Now I'm waiting for these ideas to collide and once the hoopla about AI hits a lull, everyone's going to go re-invent parsing the DOM, again and we'll see lots of new AI generated JS frameworks.

I think Apple can't find their voice since Steve Jobs passed/stopped doing the presentations. Thats why it feels inauthentic. I imagine its also hard to really feel "best (iphone|ipad|macos|etc) yet" when they are debuting features that existed elsewhere for a while. Its just a massive disconnect from anyone but fans. The same could be said for innovative features, whats left to innovate on smart phones?

In some ways both things are like having to be the person coming on after an amazing presentation or comic or musical act. How do you follow it?

If what you're creating isn't shippable to a customer/user then really scrutinize it. Things like AI skills, AI task loops, etc. those are all throw-away artifacts, the equivalent of Jira tickets. If you can get AI to help delivery without them, do that. The AI lab companies want you to use tokens but if you can automate something without AI in the mix, since you're experienced I assume you know shell scripting, automation concepts, etc., then automate it to work without token use. This is especially if you are doing something solo - your process and workflow can change on a whim so the least amount of overhead is going to keep you lean and focused on shipping software.

I do wonder if any of these three companies are using AI to do their accounting and bookkeeping. What happens when there are AI hallucinations affecting those outcomes?

A major reason for the waiting period before being added to indices is to see 4 quarters of results, accounting practices, and all the fine print on those SEC filings. All sorts of other ETFs and mutual funds index off the indexes so the market will not have the waiting time to ascertain if these companies balance sheets and accounting practices are filled with bullshit.

Is it possible that one of these IPO's would be like a Global Crossing or Enron having an IPO during the dot com timeframe and would being auto-included into indexes be a good idea? Certainly not. I'm not claiming any of these companies are cooking their books or committing fraud, etc. only pointing out that there was a reason for the waiting period and part of that reason is seeing results held up to accounting standards.

Ideas for a local bookstore: seasonal and local items for sale, think gift giving timeframes - mothers day, fathers day, end of year holidays. Items like unique greeting cards, calendars, custom gift wrapping, having a kids section with higher margin items kids like - toys, trading cards, etc. Also you could throw some checkout friendly things like book lights, book marks, candies, etc.

If you find local craftspeople, offer some shelf/floor space for free if you can agree on a split of the margin. Hand-crafted things would pair well during holiday seasons and advertised properly might get repeat visits and word of mouth spreading.

This AI boom feels similar, a lot of hype and the AI usage costs are being subsidized by private equity/VC so far. IPO's are supposed to happen this fall for OpenAI and Anthropic. They're going to have to face the music of corporate governance, accounting rules, reporting revenue, earnings, etc. Subsidizing users seems unsustainable, they need to either jack up rates or downgrade usage per plans. Then there is the circular investments between all of them and Google, Microsoft, etc. Seems like a house of cards.

Sure there are industry changing things going on. What if you're working on an app thats a decade old and has had different teams of people, styles, frameworks (thanks to the JS-framework-a-week Resume Driven Development)? Some markdown docs and a loop of agents isn't going to help when humans have trouble understanding what the app does.

Another difference is large companies using user's data in various ways, some creepy and maybe nefarious. This wasn't done 25 years ago, UI heat maps didn't come about until 20ish years ago, much less collecting data specific to one person.

These days, there's no push back on OSS and companies and individuals might prefer to not have all their usage and data sent to a giant corporation. There could be a turning point for OSS LLM's that can add value and run on personal devices (laptops, phones). Maybe there will be a resurgence of apps (desktop/phone) that have AI features but don't collect your data. Maybe that's the next digital counter culture movement - keeping data private.

AI is not delivering 10x shareholder value, anywhere. Software developers have quite the level of hubris about how important they are to companies. Yes our work is very complex and takes a certain mindset to do it well. It takes a lot of other roles to have a successful business, many of those roles will use AI to help draft slide decks, emails, etc. and that's the limit for them.

Look at recent companies doing layoffs claiming its because of AI, like CloudFlare and Coinbase, do their reported financials paint the picture that they are crushing it with AI? No, its net losses into the $100's of millions.

I don't understand how a smaller publicly traded company can buy a larger publicly traded company. Don't they need to have a majority of shares or enough to demand a board seat? A deal like that probably needs to have outside investors and/or some leverage of some kind.

My opinion on how things could progress in 5-10 years is it depends on how much the average people push back. It could be pushing back on AI data centers, loss of freedoms, CEO pay ratios, etc. The intensity of the push back could impact events.

So far both of these companies have shown they suck at support so we know that's not it. It could be that it might help Anthropic to leverage Gemini in their competition with OpenAI and Google will take compute commitments.

Anecdata: I'm finding a lot of my "type random question in URL/search bar" has decent top Gemini answers where I don't scroll to results unless I need to dive deeper.

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.