It’s been a very hard year
(bell.bz)435 points by surprisetalk 2 days ago
435 points by surprisetalk 2 days ago
>> even when mine (that they had already approved) would save them 400K a year
You learn lessons over the years and this is one I learned at some point: you want to work in revenue centers, not cost centers. Aside from the fixed math (i.e. limit on savings vs. unlimited revenue growth) there's the psychological component of teams and management. I saw this in the energy sector where our company had two products: selling to the drilling side was focused on helping get more oil & gas; selling to the remediation side was fulfill their obligations as cheaply as possible. IT / dev at a non-software company is almost always a cost center.
> You learn lessons over the years and this is one I learned at some point: you want to work in revenue centers, not cost centers.
The problem is that many places don't see the cost portions of revenue centers as investment, but still costs. The world is littered with stories of businesses messing about with their core competencies. An infamous example was Hertz(1) outsourcing their website reservation system to Accenture to comically bad results. The website/app is how people reserve cars - the most important part of the revenue generating system.
> You learn lessons over the years and this is one I learned at some point: you want to work in revenue centers, not cost centers.
Best advice I got in school is -- at least early in your career-- work in the main line of business for your company. So if you are in marketing, work for a marketing firm, an accountant, work for an accounting firm.. etc. Video game designer: work for a video game developer.
Later you can have other roles but you make your mark doing the thing that company really depends on.
> Best advice I got in school is -- at least early in your career-- work in the main line of business for your company
Related advice I got - work in the head office for your company if possible. Definitely turned out to be a good call in my case as the satellite offices closed one by one over time.
I would go further and say that even at software companies, even for dev that goes directly into the product, engineering is often seen as a cost center.
The logic is simple, if unenlightened: "What if we had cheaper/fewer nerds, but we made them nerd harder?"
So while working in a revenue center is advantageous, you still have to be in one that doesn't view your kind as too fungible.
>> even when mine (that they had already approved) would save them 400K a year You learn lessons over the years and this is one I learned at some point: you want to work in revenue centers
Totally agree. This is a big reason I went into solutions consulting.
In that particular case I mentioned it was a massive risk management compliance solution which they had to have in place, but they were getting bled dry by the existing vendor, due to several architectural and implementation mistakes they had made way back before I ever got involved, that they were sort of stuck with.
I had a plan to unstuck them at 1/5 the annual operating cost and better performance. Presented it to executives, even Amazon who would have been the infr vendor, to rave reviews.
We had a verbal contract and I was waiting for paperwork to sign... and then Feb 2020... and then crickets.
I work as a consultant and tend to focus on helping startups grow their revenue. And what you're saying here is almost word for word what I often recommend as the *first thing* they should do.
In many cases I've seen projects increase their revenue substantially by making simple messaging pivots. Ex. Instead of having your website say "save X dollars on Y" try "earn X more dollars using Y". It's incredible how much impact simple messaging can have on your conversion rates.
This extends beyond just revenue. Focusing on revenue centers instead of cost centers is a great career advice as well.
Very few people suspected that github is being used to train the ai when we were all pushed the best practice of doing frequent commit.
a little earlier very few suspected that our mobile phone is not only listening to our conversations and training some ai model but also all its gyrometers are being used to profile our daily routine. ( keeping mobile for charging near our pillow) looking at mobile first thing in morning.
Now when we are asked to use ai to do our code. I am quite anxious as to what part of our life are we selling now .. perhaps i am no longer their prime focus. (50+) but who knows.
Going with the flow seems like a bad advice. going Analog as in iRobot seems the most sane thing.
>> Going with the flow seems like a bad advice. going Analog as in iRobot seems the most sane thing.
I've been doing a lot of photography in the last few years with my smartphone and because of the many things you mentioned, I've forgone using it now. I'm back to a mirrorless camera that's 14 years old and still takes amazing pictures. I recently ran into a guy shutting down his motion picture business and now own three different Canon HDV cameras that I've been doing some interesting video work with.
Its not easy transferring miniDV film to my computer, but the standard resolution has a very cool retro vibe that I've found a LOT of people have been missing and are coming back around too.
I'm in the same age range and couldn't fathom becoming a developer in the early aughts and being in the midst of a gold rush for developer talent to suddenly seeing the entire tech world contract almost over night.
Strange tides we're living in right now.
If I had gone with the flow in 1995 I would have got my MCSE and worked for a big government bureaucracy.
Instead I found Linux/BSD and it changed my life and I ended up with security clearances writing code at defense contractors, dot com startups, airports, banks, biotech/hpc, on and on...
Exactly right about Github. Facebook is the same for training on photos and social relationships. etc etc
They needed to generate a large body of data to train our future robot overlords to enslave us.
We the 'experienced' are definitely not their target -- too much independence of thought.
To your point I use an old flip phone an voip even though I have written iOS and android apps. My home has no wifi. I do not use bluetooth. There are no cameras enabled on any device (except a camera).
They also produce crap once you leave the realm of basic CRUD web apps... Try using it with Microsofts Business Central bullshit, does not work well.
I have worked with a lot of code generation systems.
LLMs strike me as mainly useful in the same way. I can get most of the boilerplate and tedium done with LLM tools. Then for core logic esp learning or meta-programming patterns etc. I need to jump in.
Breaking tasks down to bite size, and writing detailed architecture and planning docs for the LLM to work from, is critical to managing increasing complexity and staying within context windows. Also critical is ruthlessly throwing away things that do not fit the vision and not being afraid to throw whole days away (not too often tho!)
For ref I have built stuff that goes way beyond CRUD app with these tools in 1/10th of the time it previously took me or less -- the key though is I already knew how to do and how to validate LLM outputs. I knew exactly what I wanted a priori.
Code generation technically always 'replaced' junior devs and has been around for ages, the results of the generation are just a lot better now., whereas in the past it was mixed bag of benefits/hassles doing code generation regularly, now it works much better and the cost is much less.
I started my career as a developer and the main reasons I became a solutions systems guy were money and that I hated the tedium boilerplate phase of all software development projects over a certain scale. I never stoped coding because I love it -- just not for large enterprise soul destroying software projects.
Quick note that this has not been my experience. LLMs have been very useful with codebases as far from crud web apps as you can get.
This is consistent pattern.
Two engineers use LLM-based coding tools; one comes away with nothing but frustration, the other one gets useful results. They trade anecdotes and wonder what the other is doing that is so different.
Maybe the other person is incompetent? Maybe they chose a different tool? Maybe their codebase is very different?
I earned their respect over many years of hard work -- hardly a freebie!
I will say that being social and being in a scene at the right time helps a lot -- timing is indeed almost everything.
>I will say that being social and being in a scene at the right time helps a lot
I concur with that and that's what I tell every single junior/young dev. that asks for advice: get out there and get noticed!
People who prefer to lead more private lives, or are more reserved in general, have far fewer opportunities coming their way, they're forced to take the hard path.
