AI is ushering in a 'tiny team' era

https://archive.ph/YHr9s

One area of business that I'm struggling in is now boring it is talking to an LLM, I enjoy standing at a whiteboard thinking through ideas, but more and more I see push for "talk to the llm, ask the llm, the llm will know" - The LLM will know, but I'd rather talk to a human about it. Also in pure business, it takes me too long to unlock nuances that an experienced human just knows, I have to do a lot of "yeah but" work, way way more than I would have to do with an experienced humans. I like LLMs and I push for their use, but I'm starting to find something here and I can't put my finger on what it is, I guess they're not wide enough to capture deep nuances? As a result, they seem pretty bad at understanding how a human will react to their ideas in practice.

I'm working on a bunch of different projects trying out new stuff all the time for the past six months.

Every time I do something I add another layer of AI automation/enhancement to my personal dev setup with the goal of trying to see how much I can extend my own ability to produce while delivering high quality projects.

I definitely wouldn't say I'm 10x of what I could do before across the board but a solid 2-3x average.

In some respects like testing, it's perhaps 10x because having proper test coverage is essential to being able to let agentic AI run by itself in a git worktree without fearing that it will fuck everything up.

I do dream of a scenario where I could have a company that's equivalent to 100 or 1000 people with just a small team of close friends and trusted coworkers that are all using this kind of tooling.

I think the feeling of small companies is just better and more intimate and suits me more than expanding and growing by hiring.

This may date me, but it feels like 1999 again where a small startup can disrupt an industry. Not just because of what LLMs can do in terms of delivered product, but because a small team can often turn on a problem so much faster than a big one can. I really hope that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of three to five person companies forming in basements right now ready to challenge the big players again.

I'm not entirely convinced this trend is because AI is letting people "manage fleets of agents".

I do think the trend of the tiny team is growing though and I think the real driver were the laysoffs and downsizings of 2023. People were skeptical if Twitter would survive Elon's massive staff cuts and technically the site has survived.

I think the era of the 2016-2020 empire building is coming to an end. Valuing a manager on their number of reports is now out of fashion and theres now no longer any reason to inflate team sizes.

> "Ushering in a new era."

It's ushering in a new era of valley bullshit. If only journalists tried to falsify their premise before blindly publishing it.

> Jack Clark whether AI’s coding ability meant “the age of the nerds” was over.

When was the "age of the nerds" exactly? What does that even mean? My interpretation is that it means "is the age of having to pay skilled programmers for quality work over?" Which explains Bloomberg's interest.

> “I think it’s actually going to be the era of the manager nerds now,” Clark replied. “I think being able to manage fleets of AI agents and orchestrate them is going to make people incredibly powerful.”

And they're all going to be people on a subscription model and locked into one particular LLM. It's not going to make anyone powerful other than the owner class. This is the worst type of lie. They don't believe any of this. They just really really hate having to pay your salary increases every year.

> AI is sometimes described as providing the capability of “infinite interns.”

More like infinite autistic toddlers. Sure. It can somehow play a perfect copy of Chopin after hearing it once. Is that really where business value comes from? Quickly ripping other people off so you can profit first?

The Bloomberg class I'm sure is so thrilled they don't even have the sense to question any of this self serving propaganda.

I think we’re going to have to deal with the stories of shareholders wetting themselves over more layoffs more than we’re going to see higher quality software produced. Everyone is claiming huge productivity gains but generally software quality and new products being created seem at best unchanged. Where is all this new amazing software? It’s time to stop all the talk and show something. I don’t care that your SQL query was handled for you, thats not the bigger picture, that’s just talk.

AI helps you cook code faster, but you still need to have a good understanding of the code. Just because the writing part is done quicker doesn't mean a developer can now shoulder more responsibility. This will only lead to burn out, because the human mind can only handle so much responsibility.

I read a few books the other day, The Million-dollar, One-person Business and Company of One. They both discuss how with the advances of code (to build a product with), the infrastructure to host them (with AWS so that you don't need to build data centers), and the network of people to sell to (the Internet in general, and more specifically social media, both organic and ads-based), the likelihood of running a large multi-million-dollar company all by yourself greatly increases in a way it has never done in the history of humanity before.

They were written before the advent of ChatGPT and LLMs in general, especially coding related ones, so the ceiling must be even greater now, and this is doubly true for technical founders, for LLMs aren't perfect and if your vibed code eventually breaks, you'll need to know how to fix it. But yes, in the future with agents doing work on your behalf, maybe your own work becomes less and less too.

AWS, GCP and other cloud providers play just as large of a role in allowing for tiny teams. Used to need an ops team of 10+ people to do all the stuff on premise that AWS can do

It’s true, especially with the “vibe” movement happening in real-time on X… “you can just do things” — I am building ai app layers b2c/b2b and while I do have an ml technical co-founder, I am largely scaling this with AI from strategy, visuals to coding. For example, with Claude created a framework for my company to scale, then built an AI powered dashboard in cursor around it as the command center. At scale we don’t need a team of more than ~5 to reach 7 fig MRR.

Greg Isenberg has some of the best takes on this on X. He articulates the paradigm shift extremely well.. @gregisenberg — one example: https://x.com/gregisenberg/status/1936083456611561932?s=46)