As someone who has used Ashby pretty regularly over the last several years, I suspect I’m not alone in wishing they’d let the AI make the technical and product decisions.

It’s a product that feels like it’s designed and built by the C or D team. The slowness and bloat of Rippling with wild, fever dream interaction models and workflows that frustrate and confound.

(And enjoy fucking emailing them if you need anything at all: almost literally no self service paths exist in the app for account upgrades, adding on SAML etc. And I do mean that you have to email them—last I checked it’s a mailto: link, not even a form.)

> We have a blip in March / April every year; these cyclical patterns aren’t relevant to explain here.

The 'blip' post-AI is up ~30% for the months in question. There simply isn't enough data here to prove or disprove the thesis that "customer issues remain broadly stable" - you could equally argue something more along the lines of "AI engineering does not increase issues under ideal conditions but amplifies issues under external pressure."

I’d recently been applying for plenty of jobs that were hosted on Ashby. They had a tiny link to a form where you could opt out of having your resume processed by their AI system. Only it never worked. Submitting the form displayed a spinner and did nothing. Not sure if that was intentional.

I’m starting to come around to the belief that vibe coding isn’t engineering. Not saying Ashby is vibe coding. The post certainly says they’re super serious about making sure everyone understands every line of change. I wonder how they manage that in practice.

There are few empirical studies on the effects of informal code review, what most of us do on GitHub and Codeberg, on error rates. It’s not much. But a little side line mentioned that the effect we do have on error rates disappears the more code you read per hour.

So you used to have the 80/20 rule. 20% of your dev team is doing 80% of the work. Now we have a tool that enables the 80% of the team that manages to squeak by without doing a whole lot to… write a whole ton of code that the 20% now have to review… only if they read too much it’s not going to do a whole lot.

So I dunno. Seems like that combined with the come wave of price hikes we might see orgs talking about rolling back their AI usage later this year.

Can anyone tell me why Ashby is so en vogue in SV and also the rest of the world? My company recently switched to it and as an EM I feel... disappointed? What's so special about it to have yet another hiring system with VC money?

Just by the headline: are they doing layoffs?

UPD: surprisingly not

It just sounds to me like there's probably a 20/80 split between your "new rockstars" who are using AI to make huge messes that others will have to clean up and your "malicious compliance" types who basically still actually do the work but run up the company credit card to put a patina of AI on their normal work so that they won't get fired.

But, like, this is a model you can embrace without AI. Have some people make messes, have others clean them up.

> Our thesis is that the cost of producing code is heading towards zero. AI isn’t coming for our jobs, it’s coming for the mechanical parts of them: syntax, glue code, and the tip-taps of keystrokes. The parts that are less interesting, less challenging

The cost is heading to 0???? Do they not pay for Claude, Anthropic, OpenAI? Have they not seen the sudden price increases? Hosted locally LLMs still have electrical and server costs.