Reading the comments the author is basically "one with ai" where his life is deeply integrated with ai agents.
I have a friend exactly like that. And he has being doing it so long that he cannot even respond to a discord without asking AI "what do you think? what should I say? what do you think they mean?"
Full NPC mode, and it's really sad and scary.
You lose the ability to think. You lose all differentiation.
While I agree with your point that it's sometimes about getting things done, but your example is flawed. Your example about gas-powered street lights is arguing for technology evolution. But the people who say "AI have take the fun out of programming" are fighting for craftsmanship and love.
Nobody ever found craftsmanship or pleasure out of lighting up gas-powered street lights. But there are a lot of programmers that value "doing" programming because it's their craft or art-form.
I have never had a programming job. But I program all day to serve my customers for the products I created. Because it's my art-form. I love "doing" it (my way!).
It will get done. I just want to be the person to do it.
I have charged clients first before I start. Most in full, some in part.
The question "why would they trust me to deliver?" is a good one. And there are two answers:
1. How you sell will determine their trust level. In my sales deck, I have testimonials, case studies and the outline of our full process. By the end of the presentation, when I tell them the price, they expected $10,000, but it's only $4,000. I ask them to pay the 4k now. Or, pay 2 payments of $2,500.
2. If the prospect asks us to do ALL the work first, then invoice, I say the following: "if we do all the work first, it means that you have no skin in the game. In the past, that hurt my business because people would disappear after my team spent 300 hours working. For that reason, it's not our policy to do all the work first. We have 2 options."
Then, i end off by saying: "if that's a deal breaker, I understand and I will happy send you the plan for what you should do next if you want to go at it without our help"
I have been a "business co-founder" for many years. I learned to program at a professional level 5 years ago. Today, i spend most of my time as a "tech-co-founder".
Now that I am on the tech side (and argubaly, product development side), my value is through the roof. Here is what I mean:
- The business co-founder types will convince you that "selling" the product is the main thing. They are right. But sales starts with WHAT you build. That is, with product development. What you decided to build and what you are able to build is very much a part of the marketing.
- Selling a well positioned product (where position starts during product development) is much easier that 'force-raming' your product to people who do not want it. 'force-raming' is the main marketing skill most people have.
- Ideas mean absolutely nothing.
- Marketing is important but it's not hard to learn the important parts. In fact, I can give it to you right now: (1) start your marketing at product dev time. Decide which specific problem you will solve, then solve it, (2) Find a community to share your finished MVP to them. Don't just spam the community, join it for a while, make friends, chat, add to the conversation and (3) refine the early product with the early users from said community. Then supercharge marketing with some ads (FB or Google).
^^ this is the 0-1000 user plan. And developers can do this without a "business co-founder"
What is absolutely wild to me is how many developers build "developer focused tools". That is the red'est sea to swim in as a small dev because it's easy to build things you can use every day.
I have a lot of friends who build tools in book shops, martech, payments and other niches.
There are so many markets people. Most of them are unknown, and therefore, low comp.
"It’s quite natural to program in Haskell by building a declarative model of your domain data, writing pure functions over that data, and interacting with the real world at the program’s boundaries. That’s my favorite way to work, Haskell or not."
Are there any good resources you can share to learn this specific way of programming?
source?