersecurity exploits at scale then the right thing to do is to guard access until you find a way to guardrail against it, which may be impossible

thats interesting, the HMs where I work love hiring juniors (who pass the bar) because they are so AI-native

the more experienced engineers can help with setting guardrails and mentorship, but the juniors come unconstrained by priors on how to use ai in creative ways to solve all sorts of business problems.

hmm i dont think any new grad is an expert and knows what they're doing (if im understanding you right)

but the skills we used to look for in new grads are shifting as coding agents make execution easy, a new grad with good business sense is really valuable

enterprise agreements with model providers let you opt out of training

highly dependant on school ofc

i went to a top cs school and loved it, it raised the ceiling of what i thought was even possible, coming from a country where cs was not seen as an interesting or desirable job at the time

what do you mean? we're hiring new grads because we think they will make the company money. most of our hires are from top schools so they're already proven to be smart

right now most resumes are zero signal because any new grad can whip up an impressive sounding project using ai with zero paying users. but knowing what to build, having good product sense and taste, talking to customers, iterating and not giving up are much more desirable skills

youd be surprised how many new grads with capital and free time have zero business skills

Im quite bullish on CS degrees, they equip you with a network and the general "vibe" of being in a common environment with other smart passionate kids that push you to challenge yourself

also right now nothing is higher signal than a new grad who built a product with actual paying users

i know someone who works on nuclear power plants that uses codex

obviously you need to review it

applied ai company revenues are semi public

some are even profitable!

everything else is free alpha, do with that what you want

ai companies know how to use the tools internally, not surprising

there are no citations yet because this is going on behind closed doors, if you know you know. we'll start seeing it in the financials of companies soon. alternatively you can look at the revenue growth of applied ai companies

your personal experience is clearly in the techie bubble

ai is more than delivering features fast (thats probably one of the lowest priorities for companies)

right now its a race to automate work, especially back office. companies already are seeing 10M+ in savings and revenue growth and we're barely starting. workflows in sales, outbound, gtm, marketing, eng, operations, compliance, kyc etc

consumer is a different beast, consumers want convenience which has already been hyperoptimized and the big consumer cos run on network effs instead of features

i think my point stands

clearly we were able to keep making improvements! the ceiling is nowhere near reached yet

That supports my point right?

Top devs make more than before

that kind of implies theres a ton of room for progress right?

imagine if we got new shit that worked better

curious as to why

most top swe comp comes from equity in the company, which benefits from productivity

not only that but the leveraged nature of swe means top performers are in perpetual shortage and low performers contribute negative productivity

anecdotally weve seen comp rise as the best candidates have multiple competing offers as well as the freedom to start their own business

It's even better than accounting or lawyers, because good software engineers can build incredible businesses from scratch instead of being tied to the number of businesses that exist

SWEs are more leveraged than ever and we've seen comp drastically rise for top performers

It's unclear whether mobile apps as a segment has a correlation with the elasticity of software in general

In aggregate software comes out of R&D, operations, and labor spend. Good software increases revenue and decreases costs for companies, which grows the economic pie, and frees up more spend and more companies spin up and start spending

A world where we've saturated out software would seem utopian compared to right now

youll be outcompeted by companies that do use it (caveat: effectively)

growth is much more important than profitability

my job rn is just building agents

the hard part about building agents isnt the framework it's discovery, context, traditional engineering, handling the last mile

there are some invariants like the loop, tools, observability, guardrails, monitors etc...

vibe coded landing page

reddit user testimonial

framework is for state machines

why man..

theres plenty of cruising 200k jobs in the us

not so much 0.5-1M jobs unless you got lucky with sbc or are really talented

Yes, there will always be some human bottleneck when it comes to abstract software

i also run loops that comb through slack / github to auto-propose a fix & have another agent auto-review, but you need the human to stamp, and they fail in subtle ways architecturally

even boris says they need people with judgment to manage the agents

i dont write code by hand anymore but shipping something people want is as hard (or maybe harder?) as its ever been