The Hype on AI Coding:

Several articles lately are fueling the hype cycle for “AI will be coding all the things”, none of which seem to have captured as much attention as this interview with the Y Combinator CEO:

I read this as “For about a quarter of the current cohort of YC startups, 95% of the code was written [using a code editor that used an LLM to do auto-completion].” Which sounds far less impressive than what the press is making it out to be. Of course, we don’t know if that’s exactly what he meant, but it’s by far the most plausible thing I can think of.

It doesn’t really matter, though, as far as I’m concerned. How fast you write your code is no measure of quality or competency. Here’s the question:

According to this article, slightly more than half of YC Companies are still alive after 10 years (and that chart has statistics for how many companies are still going as a function of when they started). So the question is: Are the companies in this batch of YC startups more or less likely to succeed? That’s the metric - and I would guess it will be lower. I’m really curious to see how it turns out.

Because this is how it seems to be going so far:

Sigh, I should have put that in the “Reality” section, but I couldn’t resist having the two YCombinator articles back-to-back. On with the Hype section…

This article strikes me as less about if AI can code and more about Amazon’s attitude toward its employees. It’s just more evidence for the video I did last week about Amazon and their Bossware:

And the next car in this week’s Hype Train:

If you don’t know, AngelList is all about funding early stage companies, and this comment was made on an episode of the Equity Podcast - which is about investing. I have no doubt that, from the point of view of an investor, you only care about (and hear about) AI companies - because that’s where all the hype is. But most of the reposts I’ve seen of that quote have left out the “with respect to investing” context.

The Reality of AI Coding:

This article is probably the closest I’ve seen to the way I feel about the issue, and I appreciate it and wish more people would read it:

This is also a good take on the limitations of AI - from a perspective I hadn’t really considered that’s more about OpenAI’s claims of “PhD-level agents”:

I’ve talked a lot about how AI is good for repeating things that it already memorized, but bad at judgement and bad at things that it hasn’t seen a lot of examples of. And this is another facet of that issue. Speaking of which:

The pull quote:

“[I]f we can’t write code to define what we want, we can’t use [inference-time] search,” he said. “For something like general language interaction, we can’t do this […] It’s generally not a great approach to actually solving most problems.”

And this article:

Is a really interesting look at “the alignment problem” (I hate that phrase so much).

Pull quote here is:

[N]one of the models was consistent in its preferences. Depending on how prompts were worded and framed, they adopted wildly different viewpoints.

And speaking of viewpoints changing based on prompts:

I think this wording of “‘anxiety’ in LLMs” is Anthropomorphized crap, and a phrasing like “When given a prompt containing lots of anxiety-related words, LLMs are likely to respond with words that are also anxiety-related” would be far more accurate. But it’s more fuel on the fire for the presumption that AIs have no consistent judgement or emotional state.

And on a couple of Final Channel-Related notes:

Want to talk Software As A Service with me?

First, as I mentioned in my last couple of videos, I’m currently thinking that the best way I can provide value to the development community right now, with all the uncertainty and lay-offs and bossware apparently on the way, is to help developers get out of being isolated in dev-only teams to work on their own projects (probably Software-As-A-Service project, since those are easiest to get up and running), which I believe will make them much better developers. Toward that end, I’m working on gathering information from folks about how I might best do that. So if you are:

• A Software Developer with a few years of experience already, and

• Are motivated to build your own product (probably a Software As A Service), and

• You are located in the U.S. and

• You think it is likely that you have the financial ability to work on a project for a few months before you start seeing revenue from it, then

I’d love to chat with you about what your concerns are about starting your own thing, what resources you think you might be lacking, and how I might be able to help.

You can book an appointment on my calendar here: https://iob.fyi/ssii_a 

Note for those of you that are not in the U.S.: I don’t hate you or anything, I just don’t know anything about starting a business (or even being in business) outside the US, so I’m afraid that, in my ignorance, I might recommend something that has worked for me in the US but is horrible advice in another country or market. And that means that, at least for the time being, I’m focusing on teaching what I know, and what I have experience doing. Hopefully there aren’t any hard feelings, and I hope to be able to expand my scope in the future.

Note to those of you with fewer than 5 or so years of experience: I don’t hate you either, but I’m trying to avoid a situation where I’m having to teach programming as well as teaching SaaS - at least for this set of interviews. We’ll see what the landscape looks like after I’ve talked to more people who match the criteria above. Again, hopefully there aren’t any hard feelings, and I hope to be able to expand my scope in the future.

And Lastly, the End of an Era:

I guess it had to happen sometime. ;-(

Rest assured, though, I have no intention of changing my channel branding any time soon.

Thanks for reading.