>I'm not for/or against a particular style, it must be real nice if life just solves everything for you while you just chill or whatever. But, a nice upside of being made of talent instead of luck is that when luck starts to run out, well, ... you'll be fine anyway :).
This is wildly condescending. Holy.
Talent makes luck. Ex-colleagues reach out to me and ask me to work with them because they know the type of work I do, not because it's lucky.
Also wtf did I just read. Op said he uses his network to find work. And you go on a rant about how you're rising and grinding to get that bread, and everything you have ever earned completely comes from you, no help from others? Jesus Christ dude, chill out.
My perspective is just as valid, and I also wrote,
>I'm not for/or against a particular style
... so I'm not sure why some of you took offense in my comment, but I can definitely imagine why :)
>Ex-colleagues reach out to me and ask me to work with them
Never happened to me, that's the point I'm making.
1. I wish work just landed at my feet.
2. As that never happened and most likely was never going to happen, I had to learn another set of skills to overcome that.
3. That made me a much more resilient individual.
(4. This is not meant as criticism to @arthurfirst's style. I wish clients just called me and I didn't have to save all that money/time I spend taking care of that)
>>I'm not for/or against a particular style
... so I'm not sure why some of you took offense in my comment, but I can definitely imagine why :)
Because surrounding your extremely condescending take with "just my opinion"-style hedging still results in an extremely condescending take.
In contrast to others, I just want to say that I applaud the decision to take a moral stance against AI, and I wish more people would do that. Saying "well you have to follow the market" is such a cravenly amoral perspective.
> Saying "well you have to follow the market" is such a cravenly amoral perspective.
You only have to follow the market if you want to continue to stay relevant.
Taking a stand and refusing to follow the market is always an option, but it might mean going out of business for ideological reasons.
So practically speaking, the options are follow the market or find a different line of work if you don’t like the way the market is going.
I still don’t blame anyone for trying to chart a different course though. It’s truly depressing to have to accept that the only way to make a living in a field is to compromise your principles.
The ideal version of my job would be partnering with all the local businesses around me that I know and love, elevating their online facilities to let all of us thrive. But the money simply isn’t there. Instead their profits and my happiness are funnelled through corporate behemoths. I’ll applaud anyone who is willing to step outside of that.
> It’s truly depressing to have to accept that the only way to make a living in a field is to compromise your principles.
Of course. If you want the world to go back to how it was before, you’re going to be very depressed in any business.
That’s why I said your only real options are going with the market or finding a different line of work. Technically there’s a third option where you stay put and watch bank accounts decline until you’re forced to choose one of the first two options, but it’s never as satisfying in retrospect as you imagined that small act of protest would have been.
I don't think we're really disagreeing here. You're saying "this is the way things are", I'm saying "I salute anyone who tries to change the way things are".
Even in the linked post the author isn't complaining that it's not fair or whatever, they're simply stating that they are losing money as a result of their moral choice. I don't think they're deluded about the cause and effect.
> It’s truly depressing to have to accept that the only way to make a living in a field is to compromise your principles.
Isn't that what money is though, a way to get people to stop what they're doing and do what you want them to instead? It's how Rome bent its conquests to its will and we've been doing it ever since.
It's a deeply broken system but I think that acknowledging it as such is the first step towards replacing it with something less broken.
I was talking to a friend of mine about a related topic when he quipped that he realized he started disliking therapy when he realized they effectively were just teaching him coping strategies for an economic system that is inherently amoral.
> So practically speaking, the options are follow the market or find a different line of work if you don’t like the way the market is going.
You're correct in this, but I think it's worth making the explicit statement that that's also true because we live in a system of amoral resource allocation.
Yes, this is a forum centered on startups, so there's a certain economic bias at play, but on the subject of morality I think there's a fair case to be made that it's reasonable to want to oppose an inherently unjust system and to be frustrated that doing so makes survival difficult.
We shouldn't have to choose between principles and food on the table.
> We shouldn't have to choose between principles and food on the table.
I am increasingly convinced that these are the only true kind of ethical decision. Painless/straightforward ethical decisions that you make every day - they probably don't even register on your radar. But a tough tradeoff does.
Sometimes companies become irrelevant while following the market, while other companies revolutionize the market by NOT following it.
It's not "swim with the tide or die", it's "float like a corpse down the river, or swim". Which direction you swim in will certainly be a different level of effort, and you can end up as a corpse no matter what, but that doesn't mean the only option you have is to give up.
>the options are follow the market or find a different line of work if you don’t like the way the market is going
You can also just outlive the irrationality. If we could stop beating around the bush and admit we're in a recession, that would explain a lot of things. You just gotta bear the storm.
It's way too late to jump on the AI train anyway. Maybe one more year, but I'd be surprised if that bubble doesn't pop by the end of 2027.
No, of course you don't have to – but don't torture yourself. If the market is all AI, and you are a service provider that does not want to work with AI at all then get out of the business.
If you found it unacceptable to work with companies that used any kind of digital database (because you found centralization of information and the amount of processing and analytics this enables unbecoming) then you should probably look for another venture instead of finding companies that commit to pen and paper.
> If the market is all AI, and you are a service provider that does not want to work with AI at all then get out of the business.
Maybe they will, and I bet they'll be content doing that. I personally don't work with AI and try my best to not to train it. I left GitHub & Reddit because of this, and not uploading new photos to Instagram. The jury is still out on how I'm gonna share my photography, and not sharing it is on the table, as well.
I may even move to a cathedral model or just stop sharing the software I write with the general world, too.
Nobody has to bend and act against their values and conscience just because others are doing it, and the system is demanding to betray ourselves for its own benefit.
Life is more nuanced than that.
Before that AI craze, I liked the idea of having a CC BY-NC-ND[0] public gallery to show what I took. I was not after any likes or anything. If I got professional feedback, that'd be a bonus. I even allowed EXIF-intact high resolution versions to be downloaded.
Now, I'll probably install a gallery webapp to my webserver and put it behind authentication. I'm not rushing because I don't crave any interaction from my photography. The images will most probably be optimized and resized to save some storage space, as well.
Good on you. Maybe some future innovation will afford everyone the same opportunity.
This metaphor implies a sort of AI inevitably. I simply don't believe that's the case. At least, not this wave of AI.
The people pushing AI aren't listening to the true demand for AI. This, its not making ita money back. That's why this market is broken and not prone to last.
Printing press and copying scribes is a sarcastic comment, but these web designers are still actively working and their industry is 100s of years from the state of those old techs. The joke isn’t funny enough nor is the analogy apt enough to make sense.
No it is a pretty good comparison. There is absolutely AI slop but you have to be sticking your head in the sand if you don’t think AI will not continue to shape this industry. If you are selling learning courses and are sticking your head in the sand, well that’s pretty questionable.
>but you have to be sticking your head in the sand if you don’t think AI will not continue to shape this industry.
Maybe ot will. I'm still waiting for the utility. Right now it's just a big hype bubble, so wake me when it pops.
