Comment by atomicnumber3
3 hours ago
"many engineers have not yet tried things that became feasible over the last months"
I have heard this statement every single day for 2 years and yet we still have no companies compressing 10 years into 1 year thus exploding past all the incumbents who don't "get it".
Well, the GP mentioned
> if it’s a solo greenfield project
which is a pretty large caveat. Anecdotally, I've found my side projects (which are solo greenfield projects, and don't need to be supported to the same standards as enterprise software) have gained the boost the GP was talking about.
At work, it's different, since design, review, and maintenance is much more onerous.
If you want an example of a project that condensed 5 years into 6 months and exploded past the competition I suggest looking at OpenClaw.
The first line of code was written on November 25th. It achieved adoption in the "personal agents" space that far exceeded the other companies that had tried the same thing.
(Whether or not you trust the quality of the software you can't deny the impact it had in such a short time. It defined a new category of software.)
Ideally, the given example would be something not ajacent to the presently white-hot category of "AI agents".
Like, look at e.g. YC minus the AI and AI ajacent companies. Are those startups meaningfully more impressive or feature-rich as compared to a couple years ago?
> It defined a new category of software
Which is exactly why you can't use it as an example, there is no control. This is basic stuff.
OpenClaw is definitely not a "5 years" project pre-AI though. That was more like a month of greenfield work compressed into a weekend -- which is still really impressive, don't get me wrong! -- but I think the point is we're not seeing mature, legacy codebases get outcompeted by new, agile, AI-driven codebases; we're seeing greenfield projects get spun up faster. Which, again, is still impressive and valuable.
If agents could really compress 10 years of development into 1 year, you'd see people making e.g. HFT platforms and becoming obscenely rich, not making a fun open-source project and getting hired by OpenAI as an employee.
You're framing it like the only barrier to writing wildly successful money printing software is software development skills.
If that were true, all of these anti-AI greybeards who have been in the game for 30 years would all own their own jets.
Its trash vibecoded markdown files around pi. This exemplifies well what op’is saying. We are at the ICO stage of llms. Hopefully there wont be an nft one
As much as I love to hate on AI: even the bad apples still produce something that one can reasonably work with.
Cryptocurrencies? Barely any other use than money laundering, buying drugs and betting on the outcome of battles in war. And NFTs? No use at all other than money laundering and setting money ablaze.
I don’t see OpenClaw making much of an impact. Maybe in your bubble?