gk1

Not exactly. See: https://www.runlayer.com/watch

There's also Bluerock, as yet another example. I've worked with both companies though I get nothing from mentioning them here. My point is this is a (suddenly) crowded market - perhaps more so than you realized - so you should consider what exactly is different about your product and why that matters, and then make that obvious to prospective buyers.

+1

You're facing competition from both the incumbents who can ship these capabilites to their massive userbase, and emerging startups like Runlayer who are running away with the AI-native segment.

What are you offering that people want yet neither of those classes of solutions offer?

I highly recommend you read this classic post from Patrick McKenzie: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pr...

You are not defined by your chosen software stack: I recently asked via Twitter what young engineers wanted to know about careers. Many asked how to know what programming language or stack to study. It doesn’t matter. There you go.

This is especially true now, since coding agents make it possible to work with any stack.

Exactly right. Co’s like Runlayer are growing like wild exactly for this reason. Without a central control plane MCP is a minefield.

It’s not enough to have unique ideas. You need capital, compute, people, distribution, customers… There’s huge appeal to joining a place that has all those things and lets you pursue your unique ideas without worrying about all that.

If true...

On the one hand: they fooled me.

On the other hand: hey, if the comments are that good, keep going?

Such a good comment from a new account. Please post here more often :)

Was commenting on the quote in particular. It’s just a version of “the future is in your hands” which you can find in one form or another in many graduation speeches. Just seems odd to me to read a cliche line as something cynical.

Ali G’s version of it in his 2004 Harvard commencement speech:

“You lot will become powerful people who can change de future — and you need to, coz de world at de moment iz totally f—ed up.”

Come to think of it… very appropriate today!

That quote reads totally differently to me.

It seems if you already have negative feelings about AI or the speaker, you’re going to interpret their comments as something that reinforces your negative feelings.

AI tools make great team members even better

This is the predominant (public) talking point. And it’s true.

But along with that: when you have effective people becoming even more effective with AI, it becomes glaringly obvious who the INeffective people are. At which point it becomes hard to justify keeping those people around.

(That often includes people who are otherwise effective but aren’t utilizing agents and are therefore losing their edge.)

Seen from another angle: this encourages you to make new friends locally.

And yes, also one more excuse to visit faraway friends.

Interesting that Fin (the spinoff from Intercom) is promoting a different approach on the same day: one agent, one job: https://x.com/eoghan/status/2046974515859595568

On the one hand, I get that it's a Sunday, and the CEO can't just write a mass email without approval from legal or other comms teams

This is not how things work. In a crisis like this there is a war room with all stakeholders present. Doesn’t matter if it’s Sunday or 3am or Christmas.

And for this company specifically, Guillermo is not one to defer to comms or legal.

Shaming like this doesn’t change people’s minds, it just makes them hide their feelings and introduces new or even greater feelings of guilt. The opposite of what you (hopefully) intended.

Why not contribute, then?

Think of some 100x folks you know of. Are they working more or less than before?

Exactly as happened with computer revolution... Expectations raised in line with productivity. In HN parlance, being a 10x engineer just becomes "being an engineer," and "100x engineer" is the new 10x engineer. And from what I can see in myself and others right now, being a 100x of anything, while exhilarating, is also mentally and physically taxing.

What are some striking examples from your experience?

BTW this is what I love most about HN - the surprising variety of people you can learn from, from billionaire founders to expat bingo-card geeks to Georgian-onion sellers to Dutch pro cleaners...

I actually use it all the time when driving a rental.

Love this announcement style. Direct, confident, and not a word longer than it needs to be. Gives major "the work speaks for itself" vibes. OpenAI's comms used to be like this, until it morphed into Apple-like grandiosity that instead comes off as try-hard.

@dang Any guidelines on obvious AI slop like this?

Exactly this. At least in the US, consultancies that contract with the gov’t can keep a small full time staff in order to qualify for small-business preference and keep their overhead low, and then depend on an army of subcontractors for large projects.

It’s not a mistake, it’s a choice. Quite a common one among younger people who grew up using Slack at work and iMessage everywhere else.

This comment is sickening. If this is coming from a personal hardship, I hope you find peace soon.

There are.[1] Unfortunately they take longer to employ than the crew had time.

[1] As it happens I open with an anecdote about steering redundancy on ships in this post: https://www.gkogan.co/simple-systems/

Aaaaand it's down again.

Founder of a/b testing company accuses founder of evals company of misrepresenting how a/b tests are used in practice, then concludes by misrepresenting how evals are used in practice: "Or you can write 10,000,000 evals."

Could've easily been framed as "you need both evals and a/b testing," but instead they chose this route which comes across as defensive, disingenuous, and desperate.

BTW, if a competitor ever writes a whole post to refute something you barely alluded to without even mentioning their name... congratulations, you've won.

You don’t know how good they were really doing and you don’t know how good the offer was.

From what I know they were the most used inference provider by developers a few years ago, but since the Together AI and Fireworks only grew while Replicate seems to have stayed quiet. It’s a highly competitive low-margin business, so volume is critical and if you’re losing volume then you’re doomed.

You know you have a branding problem when (1) you have to say that at the outset, and (2) it induces more eyerolls than a gaggle of golf dads.

The Augmentation vs Abdication framing is great. It also reflects my own experience in a different field: marketing. More specifically, coming up with messaging & positioning.

If you want something clear and compelling you can’t one-shot it, so you end up spending all day and night going back and forth with Gemini or Claude or whatever your cup of tea…

In the end I had something that looked great from the surface, but I felt completely lost in it. I couldn’t tell you what’s the core idea underpinning the whole thing, let alone explain it convincingly to the founders I work with.

The feeling is unsettling, but it has a benefit: it’s a signal that you’ve gone too far and need to re-calibrate.

In the end I found a great balance between the AI’s ability to synthesize vast information and offer endless alternatives to phrasing, with my personal taste and intuition. Augmentation.