Sorry to hear about the customer churn, but the MCP-first strategy makes sense to me and seems like it could be really powerful. I also suspect that the bring your own agent future will be really exciting, and I've been surprised we haven't seen more of it play out already.
Agree there will be a place for no-code and low-code interfaces, but I do think it's an open question where the value capture will be--as SaaS vendors, or by the LLM providers themselves.
It would probably have been more accurate to say "the cost of writing code" -- and you're totally right about the rise of other duties (and technologies) that expand to fill that gap.
As a dev team, we've been exploring how we grapple with the cultural and workflow changes that arise as these tools improve--it's definitely an ongoing and constantly evolving conversation.
This is a good example, but the build vs buy decision in this case also includes viable open source options, which become even more attractive when LLMs reduce the implementation + maintenance barriers.
Great point, and I agree the catch-all nature of the category feels overly broad. At our company, we've felt this shift most clearly on the app-building side so far but I'm curious to see how the low-code data applications fare as context windows grow and the core LLM providers improve their collaboration tools, governance, and improve the UX of on demand app creation. And nice to see you, too!
The rails metaphor is especially weak here. The author's argument conflates the idea of rejecting an established field of knowledge outright with Altman's critique of the absolute way in which some ideas have become taboo in society.
WaPo has been running Instant Articles for a while, as have a few dozen partners. What's changed is that with general availability, media distribution is going to change profoundly in the coming months.
For what it's worth, releasing something and finding little or no adoption of the product is often where the interesting learning begins.
I can't tell you whether or not it's worth pursuing, but I know that in my own experience it was. Our team spent almost a year building and launching a product that we ultimately shut down. We could have stopped and gone back to our day jobs, but the silver lining is that the core technology became the foundation for our current (seemingly unrelated) company.
While the now-forgotten product we launched was a failure, pushing past that resulted in a product that has been far more successful (funding, product-market fit, etc). There's no guarantee you'll pivot into success, but there's zero chance you will succeed if you stop iterating.
Like most "Uber for X" companies, there will certainly be details to sort out in the short term, but a service that efficiently connects two sides of an otherwise obscure market has a strong chance of succeeding.
I'd be really curious to see best practices for smaller startups. We've never been hit with a DDOS, but bot attacks seem pretty commonplace. I'd love to see the open source community come together to create some mitigation strategies, though I admit I don't know what they would entail.
On a positive note, now I have a full year before online tech media wastes an entire day highlighting products that don't exist, and why they are so funny. They don't seem to have grasped that explaining a joke kills the humor...
Agree there will be a place for no-code and low-code interfaces, but I do think it's an open question where the value capture will be--as SaaS vendors, or by the LLM providers themselves.