Then there's an oversupply of programmers, salaries will crash, and lots of people will have to switch careers. It's happened before.

So let's all just give zero fucks about our moral values and just multiply monetary ones.

This type of business isn’t going to be hit hard by AI; this type of business owner is going to be hit hard by AI.

Prompting isn't a skill, and praying that the next prompt finally spits out something decent is not a business strategy.

However, what I don't like is how little the authors are respected in this process. Everything that the AI generates is based on human labour, but we don't see the authors getting the recognition.

I am an AI skeptic and until the hype is supplanted by actual tangible value I will prefer products that don't cram AI everywhere it doesn't belong.

>the type of business that's going to be hit hard by AI [...] will be the ones that integrate AI into their business the most

There. Fixed!

I still wondering why I'm not doing my banking in Bitcoins. My blockchain database was replaced by postgres.

So some tech can just be hypeware. The OP has a legitimate standpoint given some technologies track record.

And the doctors are still out on the affects of social media on children or why are some countries banning social media for children?

Not everything that comes out of Silicon Valley is automatically good.

Running a services business has always been about being able to identify trends and adapt to market demand. Every small business I know has been adapting to trends or trying to stay ahead of them from the start, from retail to product to service businesses.

yes [0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raytheon

I am in a different camp altogether on AI, though, and would happily continue to do business with it. I genuinely do not see the difference between it and the computer in general. I could even argue it's the same as the printing press.

What exactly is the moral dilemma with AI? We are all reading this message on devices built off of far more ethically questionable operations. that's not to say two things cant both be bad, but it just looks to me like people are using the moral argument as a means to avoid learning something new while being able to virtue signal how ethical they are about it, while at the same time they refuse to sacrifice things they are already accustomed to for ethical reasons when they learn more about it. It just all seems rather convenient.

the main issue I see talked about with it is in unethical model training, but let me know of others. Personally, I think you can separate the process from the product. A product isnt unethical just because unethical processes were used to create it. The creator/perpetrator of the unethical process should be held accountable and all benefits taken back as to kill any perceived incentive to perform the actions, but once the damage is done why let it happen in vain? For example, should we let people die rather than use medical knowledge gained unethically?

Maybe we should be targeting these AI companies if they are unethical and stop them from training any new models using the same unethical practices, hold them accountable for their actions, and distribute the intellectual property and profits gained from existing models to the public, but models that are already trained can actually be used for good and I personally see it as unethical not to.

Sorry for the ramble, but it is a very interesting topic that should probably have as much discussion around it as we can get

Depends. Is it better to be "wrong" and burn all your goodwill for any future endeavors? Maybe, but I don't think the answer is clear cut for everyone.

I also don't fully agree with us being the "minority". The issue is that the majority of investors are simply not investing anymore. Those remaining are playing high stakes roulette until the casino burns down.

The market is nowhere close to being saturated.

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.

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.

[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

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 are outsourcing just as much as US Big Tech. And never mind the slow-mo economic collapse of UK, France, and Germany.

I'm not sure the claim "we can use good devs" is true from the perspective of European corporations. But would love to learn otherwise?

And of course: where in Europe?

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

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.

Please note, that there are some accounts downvoting any comment talking about downvoting by principle.

My experience with large companies (especially American Tech) is that they always try and deliver the product as cheap as possible, are usually evil and never cared about social impacts. And HN has been steadily complaining about the lowering of quality of search results for at least a decade.

I think your points are probably a fair snapshot of peoples moral issue, but I think they're also fairly weak when you view them in the context of how these types of companies have operated for decades. I suspect people are worried for their jobs and cling to a reasonable sounding morality point so they don't have to admit that.

Okay. When the hype cycle dies we can re-evaluate. Stances aren't set in stone.

>If you won't even lean into things like this

I'm sure Andy knows what kind of business was in his clients and used that to inform his acceptance/rejection of projects. It mentions web marketing so it doesn't seem like much edutech crossed ways here.

I suspect young people are going to flee the industry in droves. Everyone knows corporations are doing everything in their power to replace entry level programmers with AI.

Not everyone values that, but anyone who will say "just use an LLM instead" was never his audience to begin with.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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".

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.

taking a moral stance isn't inherently ideological

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.

> 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.

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.

There is also absolutely very tasteful products that add value using LLM and other more recent advancements.

Both can exist at the same time.

The only thing that's going to change is the quality of the slop will get better by the year.

Demand for AI anything is incredible high right now. AI providers are constantly bouncing off of capacity limits. AI apps in app stores are pulling incredible download numbers.

I wonder what their plan was before LLMs seemed promising?

These techbros got rich off the dotcom boom hype and lax regulation, and have spent 20 years since attempting to force themselves onto the throne, and own everything.

In my eyes, that's when the grifters get out and innovators can actually create value.

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.

No train, no gain.

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.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32184183

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

I wish I had Walmart in my area, the grocery stores here suck.

What about a functioning market is immoral?

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.

With that said, mister ants in the pants, what does actual mean to you in this particular instance?

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.