If the market is immoral, following it is immoral. And it seems like more of society is disagreeing that AI is moral.
I find this very generic what you are saying and they.
What stance against AI? Image generation is not the same as code generation.
There are so many open source projects out there, its a huge difference than taking all the images.
AI is also just ML so should i not use image bounding box algorithm? Am i not allowed to take training data online or are only big companies not allowed to?
I understand this stance, but I'd personally differentiate between taking the moral stand as a consumer, where you actively become part of the growth in demmand that fuels further investment, and as a contractor, where you're a temporary cost, especially if you and people who depend on you necessitate it to survive.
A studio taking on temporary projects isn't investing into AI— they're not getting paid in stock. This is effectively no different from a construction company building an office building, or a bakery baking a cake.
As a more general commentary, I find this type of moral crusade very interesting, because it's very common in the rich western world, and it's always against the players but rarely against the system. I wish more people in the rich world would channel this discomfort as general disdain for the neoliberal free-market of which we're all victims, not just specifically AI, for example.
The problem isn't AI. The problem is a system where new technology means millions fearing poverty. Or one where profits, regardless of industry, matter more than sustainability. Or one where rich players can buy their way around the law— in this case copyright law for example. AI is just the latest in a series of products, companies, characters, etc. that will keep abusing an unfair system.
IMO over-focusing on small moral cursades against specific players like this and not the game as a whole is a distraction bound to always bring disappointment, and bound to keep moral players at a disadvantage constantly second-guessing themselves.
> This is effectively no different from a construction company building an office building, or a bakery baking a cake.
A construction company would still be justified to say no based on moral standards. A clearer example would be refusing to build a bridge if you know the blueprints/materials are bad, but you could also make a case for agreeing or not to build a detention center for immigrants. But the bakery example feels even more relevant, seeing as a bakery refusing to bake a cake base on the owner's religious beliefs ended up in the US Supreme Court [1].
I don't fault those who, when forced to choose between their morals and food, choose food. But I generally applaud those that stick to their beliefs at their own expense. Yes, the game is rigged and yes, the system is the problem. But sometimes all one can do is refuse to play.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora...
> As a more general commentary, I find this type of moral crusade very interesting, because it's very common in the rich western world, and it's always against the players but rarely against the system. I wish more people in the rich world would channel this discomfort as general disdain for the neoliberal free-market of which we're all victims, not just specifically AI, for example.
I totally agree. I still think opposing AI makes sense in the moment we're in, because it's the biggest, baddest example of the system you're describing. But the AI situation is a symptom of that system in that it's arisen because we already had overconsolidation and undue concentration of wealth. If our economy had been more egalitarian before AI, then even the same scientific/technological developments wouldn't be hitting us the same way now.
That said, I do get the sense from the article that the author is trying to do the right thing overall in this sense too, because they talk about being a small company and are marketing themselves based on good old-fashioned values like "we do a good job".
<< over-focusing on small moral cursades against specific players like this and not the game as a whole
Fucking this. What I tend to see is petty 'my guy good, not my guy bad' approach. All I want is even enforcement of existing rules on everyone. As it stands, to your point, only the least moral ship, because they don't even consider hesitating.
Collective bargaining helps a lot there. But that's not really a popular topic here, so the infighting continues.
I'm all down once we all to backed in a corner to refuse, though.
Well if they're going to go out of business otherwise...
nobody is against his moral stance. the problem is that he’s playing the “principled stand” game on a budget that cannot sustain it, then externalizing the cost like a victim. if you're a millionaire and can hold whatever moral line you want without ever worrying about rent, food, healthcare, kids, etc. then "selling out" is optional and bad. if you're joe schmoe with a mortgage and 5 months of emergency savings, and you refuse the main kind of work people want to pay you for (which is not even that controversial), you’re not some noble hero, you’re just blowing up your life.
> he’s playing the “principled stand” game on a budget that cannot sustain it, then externalizing the cost like a victim
No. It is the AI companies that are externalizing their costs onto everyone else by stealing the work of others, flooding the zone with garbage, and then weeping about how they'll never survive if there's any regulation or enforcement of copyright law.
The ceo of every one of those Ai companies drives an expensive car home to a mansion at the end of the workday. They are set. The average person does not and they cannot afford to play the principled stand game. Its not a question of right or wrong for most, its a question of putting food on the table
I'm not sure I understand this view. Did seamstresses see sewing machines as amoral? Or carpenters with electric and air drills and saws?
AI is another set of tooling. It can be used well or not, but arguing the morality of a tooling type (e.g drills) vs maybe a specific company (e.g Ryobi) seems an odd take to me.
Plagiarism is also "another set of tooling." Likewise slavery, and organized crime. Tools can be immoral.
Its cravenly amoral until your children are hungry. The market doesn't care about your morals. You either have a product people are willing to pay money for or you don't. If you are financially independent to the point it doesn't matter to you then by all means, do what you want. The vast majority of people are not.
I assume they are weathering the storm if they are posting like this and not saying "we're leaving the business". A proper business has a war chest for this exact situation (though I'm unsure of how long this businesses has operated)
As someone who has sold video tech courses since 2015, I don't know about the future.
I don't want to openly write about the financial side of things here but let's just say I don't have enough money to comfortably retire or stop working but course sales over the last 2-3 years have gotten to not even 5% of what it was in 2015-2021.
It went from "I'm super happy, this is my job with contracting on the side as a perfect technical circle of life" to "time to get a full time job".
Nothing changed on my end. I have kept putting out free blog posts and videos for the last 10 years. It's just traffic has gone down to 20x less than it used to be. Traffic dictates sales and that's how I think I arrived in this situation.
It does suck to wake up most days knowing you have at least 5 courses worth of content in your head that you could make but can't spend the time to make them because your time is allocated elsewhere. It takes usually 2-3 full time months to create a decent sized course, from planning to done. Then ongoing maintenance. None of this is a problem if it generates income (it's a fun process), but it's a problem given the scope of time it takes.
Almost 100% of sales come from organic searches. Usually people would search for things like "Docker course" or "Flask course" and either find my course near the top of Google or they would search for some specific problem related to that content and come across a blog post I wrote on my main site which linked back to the course somewhere (usually).
Now the same thing happens, but there's 20x less sales per month.
I've posted almost 400 free videos on YouTube as well over the years, usually these videos go along with the blog post.
A few years back I also started a podcast and did 100 weekly episodes for 2 years. It didn't move the needle on course sales and it was on a topic that was quite related to app development and deployment which partially aligns with my courses. Most episodes barely got ~100 listens and it was 4.9 rated out of 5 on major podcast platforms, people emailed me saying it was their favorite show and it helped them so much and hope I never stop but the listener count never grew. I didn't have sponsors or ads but stopped the show because it took 1 full day a week to schedule + record + edit + publish a ~1-2 hour episode. It was super fun and I really enjoyed it but it was another "invest 100 days, make $0" thing which simply isn't sustainable.
