With farming, you couldn't just start your own farm, because it requires farmland, and there's only so much of that. But those 6 software engineers can start their own companies, fire up their own team of agents. There's no limit to how many companies can exist in the world.
No I watch/listen to a lot of entrepreneurial stuff since 2016 and I still haven't launched my own product. There's a YT channel "Starter Story" it's like "this person make $100K/mo, here is the template".
It really is simple though, put a paypal button on a squarespace page and ask someone to pay it.
Yeah pretty much. Have you seen Polsia and its ilk? Maybe "trivial" would be too strong a word but... in 2026 it's not hard.
That's my point. You couldn't tell an unemployed farm worker to go start their own farm. They probably don't have the land or substantial capital it takes. But an unemployed software engineer just doesn't need anything like that to go into a business built on AI.
This may seem like an important change that's making things different today, but it's not. Farms back in the day were constrained by supply, software today is constrained by demand.
A farmer couldn't create a farm from nothing, but if you had one, you very likely were able to sell its products - everyone always wants to eat. That is in addition to the natural benefit of being able to use the food grown there to survive all on their own, being your own guaranteed consumer.
A software developer can create software from nothing, but who is going to buy it? There's not enough consumers and problems in the world for everyone to have their own specialized business that is able to thrive. Someone is always going to be left out. It's not like food.
It's like as if a farmer was able to conjure up a farm for free, but there is such an abundance of farms that to sell the crops to anyone, you'd need the help of a bigger business, or try to cultivate very specialized and niche crops that are not being made by one of the mega-farms, yet.
software today is heavily, heavily constrained by supply. demand is basically infinite for actually good software that solves problems people have (and people always have problems).
I recently started having my AI assistant help clean up my email gradually. (Using stumpy.ai for what it's worth.)
The way I do it is every morning we go through recent emails in my inbox one at a time. If I want to mark it as spam, delete it, add it to my calendar, whatever, I explain to the agent why in detail. Over time it builds up an understanding of how I handle a lot of things, it needs to show me less and less, and it handles more and more on its own.
I also told the assistant to check my email on its own once per hour and auto-action what it can. That helps keep junk from building up, and it alerts me via SMS if something high priority shows up (e.g. user reporting a bug).
Point is there was never a point where it just ran for a long time and magically cleaned everything up just how I'd have wanted. I have like 7k emails in my inbox, that wouldn't be practical. But the number is going down now gradually, instead of up. I've had a chance to teach it and let it establish trust that it's doing things the right way. Which feels safer.
this is the approach that actually makes sense to me. gradual trust not yolo from day one. curious though, can you see what it learned about your patterns or is it a black box? like if it starts auto-archiving something you actually wanted, how do you debug that
Agreed. People aren’t ready for this, even (maybe especially) on HN.
Everyone’s hung up on how nobody really does waterfall. Or course. But a LOT of people are vibing their code and making PRs and then getting buried in code reviews. Just like the article says, you can’t keep up that way. Obviously. Only agents can review code as fast as agents write it. But I find as of recently that agents review code better than people now, just like how they write it better. Gotta lean into it!
> They don't know that the reason you price things the way you do is rooted in a competitive dynamic that never got written down anywhere.
So maybe you should write it down?
I see this going differently than they do. An exoskeleton that makes you 5% stronger is not a game changer. Companies that lean fully into agents won’t just be “humans, but a little better.” They’ll move orders of magnitude faster, make decisions in less time, do it ask more efficiently. It will be no contest.
Depending on what you mean by claw-like, stumpy.ai is close. But it’s more security focused. Starts with “what can we let it do safely” instead of giving something shell access and then trying to lock it down after the fact.
For one thing they were just early. Whatever measurements people made of AI six months ago are invalid. It’s a different animal now.
Plus you get a wildly different payoff the more you can take humans completely out of the loop. If it writes the code but humans review, you’re still bottleneck. If it designs and codes and reviews and goes back to designing, and so on, there’s no effective speed limit.
Big businesses aren’t going to work that way though. Which is why we shouldn’t be looking to them as thought leaders right now.
That's because you're getting left behind. The technology is outpacing you because most likely you're not using it right. Also likely you're not in an environment that pushes you to use it right so you just give it half assed attempts, never putting the initial effort to up your game with AI.
At my company, if you don't use AI, you're productivity will be much slower than everyone else and that will result in you getting fired. The expectation is 3-4 PRs a day per person.
Bro no need to be snarky. You're not useless to the economy. You're in the process of becoming more and more useless. Unlikely to be completely useless but AI is for sure eating away your job. Denying it and acting like this is just delusional coping.
I'm not singling you out. This applies to all of us, you, me, everyone.
Author here. I've been a programmer for 25 years. Elixir, C, Ruby, PHP, Python, FoxPro. About a month ago I stopped writing code entirely and switched to designing through conversation with AI agents.
The 60x number is real but I know it'll be controversial. It's lines of code in a month vs. what I'd produce in a year by hand. Your mileage will vary. I'm not claiming everyone gets this. I'm saying the range of individual experiences is so wide that averages are meaningless.
Yes, this is another post about vibe coding. But it's a real product with real users at this point, more than a weekend project, and I think the health and communication effects are worth talking about even if the productivity claim doesn't land for you.
