> I think I could have been a pretty formidable startup founder had I been born five or ten years earlier.

I wish that I was born a thousand years ago

I wish that I'd sail the darkened seas,

On a great big clipper ship,

Going from this land here to that,

In a sailor's suit and cap,

Away from the big city

Where a man can not be free

Of all of the evils of this town,

And of himself, and those around.

- The Velvet Underground, "Heroin"

Yeah. 5-10 years? I estimate I was born 20-25 years before the author (based the about page, not sure how current it is). Yes, there was more opportunity for passionate software geeks because normies were still learning about the internets and the eternal september was just starting to cross the chasm from universities to, you know, the rest of the world. So there was more low-hanging fruit, and the common conception of "success" was much lower ($150k was a massive salary! $10M was a great exit!), but to actually achieve breakout success on the scale that I suspect this person is imagining, always required a level understanding human behavior and ruthless business acumen that most geeks just don't have. I also think AI benefits technically-minded, details-oriented people much more than anyone else. So basically if you would have been a formidable founder born 10 years earlier, I believe you can still be a formidable founder now.

as long as there are things in and our lives to improve, there are opportunities to build great companies that provide a lot of value

i dont think those exist purely in software anymore- but if you look around at say, the skyrocketing number of elderly and nursing homes (just as an example) there are probably dozens of ways to improve lives and make a good living there

and electronics and hardware has always been so difficult and expensive to get into- but with new infra and workflows and 3d Printing and getting stuff from China- it's vastly cheaper and easier to do a robotics or hardware startup than 20 years ago

there will always be opportunities!

Thank you for this reply. Needed this today

Agreed. I think there are people who like coding for the sake of it, akin to solving a puzzle. Then there are those who like building, and coding is a necessary step in that. The former are sad, the latter are happy.

It makes me wonder if the current app dopamine/gold rush will be similar to the Sora/MidJourney dopamine hit in 2023 or the AI "make me a story to make fun of my friend on Discord" dopamine hit in 2022. "We have never been able to make more images, movies and now apps... but they don't seem to have made a single killer art, film... or dare I say app?" Maybe just maybe, the novelty will wear off and people realize how artificial and soul-less these AI-tokenmaxxed app's are, with their temu Cyberpunk aesthetics, California minimalist Dashboard UX flow and mid-witted Rust stack.

I wonder what is the equivalent in 2026 of what Dave should do to be a human cosmonaut to go against the transformer VAE probability-based machine we call Claude.

> Now I can build those ideas as fast as they hit me.

That is the problem, why OP is so sad, you spam with your great ideas taking up the oxygen around him. AI is absolutely amazing when you use it for your own ideas and projects, and terrible when others do the same, raising the bar and making your own efforts look smaller. Have you read the open letter written by Fields medalists? They complain "the collection of good, fruitful open problems is now being mined in a non-renewable fashion".

A sad realization I've had is that even though we can create so much with the help of AI, what we're creating isn't the same as what it was before AI, even if the artifact is exactly the same.

Like immagine 200 years ago being able to produce a photorealistic depiction of a scene. Then, it would command you a reputation, a salary, you would have cultural prowess attached to your work, it would generate a legacy for yourself, etc.

Before AI, any cool project would give back so much more than after AI: experience, a following, a community coming around your project which could increase your social capital. It would even give you momentum, spending a long time working on something which would mark you as someone who works on that type of thing, which could lead you to interesting places.

Nowadays, these fleeting project ideas that you can grind out with AI have the effect of children's art projects: you feel a sense of pride at what you made, you like the way it looks, you may hang it somewhere, but no one else really cares, or if they do care, it's not for long.

There's an initial AI mania stage. It's when someone starts using AI to code and they come to think that they now have superpowers (and to some extent they do). I certainly had that mania and to some extent still do. There's a frenzy of working on 3 or 4 projects at once that's exhilarating. Even right now I've got Claude working on a couple of different projects and GLM-5.3-flash working on another. But I have to wonder how much of this stuff I'm co-creating with AI will actually get used.

This absolutely puts a lot of what I've been feeling into concrete, scientific terms, thanks!

This is the most apropos comment about this moment that I have read in months.

Well, even if the demand for software engineers ends up not going down, there’s going to be a HUGE downskilling. The things built might be more complicated, but that complexity will only be understood by the AI. (If we had to slow down so that humans could understand the code, all of the productivity benefits from AI would be lost.) The human might “understand the system at a high level and how things work together”, but why does that even matter? The AI can do that too… I don’t see a way where the human engineers provide value other than being liability meat shields.

And even if there ends up being some kind of new future SWE work that AI is bad at, how long would that last? People aren’t realizing that AI isn’t just a way to replace current human work, it’s a framework to replace all future human work too. Wouldn’t companies be tripping over themselves to feed AI as much data on this new task as possible, so that they can replace those human workers ASAP?

I don’t see a future where humans do long term meaningful software work unless AI improvement plateaus quickly or there’s some kind of regulation slowing down future AI training.

I agree, and I can provide a mechanism too - competition. AI makes imitation easier, anything you can point your agent at can be reimplemented with much less effort than the original took. So it becomes harder to stand out, we are losing our distinctiveness, our differentiated positions. And that is all we had.

A company, a product or job seeker the all need the same thing - to be picked - why would you pick me? That question is harder to answer today than in 2020. So it becomes a "musical chairs" moment. Everyone is panicking and scrambling for their own seat. This is how we get "new opportunities that didn't exist before" - we will strive to create new ways to differentiate ourselves. We could spend an enormous energy on that goal. But we can't predict what they will be no more than we can predict where the ball will be 1 minute later on the football field, it depends on what everyone else is doing.

The scary part for me is if the AI don't work on that level. But there is still too broad attempt to do it. We will end up with unmitigated mess of a disaster... Most likely with level of complexity that it is unsolvable without fully rebuilding it from ground up with human understanding...

And what if critical systems for our current way of living are involved. There is lot of sectors where such significant disruption would have very wide ranging consequences...

> I feel like the thing a lot of people are missing about the AI explosion is that there will be new opportunities that didn't exist before.

This feels like cope to me. So much of what "knowledge workers" do at all falls into a few buckets: we shuffle data around, we serve ads, or we provide tooling for those who do those things.

When the car came, the buggy drivers were screwed, but there were ultimately more cars (and hence work for people who supported them) than there could ever have been buggies.

What does AI give us "more" of, exactly? It makes everything simpler, and thus requiring fewer "knowledge workers" to plumb things in. After all, the need to shuffle data around is finite.

>we're going to be able to create systems that are far more complicated than anything we could make before

I think this is very true but I'm not excited about it!