> find my course near the top of Google
> Now the same thing happens, but there's 20x less sales per month.
You’re a victim of the AI search results. There are lots of those.
I recommend something like social media ads where your target audience hangs out (maybe LinkedIn, possibly Google).
This is always sad to hear. I really want more educational material out there that isn't just serving "beginner bait" and I'd love love love more technical podcasts out there. But it seems like not much of the audience is looking for small creators for that. Perhaps they only focus on conference studies.
And yeah, I agree with the other reponsder that AI + Google's own enshittification of search may have cost your site traffic.
As someone who was probably a consumer of such courses, thanks, first off. But second, what happened with me was I would be on the bench at my company and be going hard at training on various tools and technologies and then get whipsawed by them into another direction completely and never once used the thing I was learning in my actual work. So I gave up on training. I would pretend to do training, but basically just screwed around doing whatever I wanted--I learned auto painting and dent repair while on the bench, basically anything. The last few years of my career sucked anyways. So yeah, I can understand why your business has dried up--there's no point in actually learning anything ahead of actually needing to use it. There just isn't. That goes for certs, too. People are burned the hell out on tech because there is so much of it now. It used to be you could do a bunch of Java certs or whatever and have a career. Now, you have to know and be experienced with EVERYTHING and that just is not possible when every technology has 2-5 competing clones of it.
Yep, I know what you mean.
It skews back-end stats too. For example if someone buys a course, I hope they take it in full so they feel happy and fulfilled but in reality a good portion never start. It's like Steam games. Some people just like collecting digital goods knowing they exist and that gives comfort.
Massive course platforms are still thriving it seems so the market is there but it is way more saturated than 10 years ago. My first Docker course in 2015 was like maybe 1 out of 5 courses out there, but now there's 5,000 courses and Docker's documentation has gotten a lot better over time.
I haven't figured out how to make things work, I just know I love tech, solving real world problems, documenting my journey (either through blog posts or courses) and traveling. It would be amazing to be able to travel the world and make courses. Back when I started 10 years ago I didn't realize I like traveling so much so I squandered that extra time.
I feel like this person might be just a few bad months ahead of me. I am doing great, but the writing is on the wall for my industry.
We should have more posts like this. It should be okay to be worried, to admit that we are having difficulties. It might reach someone else who otherwise feels alone in a sea of successful hustlers. It might also just get someone the help they need or form a community around solving the problem.
I also appreciate their resolve. We rarely hear from people being uncompromising on principles that have a clear price. Some people would rather ride their business into the ground than sell out. I say I would, but I don’t know if I would really have the guts.
Its a global industry shift.
You can either hope that this shift is not happening or that you are one of these people surviving in your niche.
But the industry / world is shifting, you should start shifting with.
I would call that being innovative, ahead etc.
They pay people in Malaysia to solve issues.
Google has a ton of code internal.
And million of people happily thumb down or up for their RL / Feedback.
The industry is still shifting. I use LLMs instead of StackOverflow.
You can be as dismissive as you want, but that doesn't change the fact that millions of people use AI tools every single day. People start using AI based tools.
The industry overall is therefore shifting money and goals etc. into direction of AI.
And the author has an issue because of that.
Sure they say that about every fad. Let's see how you feel when the bubble pops.
In my eyes, that's when the grifters get out and innovators can actually create value.
Image editing is now working so well, last week i used nano banana instead of doing anything in photoshop.
That image generation is already disrupting industries and jobs today.
My mother! (non technical) had a call with a support ai agent just a few month ago.
AI is also not a fad. LLMs are the best interface we had sofar. They will stay.
AI Coding helps non developers to develop a lot faster and better (think researchers who sometimes need a little bit of python or 'code').
I'm using AI to summarzie meetings i missed, i asked chatgpt to summarize error logs (successfully).
AlphaFold solved protein folding.
Nearly all roboters you see today are running on Nvidias Isaac and Groot.
The progress has not stoped at all. When Nano Banana came out, Seedream 4 came out a week later. Now we have nano Bananan Pro and Gemini 3.
After Gemini 3 came out, Opus 4.1 came out and now Deep Seek v3.2. All of them got better, faster and/or cheaper.
> Landing projects for Set Studio has been extremely difficult, especially as we won’t work on product marketing for AI stuff
If all of "AI stuff" is a "no" for you, then I think you just signed out off working in most industries to some important degree going forward.
This is also not to say that service providers should not have any moral standards. I just don't understand the expectation in this particular case. You ignore what the market wants and where a lot/most of new capital turns up. What's the idea? You are a service provider, you are not a market maker. If you refuse service with the market that exists, you don't have a market.
Regardless, I really like their aesthetics (which we need more of in the world) and do hope that they find a way to make it work for themselves.
> If all of "AI stuff" is a "no" for you, then I think you just signed out off working in most industries to some important degree going forward.
I'm not sure the penetration of AI, especially to a degree where participants must use it, is all that permanent in many of these industries. Already the industry where it is arguably the most "present" (forced in) is SWE and its proving to be quite disappointing... Where I work the more senior you are the less AI you use
Just the opposite where I work. Seniors are best positioned to effectively use AI and are using it enthusiastically.
Fighting with anecdotes is as productive as always. Especially over trends.
The big issue is Ai isn't profitable. Streaming services is actuslly useful, but well see how that lasts.
Even if it isn't, the OP can still make hay while the sun is still shining, even if it'll eventually set, as the saying goes. But to not make hay and slowly see it set while losing your income, I won't ever understand that.
> what the market wants
Pretty sure the market doesn't want more AI slop.
There is absolutely AI slop out there. Many companies rushed to add AI, a glorified chat bot to their existing product, and have marketed it as AI.
There is also absolutely very tasteful products that add value using LLM and other more recent advancements.
Both can exist at the same time.
>Both can exist at the same time.
They can. But I'm not digging in a swamp to find a gold nugget. Let me know when swamp is drained. Hopefully the nugget isn't drained with it.
>the market does not care about slop or not
Okay. Lemme know when they need to pay for it. A free app for a trillion dollar investment isn't the flex Altman wants to make it seem.
The market wants a lot more high quality AI slop and that's going to be the case perpetually for the rest of the time that humanity exists. We are not going back.
The only thing that's going to change is the quality of the slop will get better by the year.
>The market wants a lot more high quality AI slop
They sure aren't paying for it. It's great how we're on a business topic we're not talking about the fact that the market demand doesn't match the investment put into it.
> The market wants a lot more high quality AI slop
"High quality AI slop" is a contradiction in terms. The relevant definitions[1] are "food waste (such as garbage) fed to animals", "a product of little or no value."
By definition, the best slop is only a little terrible.
> Landing projects for Set Studio has been extremely difficult, especially as we won’t work on product marketing for AI stuff, from a moral standpoint, but the vast majority of enquiries have been for exactly that
I started TextQuery[1] with same moralistic standing. Not in respect of using AI or not, but that most software industry is suffering from rot that places more importance on making money, forcing subscription vs making something beautiful and detail-focused. I poured time in optimizing selections, perfecting autocomplete, and wrestling with Monaco’s thin documentation. However, I failed to make it sustainable business. My motivation ran out. And what I thought would be fun multi-year journey, collapsed into burnout and a dead-end project.
