alt Hacker NewsI'm sure people (esp engineers) know this. But imagine you're starting a company: would you try to deploy N agents (even if shitty), or take a financial/time/legal/social risk with a new hire. When you consider short-term costs, the math just never works out in favor of real humans.
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Well, in the beginning, the math doesn’t work out in favor of building the software (or the thing you want to sell) either.
What about the financial / legal / social risk of your AI agent doing something bad? You're only looking at cost savings, without seeing the potentially major downsides.
I can’t stop thinking that this way of thinking is either plain wrong and misses completely what software development is really about. Or very true and in X years people will just ask the trending AI « I need a billing/CRM/X system with those constraints ». Then the AI will ask questions and refine the need. Work for 30mn the time to use libs and code the whole thing, pass into systems to test and deploy and voila. Custom feature on demand. No CEO, no sales, nobody. You just deploy your own SaaS feature. Then good luck to scale properly and migrate data and add features and complexity. If agents hold onto their promise, then the future is custom based, you deploy what you need, SaaS platform is dead with everyone in between useless.
Every single time I post my comment I get this response...
1) There is no universal rule for anything. It doesn't have to apply to every single case. No one is saying a startup needs to hire juniors. No one is saying you have to hire only juniors. We haven't even talked about the distribution tbh. That's very open to interpretation because it is implicit that you will have to modify that based on your context.
2) Lots of big companies still act like they're startups. You're right, that short term "the math" doesn't work out. But it does on the medium and long term. So basically as long as you aren't working at the bootstrapping stage of a startup, you want to start considering this. Different distributions for different stages, of course.
But you shouldn't sacrifice long term rewards for short term ones. You are giving up larger rewards...