meetingthrower

OMG coming from bigtime consulting this is...AMAZING. Thank you!

The Dartmouth analytics say that is true. The top 1% is taking from the top 10% in admissions.

That said, your view that they need "trauma" to get in is very wrong. You need to find a hook. The hook should be positive and not negative. (Why should they let you in to the private club?)

Source: I've gotten my kids into 6 Ivies. Non-athletes, white, public schools, and I am not a doner.

That's a great way to put it: functional slop. That's what I mean tho - as long as it is minimally functional it does its job.

I totally get the shade thrown at ycombinator. But I guess my perception is that it has never been about the tech for them and more about getting quick hacks to get to market quickly. So it feels on brand?

Correct. It's "good enough" for now and if it needs to be industrialized you can do that later. If it is brand new and has no traffic and is not exposing user data or opening up your keys to someone.... who cares how perfect the code is if it mostly works? Users don't have to use it...

I like the idea of getting a slice of the action for the country. I mean, to have a nice slice of profits or something would be really nice. You know the equity is nice in that only pays off if there are profits. What would be even nicer is just a nice permanent claim on profits, like 20% or something like that....don't we call that a tax rate? /s

Right. You hire the developer when you want a developer. But if I am building simple agentic workflows -- glorified automations with a small bit of structured "thinking" - I will sure use the cheapest API that can deliver that task at the speed I want.

I wonder where the market sizes will shake out for these different types of use cases? I am guessing right now 1 is bigger than 2 but not for long (by token volume)?

To the others on this reply, I take 1/4 dose of the "clinical dose" and it has been life changing. I've lost 30 lbs. I've done that in the past, but for me that was harder than ranger school in the army.

I LOVE food. Eating out and family dinner were always important to me. I was very worried that I would lose my pleasure in this.

I haven't.

But now I can just eat 1/2 slice of pie. Or 1 scoop of ice cream, etc etc. I don't have the crazy urge to EAT IT ALL.

Also I loved drinking. I actually still love drinking. But I get done at 2.5 drinks. And once a week.

It adds up. Makes you wonder what free will is.Variance in GLPs are naturally occuring. I find the people who say "I forgot to eat" relatable now. Our bodies were not designed for abundance. At least not mine.

The tfa says that almost all of this went to big public automakers. Enraging. I initially thought that this was going to some small biz thing that at least would slosh the money around through the owners. But nope - corp welfare!

Interesting - if you're the author, I couldn't see quickly what data sources I would need to plug into it to make it work well (e.g, with the marketing agents doing account reviews etc?)

Right? Runaway Bunny, Goodnight Moon? Probably 1K times between my two kids.

You are so incorrect here. If you feed it an evaluation rubric it will go after it! You really understimate the technology when in good and well intentioned hands. (Yes lazy people will use it to cheat and get to the answer faster. But it is like a grad student tutor who will do an evaluation in 30 seconds! Rapid iteration and laddering up...)

100% you are so right. Don't rely on the LLM. It is a robot you give tools and context, and then you ask it to do something with that. It's amazing at that.

on business pages they literally give you access to the posting API.... And you can automate against that. Not that they will give you much action on that without the sweet sweet accelerant of ad money.

Welcome to management!!!

Right but that margin is tight!? Total rev of $6m, entry cost before anything built of $3m. $3m to play with. 8 units selling for $750k and you want to build them for under $300k a piece? Tight.

How is this not recognized as a complete scam?

So you think "good" management translates? I actually think it very much does. Clear expectations, providing right context and "the why", quick and clear feedback loops, intervening early when they are going off track, not micromanaging too much so they can actually accomplish more. It's all very similar.

And you have discovered the job of managers! There has always been a lot of hate for managers. Wonder if the robots hate us just as much? (I often feel a weird guilt when I tell an agent to do something I know I am going to throw away but will serve as an interesting exploration...I know if I did that to a human they would be pissed...)

Yes x 1000. I find it amazing.

So right. All these guys have never been managers. Do you think humans don't write things that break? Or that teams sometimes take a wrong path and burn a week of work? Or months? Well now you can experience all of that in 30 minutes of vibecoding. As a former tech product manager, it feels EXACTLY the same.

Hahah yes. Eagle Scout here! Be prepared!

I agree it sucks! I thought about vibecoding my own app just to reliably get my data out.

https://planoptica.com/

Employee benefit plan analytics. Had a huge dataset long ago as a consultant to the industry and finally vibecoded up a decent frontend. All public data but if you know the data there is a bunch of analytics you can do. Just about to launch and do some marketing in a few weeks, so saw this and thought I'd throw it in!

Former Eagle Scout here -- I agree a bit with this analysis. The absolute best parts of it for me were the high adventure camps, backpacking, etc. The absolute worst where the Monday meetings. Depending on the vibe of the troop your activities bias one way or the other.

This is it. Great job. I'm in same boat having been a tech pm in the '01 era but having moved over to business side after. Now having fun building tech stuff again!

I got introduced to it by Claude the other day as I was interrogating several GB of public csv files. Seemed magical as it out them all in parquet files and transformed what I needed into the normalized sqllite for my server. Coding agents seen quite comfortable with it!

Amish craftsmen confronted with a nail gun and an impact driver. Yeah you can still build a house swinging your arm if you want, but others won't.

This has happened to me btw. I can only suspect they are "testing" the reception.

Correct. But the llm can also program you the exact automation you want! Much more efficiently than gui madness with N8N. And if you want observability just program that too!

Already very possible and super easy if you do a little vibecoding. Although it will hit the api. Have a stack polling my email every five minutes, classifying email, taking action based on the types. 30 minute coding session.