I have to say my time was better spent on building something sustainable, making more money, and optimizing the details once having that. It was naïve to obsess over subtleties that only a handful of users would ever notice.
There’s nothing wrong with taking pride in your work, but you can’t ignore what the market actually values, because that's what will make you money, and that's what will keep your business and motivation alive.
Software is a means to an end. It always has been. There are a privileged few who have the luxury of being able to thoughtfully craft software. The attention to detail needs to go into what people see, not in the code underneath.
>It was naïve to obsess over subtleties that only a handful of users would ever notice.
"When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through." - Steve jobs
Didn't take long for people to abandon their principles, huh?
'I wouldn’t personally be able to sleep knowing I’ve contributed to all of that, too.'
I think this is the crux of the entire problem for the author. The author is certain, not just hesitant, that any contribution they would make to project involving AI equals contribution to some imagined evil ( oddly, without explictly naming what they envision so it is harder to respond to ). I have my personal qualms, but run those through my internal ethics to see if there is conflict. Unless author predicts 'prime intellect' type of catastrophe, I think the note is either shifting blame and just justifying bad outcomes with moralistic: 'I did the right thing' while not explaining the assumptions in place.
See.. here is a problem. You say 'actual' ethics as if those were somehow universal and not ridiculously varied across the board. And I get it, you use the term, because a lot of readers will take it face value AND simply use their own value system to translate them into what agrees with them internally. I know, because I do the same thing when I try to not show exactly what I think to people at work. I just say sufficiently generic stuff to make people on both sides agree with a generic statement.
With that said, mister ants in the pants, what does actual mean to you in this particular instance?
:D no, but it would help if I knew what that moral objection is
Its been 3 years and its been the most talked about topic on HN. If you really don't know at this point, you are choosing to remain ignorant. I can't help you here.
If you genuinely are unaware of the issues, it's a very easy topic to research. Heck, just put "AI" into HN and half the articles will cover some part of the topic.
Not a big fan of his these days but Gary Vaynerchuk has my favorite take on this:
"To run your business with your personal romance of how things should be versus how they are is literally the great vulnerability of business."
It's very likey the main reason that small businesses like local restaurants, bakeries, etc. fail. People start them based on a fantasy and don't know how to watch the hard realities of expenses and income. But like gravity, there's no escaping those unless you are already wealthy enough for it all to just be a hobby.
Maybe you're not the biggest fan precisely because the endgame of that statement is to develop a business without any moral grounding.
If the fish are in a natural reserve, then you pretty much pit your soil on the line. We're missing that detail here and treating it as if this is the difference between one lake or another
Gary's point is: sell what people are buying. But you think: that's immoral.
What about a functioning market is immoral?
You're still responsible for the consequences of what you produce and sell.
Surely you would agree that making landmines simply because there are people who want to buy them would be an immoral choice.
So we should cater to those with the lowest ethical standards instead?
That's what this community has shifted towards these past few years. Didn't take too long for the "hacker scene" to crumble to corporate greed.
I had hope during the NFT days, but I guess many here always wanted a not that told them they were smart and correct. Alas.
You might think it's unethical, but ethics is subjective
I want to sympathize but enforcing a moral blockade on the "vast majority" of inbound inquiries is a self-inflicted wound, not a business failure. This guy is hardly a victim when the bottleneck is explicitly his own refusal to adapt.
It's unfair to place all the blame on the individual.
By that metric, everyone in the USA is responsible for the atrocities the USA war industry has inflicted all over the world. Everyone pays taxes funding Israel, previously the war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, etc.
But no one believes this because sometimes you just have to do what you have to do, and one of those things is pay your taxes.
>unfair to place all the blame on the individual.
I'm mostly blaming the rich.
>everyone in the USA is responsible for the atrocities the USA war industry has inflicted all over the world.
Yeah we kind of are. So many chances to learn and push to reverse policy. Yet look how we voted.
>sometimes you just have to do what you have to do, and one of those things is pay your taxes.
If it's between being homeless and joining ICE... I'd rather inflict the pain on myself than others. There are stances I will take, even of AI isn't the "line" for me personally. (But in not gonna optimize my portfolio towards that either).
>
>By that metric, everyone in the USA is responsible for the atrocities the USA war industry has inflicted all over the world. Everyone pays taxes funding Israel, previously the war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, etc.
I mean, the Iraq War polled very well. Bush even won an election because of it, which allowed it to continue. Insofar as they have a semblance of democracy, yes, Americans are responsible. (And if their government is pathological, they're responsible for not stopping it.)
>But no one believes this because sometimes you just have to do what you have to do, and one of those things is pay your taxes.
Two things. One, you don't have to pay taxes if you're rich. Two, tax protests are definitely a thing. You actually don't have to pay them. If enough people coordinated this, maybe we'd get somewhere.
"I have to do this societally deleterious thing or else someone else will." Is that the world you want to live in?
Is the author starving or does he have the savings to bear a few bad years?
Bingo. Moral grandstanding only works during the boom, not the come down. And despite being as big an idealist as they come, sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do. You can crusade, but you're just making your future self more miserable trying to pretend that you are more important than you think. Not surprising in an era of unbridled narcissism, but hey, that's where we are. People who have nothing to lose fail to understand this, whereas if you have a family, you don't have time for drum circles and bullshit: you've got mouths to feed.
>Not surprising in an era of unbridled narcissism, but hey, that's where we are.
Having the empathy to reject an endemic but poisonous trend is the opposite of narcissistic.
And we're making big assumptions on the author's finances. A bad year isn't literally a fatal year depending om the business and structure.
How many models are only trained on legal[0] data? Adobe's Firefly model is one commercial model I can think of.
[0] I think the data can be licensed, and not just public domain; e.g. if the creators are suitably compensated for their data to be ingested
> How many models are only trained on legal[0] data?
None, since 'legal' for AI training is not yet defined, but Olma is trained on the Dolma 3 dataset, which is
1. Common crawl
2. Github
3. Wikipedia, Wikibooks
4. Reddit (pre-2023)
5. Semantic Scholar
6. Project Gutenberg
I wonder if there is a pivot where they get to keep going but still avoid AI. There must be for a small consultancy.
> "a self-inflicted wound"
"AI products" that are being built today are amoral, even by capitalism's standards, let alone by good business or environmental standards. Accepting a job to build another LLM-selling product would be soul-crushing to me, and I would consider it as participating in propping up a bubble economy.
Taking a stance against it is a perfectly valid thing to do, and the author is not saying they're a victim due to no doing of their own by disclosing it plainly. By not seeing past that caveat and missing the whole point of the article, you've successfully averted your eyes from another thing that is unfolding right in front of us: majority of American GDP is AI this or that, and majority of it has no real substance behind it.
