1. A number of media and substack articles about a Twitter beef that becomes a submarine article for Replit, Emergent Labs, and Taskade

2. A couple executives who may have not heard about these startups (this is actually very common outside the tech IC bubble) and will now ask their tech teams to contact them to see if they fit their needs

3. LPs who invested in YC by further reshoring Garry and YC's entire investment thesis.

> it wouldn't work on you...

It doesn't matter that it doesn't work on me - everyone does this form of narrative building (that's the entire point of Strategic Comms teams) so you have to play the game because that's how a Nash Equilibrium be.

Building a zeitgeist is a core part of demand gen, and yea it is transparent and tacky, but even 1 conversion for what was basically 1 hour of drafting makes the RoI positive.

The press nearly always obliges in the first year. It works for wars and pandemics, too. In the second year the first dissenters begin to show up. We are now in past the stage of opinion reversal, where the press and the public mostly hate "AI".

This is also why it is wrong to compare "AI" to the early Internet. After the Internet bubble burst, the public still liked the Internet.

LPs. Your LPs want to hear about how you are using their capital for A.I. If A.I fails 2 years down the line you will get to hide out in the crowd. Contrarianism in an institutional setting is actually very hard to do.

I always thought that NFTs were completely ridiculous and essentially nothing but hype. But then again, I thought that amazon wasn't going to work either, when I was there building it, so I'm not sure that even in a given individual "good intuition for breakthrough innovation" is a unitary thing.

So people will follow those with money (or that they perceive to have money) without much critical thought about where that is going to lead them, they're hoping for wisdom but may end up being misled. That's why all of these ultra wealthy folk turned on a dime when the political weather changed, they don't really have principles, they just want more zeros.

This is perhaps what most non-dev people don't get. Maintenance is a far more harder thing than building something. So you want to go slow when building things, not fast. Either way building things fast has been a solved problem for a while, people don't go fast not because we don't have tools, but there are other fairly valid reasons to go slow. This is true with so many other things outside of software. I guess its called 'haste'.

This is true for most things. Especially where money and life are at stake. But Im guessing you could extend this to anything where reputation is at stake.

Im guessing it doesn't apply to some start ups, but other wise every one is subject to this.

If I think about who's "site" HN is then PG or Dang are front of mind. I know Dang is /just/ a mod but he is who is visible. I've never once cared who actually ran YC, I didn't care when Sam Altman ran it and I don't care about Gary Tan either, they are 100% immaterial to the discussions that happen on this site IMHO.

Unfortunately, truth be told, most software is like that. Take Salesforce for instance - same issue. Granted, Zendesk niches at this painpoint you mentioned (and I've seen some enterprises switch from Zendesk to Salesforce and face the exact same issue as above), but their insane price increases after the PE acquisition does not inspire hope. UI-wise, Zendesk is still the best.

Speaking in metaphors: someone still needs to build the fixings, bricks, wires, pipes and tiles and paint and tools to put them all together someone has to still come up with the building.

I used to work in construction and I've watched the sophistication of all the pieces get better and better over time. Insulated floors, heated floors, push fit pipes, RCDs instead of fuses, better materials, resin driveways. I live in a new build house, I'm not nostalgic for a sandstone cave.

I've built some crazy things these past few months, I've got a voice control computer with head tracking mouse. Apart from the actual voice transcription model and the neural network model that works out where my face is, I could have built it all by hand. With enough data, I could probably have even made the face position model, but I simply wouldn't have taken these on. They just sound too monumental.

And then we've got the perfect is the enemy of the good. As programmers, we want to produce things that are better for everybody else. So when we start building a library we start considering how all the people are going to use it. Now simply don't care. If it's a bit rough around the edges it doesn't matter because it's for me. And if you want one for yourself, you can prompt it into existence.

I'm a component builder as well. And now I can build polished components that are great for future use. Not only that, they're fully documented. I just wish I wasn't pushing 60. I'm feeling the joy of being with my new computer - 15 again seeing more possibilities than ever.

I've faced serious burnout in this industry. Fed up of another round of read to database, write to database, present data from database. Spending days fiddling with forms, add this box, make this box bigger, that button's got the wrong text. Now I can just say those things out loud into a text box and switch to another text box and build something more complex.