The last 10% takes 90% of the work, and the last 1% takes 99% of the work and time. So sure you can get 80% of the way there, but that’s not the majority of the work. And you’re overestimating agency, we have had the internet for a long time, many choose to consume and a select few choose to produce and publish software and writing. There will always be a filter, the tools help but most people do not persist the roadblocks that come up.
Sure, I don't think everyone will do it. But it doesn't take that many to make a difference. It's more that the motivated people now *can* do it, not that everyone will.
There's also a softer version of this in which the composition of startup employees changes. Instead of most of them being mostly engineers, I suspect they'll be more balanced, where companies have one or two people who are very good at different functions: a couple marketers, a few engineers, and a few domain experts from whatever industry they're working in. The best companies could be ensembles like this, rather a bunch of engineers ramming at some problem with technology.
Yeah, I saw that this morning, and mentioned in the bit about vibe-coding toys. That's one of the things that really struck me about all this though - the stuff in that article is mostly about little helper apps and games for kids and stuff. It's kind of the equivalent of Squarespace, where they're more consumer tools than something for a professional. Though what I made was a hardly enterprise software, it's much closer to that than I ever thought it would've been.
The last 10% takes 90% of the work, and the last 1% takes 99% of the work and time. So sure you can get 80% of the way there, but that’s not the majority of the work. And you’re overestimating agency, we have had the internet for a long time, many choose to consume and a select few choose to produce and publish software and writing. There will always be a filter, the tools help but most people do not persist the roadblocks that come up.
Sure, I don't think everyone will do it. But it doesn't take that many to make a difference. It's more that the motivated people now *can* do it, not that everyone will.
There's also a softer version of this in which the composition of startup employees changes. Instead of most of them being mostly engineers, I suspect they'll be more balanced, where companies have one or two people who are very good at different functions: a couple marketers, a few engineers, and a few domain experts from whatever industry they're working in. The best companies could be ensembles like this, rather a bunch of engineers ramming at some problem with technology.
I love the name stochastic pig
Maybe you just need tobtaje your idea and PIVOT
oh there was a pivot joke in this at some point, but it didn't make the cut https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8w3wmQAMoxQ&t=80s
great and accurate
We're working on something special gAI ventures helping deep experts create agentic products that change the way people work.
Do they have to be agentic products though? Deep experts seem like they could also make pretty good analog saas products or whatever too.
As always Ben, spot on!
If you did want to effortlessly get account management and auth off the ground, you can just use what Cursor uses: https://workos.com/
Oh nice. Gah, it really does seem like you could build an almost fully real product with essentially no real engineers, which is...wild.
I wish more people knew this!!
Luckily Kevin Roose at NYT is talking about vibe-coding in the main press… https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/27/technology/personaltech/vibecoding-ai-software-programming.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=g&pvid=962567E6-E81A-4D8B-84EC-E13DED1311E6
Yeah, I saw that this morning, and mentioned in the bit about vibe-coding toys. That's one of the things that really struck me about all this though - the stuff in that article is mostly about little helper apps and games for kids and stuff. It's kind of the equivalent of Squarespace, where they're more consumer tools than something for a professional. Though what I made was a hardly enterprise software, it's much closer to that than I ever thought it would've been.
My favorite part is where you say “But what if anyone can?” And that’s the thing that needs to be explored…
Yeah, I wouldn't be at all surprised if more starts start tilting away from being mostly engineering teams and more domain-specific people.