I too think AI is a bubble, and besides the way this recklessness could crash the US economy, there's many other points of criticism to what and how AI is being developed.
But I also understand this is a design and web development company. They're not refusing contracts to build AI that will take people's jobs, or violate copyright, or be used in weapons. They're refusing product marketing contracts; advertising websites, essentially.
This is similar to a bakery next to the OpenAI offices refusing to bake cakes for them. I'll respect the decision, sure, but it very much is an inconsequential self-inflicted wound. It's more amoral to fully pay your federal taxes if you live in the USA for example, considering a good chunk are ultimately used for war, the CIA, NSA, etc, but nobody judges an average US-resident for paying them.
>They're not refusing contracts to build AI that will take people's jobs, or violate copyright, or be used in weapons.
They very well might be. Websites can be made to promote a variety of activity.
>This is similar to a bakery next to the OpenAI offices refusing to bake cakes for them
That's not what "marketing" is. This is OpenAI coming to your firm and saying "I need you to make a poster saying AI is the best thing since Jesus Christ". That very much will reflect on you and the industry at large as you create something you don't believe in.
Sorry for them- after I got laid off in 2023 I had a devil of a time finding work to the point my unemployment ran out - 20 years as a dev and tech lead and full stack, including stints as a EM and CTO
Since then I pivoted to AI and Gen AI startups- money is tight and I dont have health insurance but at least I have a job…
> 20 years as a dev and tech lead and full stack, including stints as a EM and CTO
> Since then I pivoted to AI and Gen AI startups- money is tight and I dont have health insurance but at least I have a job…
I hope this doesn't come across as rude, but why? My understanding is American tech pays very well, especially on the executive level. I understand for some odd reason your country is against public healthcare, but surely a year of big tech money is enough to pay for decades of private health insurance?
Not parent commenter, but in the US when someone’s employment doesn’t include health insurance it’s commonly because they’re operating as a contractor for that company.
Generally you’re right, though. Working in tech, especially AI companies, would be expected to provide ample money for buying health insurance on your own. I know some people who choose not to buy their own and prefer to self-pay and hope they never need anything serious, which is obviously a risk.
A side note: The US actually does have public health care but eligibility is limited. Over one quarter of US people are on Medicaid and another 20% are on Medicare (program for older people). Private self-pay insurance is also subsidized on a sliding scale based on your income, with subsidies phasing out around $120K annual income for a family of four.
It’s not equivalent to universal public health care but it’s also different than what a lot of people (Americans included) have come to think.
Come to Europe. Salaries are (much) lower, but we can use good devs and you'll have vacation days and health care.
Moving to Europe is anything but trivial. Have you looked at y'all's immigration processes recently? It can be a real bear.
Yeah. It is much harder now than it used to be. I know a couple of people who came from the US ~15 to 10 years ago and they had it easy. It was still a nightmare with banks that don’t want to deal with US citizens, though.
As Americans, getting a long-term visa or residency card is not too hard, provided you have a good job. It’s getting the job that’s become more difficult. For other nationalities, it can range from very easy to very hard.
If you have a US or Japanese passport and want to try NL: https://expatlaw.nl/dutch-american-friendship-treaty aka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DAFT . It applies to freelancers.
I made a career out of understanding this. In Germany it’s quite feasible. The only challenge is finding affordable housing, just like elsewhere. The other challenge is the speed of the process, but some cities are getting better, including Berlin. Language is a bigger issue in the current job market though.
Counter: come to Taiwan! Anyone with a semi active GitHub can get a Gold Cars Visa. 6 months in you're eligible for national health insurance (about 30$ usd/month). Cost of living is extremely low here.
However salaries are atrocious and local jobs aren't really available to non mandarin speakers. But if you're looking to kick off your remote consulting career or bootstrap some product you wanna build, there's not really anywhere on earth that combines the quality of life with the cost of living like Taiwan does.
Thanks - my wife and I actually have a long term plan to shift to the EU
Applied to quite a few EU jobs via LinkedIn but nothing came of it- I suspected they wanted people already in EU countries
Both of us are US Citizens but we don't want to retire in the US it seems to be becoming a s*hole esp around healthcare
Maybe one day, but your game industry isn't that much better than ours. Wouldn't want to move overseas only to still have the studio shut down.
It would be worth it mathematically to be unemployed in the US for up to 3-5 years in hopes of landing another US job.
>free Healthcare that costs 1k a month anyway
Well, which is it?
>Not to mention the higher taxes for this privilege.
Rampant tax cuts is how we got here to begin with. I don't think the EU wants someone with this mentality anyway.
> we won’t work on product marketing for AI stuff, from a moral standpoint, but the vast majority of enquiries have been for exactly that. Our reputation is everything, so being associated with that technology as it increasingly shows us what it really is, would be a terrible move for the long term. It is such an “interesting” statement in on many levels.
Market has changed -> we disagree -> we still disagree -> business is bad.
It is indeed hard to swim against the current. People have different principles and I respect that, I just rarely - have so much difficulty understanding them - see such clear impact on the bottom line
Being broadly against AI is a strange stance. Should we all turn off swipe to type on our phones? Are we supposed to boycott cancer testing? Are we to forbid people with disabilities reading voicemail transcriptions or using text to speech? Make it make sense.
These arguments are becoming tropes with little influence. Find better arguments.
Arguably you shouldn't trifle your argument by decorating it when fundamentally it is rock solid. I wonder if the author would consider just walking away from tech when they realize what a useless burden its become for everyone.
You might be right, and I think tech professionals should be expected to use industry terminology correctly.
What do LLMs have to do with typing on phones, cancer research, or TTS?
Deciding not to enable a technology that is proving to be destructive except for the very few who benefit from it, is a fine stance to take.
I won't shop at Walmart for similar reasons. Will I save money shopping at Walmart? Yes. Will my not shopping at Walmart bring about Walmart's downfall? No. But I refuse to personally be an enabler.
I don't agree that Walmart is a similar example. They benefit a great many people - their customers - through their large selection and low prices. Their profit margins are considerably lower than the small businesses they displaced, thanks to economies of scale.
I wish I had Walmart in my area, the grocery stores here suck.
It is a similar example. Just like you and I have different options about whether Walmart is a net benefit or net detriment to society, people have starkly different opinions as to whether LLMs are a net benefit or net detriment to society.
People who believe it's a net detriment don't want to be a part of enabling that, even at cost to themselves, while those who think it's a net benefit or at least neutral, don't have a problem with it.
You really need to research "The Wal Mart effect" before spouting that again. They literally named the phenomenon of what happens after them.
If your goal is to not contribute to community and leave when it dries up, sure. Walmart is great short term relief.
They are a marketing firm, so the stance within their craft is much more narrow than cancer.
Also, we clearly aren't prioritizing cancer research if Altman has shifted to producing slop videos. That's why sentiment is decreasing.
>Make it make sense.
