Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | odyssey7's commentslogin

The need to teach people what setting does what is a sort of consulting moat that AI dismantles when it can access the right context.

They don't make any of the documentation for those settings easy to find or understand because the support contracts make them so much money.

Before, that could create a moat.

Soon, it will be table stakes to put scattered internal communications, notes, documents into an AI’s knowledge base, where the information can no longer hide.

When that fails, the AI can read the code itself, so that the settings and how to change them are easily explained in simple terms. Actually, this is possibly even better than letting the scattered internal information serve as an intermediate layer.


That works for small customers who actually want to spend time customizing things themselves. Big customers love having to sign support contracts, because it gives them someone to blame when something goes wrong. Nobody else gets to touch any of the settings or knobs to avoid breaking anything.

Being big is the actual moat.


The fact that a work of satire that stimulated interesting discussion has been flagged is telling.

We can’t have dissent around here.

I want to understand how AI leads to this outcome.

I think it's to do with the bottleneck shifting away from code generation and towards specifying and reviewing and integrating code. The process of working with AI agents to produce specs, tech specs, code, and reviews lends itself more to a flow-based structure (like kanban).

Bear in mind this is a B2B enterprise company with a mix of legacy and greenfield. And management has invested heavily into designing a robust spec/context-based workflow for using agents. Might be different elsewhere.

Personally I don't think scrums, planning, retros etc were better than kanban even before AI, at least if you have switched-on, motivated and smart people on your team. They actually made things less agile, and story-points give a false sense of predictability. Imo the crucial factor may be that AI agents are smart and switched-on (with the right context).


Its a good excuse to move away from a shitty process, I'll take it! Fuck SCRUM, fuck Agile. No one was doing it anyway. I had to quit an Agile job because I was shipping shit without ever getting a lick of feedback, and this was not some webdev low stakes work, it was for planning expensive real world installations.

It’s a compelling story; but what you’re describing is, to the turkey, a black swan event, rather than an obvious inevitability that all the other turkeys keep telling the turkey is going to happen.

Years ago when you went into computers, you didn't have normies warning you that one day computers will program themselves? 20 years ago, nobody could tell you if this would happen in 20 years or 200 years, but I do believe there has been a general sense of this sort of thing happening eventually.

Yeah, and the lesson is ... don't be a turkey :D

It's not a certainty, but if you're not prepared for an extreme event, it can be ouch.


Is the Bay Area really dealing with ticket machines? The global capital of technology? Just bill by plate or something.


The global capital of technology has absolute horrid infrastructure and is not on the forefront of any municipal technologies.

There's a big disconnect from people building new projects and local governance, and it's growing. When tech companies started even providing buses for their employees, because local government is too fractured and incapable of running needed bus routes, and can not coordinate across county and city borders, local activists were extremely upset that tech workers were not driving their personal cars and instead using environments-saving and traffic-reducing transit.


I got billed by plate at gravel parking lots in places in Iceland where there were probably more sheep nearby than human residents. Embarrassing.


Or develop 12 competing apps that each only work in different lots.


A fellow Swede I presume?

It's extra silly cause I once parked in central Oslo and got the ticket mailed to my sthlm address. No fuss, no problem, super easy!

We got a lot to learn from our neighbours....


No not a Swede at all this is funny! That was my experience parking in the Washington, DC area last year.


Super easy unless you have moved recently, then you don't get the bill and end up years later in collections for the original amount plus a million late fees added on.


Nah it arrives electronically to kivra, which is like email except you log in with your social security number and it's only for "official business" like invoices and whatnot.


Unfortunately here in the US we are pathologically incompetent.

One day we will attempt to roll out such a system. We'll pay McKinsey billions to develop and operate it, set no targets, and they will take the money and disappear for 10 years, and then deliver some unusable website developed by one offshore developer.


That sounds great! In the US the phrase you used "mailed to my sthlm address" would never mean anything other than physically sending a paper bill to your house.


Yeah I phrased that wrong. I wanted to emphasize that I don't live in Norway. I found it extra impressive that it worked so seamlessly even with a foreign car. Oh well.


The reasons why the Bay Area is the global capital of technology are absolutely totally unrelated to the quality of infrastructure or the policies of local government there.

It’s mainly due to the state of US technological advancement decades ago when the whole thing got started, the general US-level business-friendly environment, and the presence of an extremely prestigious (especially in science and tech fields) university nearby.


The specific reason is that William Shockley's mother lived in Palo Alto. Stanford gets the credit but in reality it had nothing to do with the decision.


I would bill by ticket machine too if it was my job to collect money on the parking. I’m guessing that the amount of people who never pay is much higher than zero so it really only makes sense when you have such high throughput that the slowdown is detrimental (such as the Bay bridge).


Works of art are the original NFTs? Pricing is meme-like, though over longer timescales.


Quick! We have to approve all the nuclear plants for AI now, before efficiency from optimization shows up


Check into panpsychism.


The use of exotic means actually places a signature on the work.

Plausible deniability is avoided, so that a clear example is presented for other would-be challengers.


It’s great marketing though


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: