Most of the AI output I get is mediocre and needs human reviews, UI touch-ups, refactors, etc. There could be a strong case for AI slop cleanup businesses soon.

The key point is you are breaking up the context of what you are building into smaller areas of focus. The smaller contexts allow agents to do work with only the context of what their tasks are, so you have less of a chance of hallucinations and they each get a larger context window than they would if you had all of your context written out into a single text file.

This is why a lot of folks call them junior engineers. You wouldn't ask a junior engineer to "act as a senior expert JS developer and build a front end for a SaaS project management app" and expect them to do it with good output. You need to define specific things you want done and how you want them done - "use react, call APIs for data, APIs should be RESTful, etc." You can add personas to them if you like and personalities but thats more for entertainment.

I don't think their approach is getting to stable, valuable businesses and keeping them that way. Their company name is Epic, not Mediocre BlueChipGameCo. I think their approach has been to make big investments into things, almost like Amazon's earlier approach where they would re-invest everything into the business and that might be where Epic now has to react to the market slowing for them and pull back.

I have to imagine AI is having an impact but not in the way people jump to about them using AI. How many people out there have ideas for games and can't execute them because they don't know the tech? How many people in the software industry were drawn to computing because of gaming?

If they built AI into Unreal Engine so that someone could approach it from a Game Producer/Designer role and not have to get deep into C++ programming or shaders and art assets, and produce games, games that go to the Epic Game Store and they take a cut? That would move the market in a way that would be more fitting for their company name.

Smart organizations will not just deliver better products but likely start products that they were hesitant to start before because the cost of starting is a lot closer to zero. Smart engineering leadership will encourage developers into delivering value and not self-serving, endless iterations of tooling enhancements, etc.

If I was a CTO and my competitor Y fired 90% of their devs, I'd try to secure funding to hire their top talent and retain them. The vitriol alone could fuel some interesting creations and when competitor Y realizes things later, their top talent will have moved on.

I also worked at a couple of F500 companies, they typically want people with Bachelors degrees at a minimum, mostly as a check-mark on their hiring list. If you're contracting with an agency/headhunter house then they may be the ones shortchanging you, not the company doing the contracting.

If the AI tool companies increase their rates 2x, 5x, 10x, is it worth it? They aren't going to lower prices.

Consumer AI tool usage isn't going to get a lot of adopters that will pay, people outside of a work environment will see it as a fun toy, much like social media and will be fine with being served ads and letting their loss of privacy be the cost.

> I've spent hours and hours unsubscribing, deleting, uninstalling, toggling settings,but then I find myself reinstalling, resubscribing

You already know the tools and methods. This is more of a psychology issue rather than technology. You need some sort of dopamine detox. I'm not a professional, there are probably professionals out there that can help but here's some random thoughts of what that might look like:

* Take a week off work and turn off all notifications. Tell work you are unavailable.

* Write anything important down on paper that happens in the next two weeks: birthdays, events, appointments, etc. so you don't miss them. A paper calendar planner works.

* Turn off the phone if you can. If you need it for travel - uninstall everything unnecessary and keep all the notifications off. Phone, maps, airline, Uber, SMS, web browser are really all you need. You could ditch the airline app and just get paper boarding passes.

* Do something, anything, that doesn't involve computers/phone and notifications.

A good manager I had once had the approach of setting guidelines and "just getting out of the way" and I try to follow that, it works well for most people.

At some point a tech product is "finished" as in a mature, stable product and adding new things to it isn't going to do 10x in revenue. Its probably really hard for the product and tech teams involved to admit though.

There are many that buy trucks for off road capabilities but probably 70% or more of truck owners don't go off road more than once a year. Many pick up truck models, like stock versions with crew cabs, are too long and not equipped for serious off-road use. Shallow sand/snow they can handle but so can SUVs.

Auto pilot can be used for nearly everything after take-off and before landing, so I think you'll need to define "AI" here. I see people using "AI" almost interchangeably these days for things that plain old computers have been doing for a while now. Auto-pilot is not AI, its just a set of instructions (aka programming) given to a computer.

Airports have designed approaches, large airports have multiple and there is a need for communication with other humans, reacting to dynamic environments including weather, other aircraft (both airborne and on taxiways) and having actual vision out the cockpit to see things.

Its a struggle for me to get any momentum going on personal projects. I think its because I'm a person that is externally motivated - like I know I get paid, promotions potentially, etc. via my employment. When it comes to personal projects I can't get going. I only mention this because I would also change out what/how I use to manage the work thinking that would change and I'd get more done, its never worked. Things I've used along the way: trello, wiki, pen and paper, various apps like todoist, etc.

Product hype might be hard with developer/tech types of tools. Devs have very good BS radar and "hype" is sometimes all there is in a lot of content. I see and hear a lot of the "build in public" being promoted as the way to do things with the "build an audience" mantra.

There is a huge hurdle to produce good video content, it takes a lot of time to record, edit and publish quality videos. Publishing quality videos can help get traction/views/subscribers but that doesn't mean it will translate into paying customers either. Do people really want to watch software developers code or talk about it? There has to be other ways to market a product.

If those user types haven’t moved en masse off twitter to then what would compel people to move, and pay for something they don’t pay for with money?

If by existing relationships you mean only like 2 degrees of separation then its implied that there is no global posting, no viral capability and probably no businesses or politicians on it (all amazing features I would love). Basically a family and friends network. A huge difficulty would be how to price it, one time fee for a family tree? The largest costs are going to be bandwidth and storage. If you go no video/images then what pulls people in?

Company structure might be key too. If it’s built as employee owned and operated with a small profit goal, it might take longer to grow but odds are enshitification or corrupt management can be avoided.

I’ve seen runaway cloud costs at my employer a few times, with a few different services and it took a fair amount of time to figure out the monitoring/alerting. They may change their service agreements or pricing structure in hard to decipher ToS, etc. If the cloud provider won’t refund or credit a company that has a representative, they aren’t going to pay any attention to a solo dev or small team.

I would build locally on your laptop and start with a $5/month VM until you get a paying customer and know what size your system needs.

Outside of docker containers for servers and work I haven't delved into VMs on PCs in a while but this sounds compelling to run linux and windows at once from the same hardware instead of a dual boot.