I can't explain to one who doesn't want to understand.
Intentionally or not, you are presenting a false equivalency.
I trust in your ability to actually differentiate between the machine learning tools that are generally useful and the current crop of unethically sourced "AI" tools being pushed on us.
If it was actually being given away as an accessiblity tool, then I would agree with you.
It kind of is that clear. It's IP laundering and oligarchic leveraging of communal resources.
1. Intellectual property is a fiction that should not exist.
2. Open source models exist.
How am I supposed to know what specific niche of AI the author is talking about when they don't elaborate? For all I know they woke up one day in 2023 and that was the first time they realized machine learning existed. Consider my comment a reminder that ethical use of AI has been around of quite some time, will continue to be, and even that much of that will be with LLMs.
>Consider my comment a reminder that ethical use of AI has been around of quite some
You can be among a a swamp and say "but my corner is clean". This is the exact opposite of the rotten barrel metaphor. You're trying to claim your sole apple is so how not rotted compared to the fermenting that is came from.
You have reasonably available context here. "This year" seems more than enough on it's own.
I think there is ethical use cases for LLMs. I have no problem leveraging a "common" corpus to support the commons. If they weren't over-hyped and almost entirely used as extensions of the weath-concentration machine, they could be really cool. Locally hosted llms are kinda awesome. As it is, they are basically just theft from the public and IP laundering.
Putting aside the "useful" comment, because many find LLMs useful; let me guess, you're the one deciding whether it's ethical or not?
There's a moral line that every person has to make about what work they're willing to do. Things aren't always so black and white, we straddle that line The impression I got reading the article is that they didn't want to work for bubble ai companies trying to generate for the sake of generate. Not that they hated anything with a vector db
Andy Bell is absolute top tier when it comes to CSS + HTML, so when even the best are struggling you know it's starting to get hard out there.
I don’t doubt it at all, but CSS and HTML are also about as commodity as it gets when it comes to development. I’ve never encountered a situation where a company is stuck for months on a difficult CSS problem and felt like we needed to call in a CSS expert, unlike most other specialty niches where top tier consulting services can provide a huge helpful push.
HTML + CSS is also one area where LLMs do surprisingly well. Maybe there’s a market for artisanal, hand-crafted, LLM-free CSS and HTML out there only from the finest experts in all the land, but it has to be small.
I'm afraid of what the future will look like 10+ years down the line after we've gutted humans from the workforce and replaced them with AI. Companies are going to be more faceless than they've ever been. Nobody will be accountable, you won't be able to talk to anyone with a pulse to figure out a problem (that's already hard enough). And we'll be living in a vibe coded nightmare governed by executives who were sold on the promise of a better bottom line due to nixing salaries/benefits/etc.
I don't think it will get that bleak, but it still is a good time to build human community regardless. This future only works for a broken society who can't trust their neighbor. You have the power to reverse that if you wish.
This isn't a bootcamp course. I don't think Andy's audience is one trying to convert an HTML course into a career wholesale. It's for students or even industry people who want a deeper understanding of the tech.
Not everyone values that, but anyone who will say "just use an LLM instead" was never his audience to begin with.
How do you measure „absolute top tier“ in CSS and HTML? Honest question. Can he create code for difficult-to-code designs? Can he solve technical problems few can solve in, say, CSS build pipelines or rendering performance issues in complex animations? I never had an HTML/CSS issue that couldn’t be addressed by just reading the MDN docs or Can I Use, so maybe I’ve missed some complexity along the way.
Look at his work? I had a look at the studio portfolio and it's damn solid.
If one asks you "Why do you consider Pablo Picasso's work to be outstanding", then "Look at his work?" is not a helpful answer. I've been asking about parent's way to judge the outstandingness of HTML/CSS work. Just writing "damn solid" websites isn't distinguishing.
Being absolute top tier at what has become a commodity skillset that can be done “good enough” by AI for pennies for 99.9999% of customers is not a good place to be…
When 99.99% of the customers have garbage as a website, 0.01% will grow much faster and topple the incumbents, nothing changed.
Hmm. This is hand made clothes and furniture vs factory mass production.
Nobody doubts the prior is better and some people make money doing it, but that market is a niche because most people prioritize price and 80/20 tradeoffs.
A lesson many developers have to learn is that code quality / purity of engineering is not a thing that really moves the needle for 90% of companies.
Having the most well tested backend and beautiful frontend that works across all browsers and devices and not just on the main 3 browsers your customers use isn't paying the bills.
> When 99.99% of the customers have garbage as a website
When you think 99.99% of company websites are garbage, it might be your rating scale that is broken.
This reminds me of all the people who rage at Amazon’s web design without realizing that it’s been obsessively optimized by armies of people for years to be exactly what converts well and works well for their customers.
Are they successful companies despite a bad websote, or companies successful because they knew where to stop cutting corners that lead to success?
I suspect it's the former.
Struggling because they're deliberately shooting themselves in the foot by not taking on the work their clients want them to take. If you don't listen to the market, eventually the market will let you fall by the way side.
His business seems to be centered around UI design and front-end development and unfortunately this is one of the things that AI can do decently well. The end result is worse than a proper design but from my experience people don't really care about small details in most cases.
I'm sure author's company does good work, but the marketplace doesn't respond well to, "we're really, _really_ good,", "trust me," "you won't be disappointed." It not only feels desperate, but is proof-free. Show me your last three great projects and have your customers tell me what they loved about working with you. Anybody can say, "seriously, we're really good."
the "trust me" has a trailer, testimony from industry experts, and gasp a good looking website that doesnt chug and still looks modern and dynamic. Bonus points for the transparency about 2025, we don't get much of that these days.
It could still be trash, but they are setting all the right flags.
Tough crowd here. Though to be expected - I'm sure a lot of people have a fair bit of cash directly or indirectly invested in AI. Or their employer does ;)
We Brits simply don't have the same American attitude towards business. A lot of Americans simply can't understand that chasing riches at any cost is not a particularly European trait. (We understand how things are in the US. It's not a matter of just needing to "get it" and seeing the light)
It's not really whether one has invested in the companies or not, it's more that we can see the author shooting themselves in the foot by not wanting to listen to the market. It's like selling vinegar at a lemonade stand (and only insisting on selling vinegar, not lemonade). It's simply logically nonsensical to us "Americans."
I do. But sadly I don't have money and December/January are my slowest months these past few years. I'm exactly that "money is tight" crowd being talked about.
After reading the post I kept thinking about two other pieces, and only later realized it was Taylor who had submitted it. His most recent essay [0] actually led me to the Commoncog piece “Are You Playing to Play, or Playing to Win?” [1], and the idea of sub-games felt directly relevant here.
In this case, running a studio without using or promoting AI becomes a kind of sub-game that can be “won” on principle, even if it means losing the actual game that determines whether the business survives. The studio is turning down all AI-related work, and it’s not surprising that the business is now struggling.
I’m not saying the underlying principle is right or wrong, nor do I know the internal dynamics and opinions of their team. But in this case the cost of holding that stance doesn’t fall just on the owner, it also falls on the people who work there.
Links:
The author has painted themselves into a corner. They refuse to do business with companies that use AI, and they try to support their business with teaching courses, which is also being impacted by AI.
They have a right to do business with whomever they wish. I'm not suggesting that they change this. However they need to face current reality. What value-add can they provide in areas not impacted by AI?
> However they need to face current reality. What value-add can they provide in areas not impacted by AI?
I'm sure the author has thought much longer on this than I, but I get the vibes here of "2025 was uniquely bad for reasons in and outside of AI". Not "2025 was the beginning of the end for my business as a whole".
I don't think demand for proper engineering is going away, people simply have less to spend. And oncestors have less to invest or are all in gambling on AI. It's a situation that will change for reasons outside the business itself.
Maybe they dont need to "create" website anymore, fixing other website that LLM generated is the future now
we say that wordpress would kill front end but years later people still employ developer to fix wordpress mess
same thing would happen with AI generated website
>fixing other website that LLM generated is the future now
I barely like fixing human code. I can't think of a worse job than fixing garbage in, garbage out in order to prop up billionaires pretending they don't need humans anymore. If that's the long term future then it's time for a career shift.
I'm still much more optimistic about prospects, fortunately.
> same thing would happen with AI generated website
Probably even moreso. I've seen the shit these things put out, it's unsustainable garbage. At least Wordpress sites have a similar starting point. I think the main issue is that the "fixing AI slop" industry will take a few years to blossom.
My post had the privilege of being on front page for a few minutes. I got some very fair criticism because it wasn't really a solid article and was written when traveling on a train when I was already tired and hungry. I don't think I was thinking rationally.
I'd much rather see these kind of posts on the front page. They're well thought-out and I appreciate the honesty.
I think that, when you're busy following the market, you lose what works for you. For example, most business communication happens through push based traffic. You get assigned work and you have x time to solve all this. If you don't, we'll have some extremely tedious reflection meeting that leads to nowhere. Why not do pull-based work, where you get done what you get done?
Is the issue here that customers aren't informed about when a feature is implemented? Because the alternative is promising date X and delaying it 3 times because customer B is more important
I don’t think they’re unique. They’re simply among the first to run into the problems AI creates.
Any white-collar field—high-skill or not—that can be solved logically will eventually face the same pressure. The deeper issue is that society still has no coherent response to a structural problem: skills that take 10+ years to master can now be copied by an AI almost overnight.
People talk about “reskilling” and “personal responsibility,” but those terms hide the fact that surviving the AI era doesn’t just mean learning to use AI tools in your current job. It’s not that simple.
I don’t have a definitive answer either. I’m just trying, every day, to use AI in my work well enough to stay ahead of the wave.
>especially as we won’t work on product marketing for AI stuff, from a moral standpoint, but the vast majority of enquiries have been for exactly that.
I intentionally ignored the biggest invention of the 21st century out of strange personal beliefs and now my business is going bankrupt
I don't think it's fair to call them "strange" personal beliefs
It probably depends on your circle. I find those beliefs strange, seems like moral relativism.
Yes I find this a bit odd. AI is a tool, what specific part of it do you find so objectionable OP? For me, I know they are never going to put the genie back in the bottle, we will never get back the electricity spent on it, I might as well use it. We finally got a pretty good Multivac we can talk to and for me it usually gives the right answers back. It is a once in a lifetime type invention we get to enjoy and use. I was king of the AI haters but around Gemini 2.5 it just became so good that if you are hating it or criticizing it you aren’t looking at it objectively anymore.
> we won’t work on product marketing for AI stuff, from a moral standpoint
I fundamentally disagree with this stance. Labeling a whole category of technologies because of some perceived immorality that exists within the process of training, regardless of how, seems irrational.
I appreciate and respect that this org is avoiding AI hype work, but I don't know if there are long term reputational benefits. Clients are going to be more turned off by your reasons not to do work than your having a "principled business".
From the clients perspective, it's their job to set the principles (or lack thereof) and your job to follow their instructions.
That doesn't mean it's the wrong thing to do though. Ethics are important, but recognise that it may just be for the sake of your "soul".
I had a discussion yesterday with someone that owns a company creating PowerPoints for customers. As you might understand, that is also a business that is to be hit hard by AI. What he does is offer an AI entry level option, where basically the questions he asks the customer (via a Form) will lead to a script for running AI. With that he is able to combine his expertise with the AI demand from the market, and gain a profit from that.
I guess then, that he is relying on his customers not discovering that there are options out there that will do this for them, without a "middle man" as it were. Seems like shaky ground to be standing on, but I suppose it can work for a while, if he already has good relationships in his industry.
I feel for the author. I do both mechanical and software engineering and I’m in this career(s) because I love making things and learning how to do that really well. Been having the most difficult time accepting the idea that there isn’t a good market for people like us - artisans, craftsmen, whatever the term might be - who are obsessive about exceptional quality and the time and effort it takes to get there. In this day and age, and especially when LLMs look ever more like they can produce at least a cheap, dollar store approximation of the real deal, “doing things really well” is going to be relegated to an ever more niche market.
Interesting. I agree that this has been a hard year, hardest in a decade. But comparison with 2020 is just surprising. I mean, in 2020 crazy amounts of money were just thrown around left and right no? For me, it was the easiest year of my career when i basically did nothing and picked up money thrown at me.
Why would your company or business suddenly require no effort due to covid.
Too much demand, all of a sudden. Money got printed and i went from near bankruptcy in mid-Feb 2020 to being awash with money by mid-June.
And it continued growing nonstop all the way through ~early Sep 2024, and been slowing down ever since, by now coming to an almost complete stop - to the point i ever fired all sales staff because they were treading water with no even calls let alone deals, for half a year before being dismissed in mid-July this year.
I think it won't return - custom dev is done. The myth of "hiring coders to get rich" is over. No surprise it did, because it never worked, sooner or later people had to realise it. I may check again in 2-3 years how market is doing, but i'm not at all hopeful.
Switched into miltech where demand is real.
I did not look for a consulting contract for 18 years. Through my old network more quality opportunities found me than I could take on.
That collapsed during the covid lockdowns. My financial services client cut loose all consultants and killed all 'non-essential' projects, even when mine (that they had already approved) would save them 400K a year, they did not care! Top down the word came to cut everyone -- so they did.
This trend is very much a top down push. Inorganic. People with skills and experience are viewed by HR and their AI software as risky to leave and unlikely to respond to whatever pressures they like to apply.
Since then it's been more of the same as far as consulting.
I've come to the conclusion I'm better served by working on smaller projects I want to build and not chasing big consulting dollars. I'm happier (now) but it took a while.
An unexpected benefit of all the pain was I like making things again... but I am using claude code and gemini. Amazing tools if you have experience already and you know what you want out of them -- otherwise they mainly produce crap in the hands of the masses.