[HN Gopher] AI is ushering in a 'tiny team' era
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AI is ushering in a 'tiny team' era
Author : kjhughes
Score : 63 points
Date : 2025-06-21 18:21 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bloomberg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bloomberg.com)
| kjhughes wrote:
| https://archive.ph/YHr9s
| apical_dendrite wrote:
| When I worked at a startup that tried to maximize revenue per
| employee, it was an absolute disaster for the customer. There was
| zero investment in quality - no dedicated QA and everyone was way
| too busy to worry about quality until something became a crisis.
| Code reviews were actively discouraged because it took people off
| of their assigned work to review other people's work. Automated
| testing and tooling were minimal. If you go to the company's
| subreddit, you'll see daily posts of major problems and people
| threatening class-action lawsuits. There were major privacy and
| security issues that were just ignored.
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| Theres two types of software, the ones no one uses, and the
| ones people complain about
| hackable_sand wrote:
| Everyone should just write their own software then.
| apical_dendrite wrote:
| I've worked at a number of companies - the frequency and
| seriousness of customer issues was way beyond anything I've
| experienced anywhere else.
| golergka wrote:
| Really depends on the type of business you're in. In the
| startup I work in, I worked almost entirely on quality of
| service for the last year, rarely ever on the new features --
| because users want to pay for reliability. If there's no
| investment in quality, then either the business is making a
| stupid decision and will pay for it, or users don't really care
| about it as much as you think.
| geremiiah wrote:
| AI helps you cook code faster, but you still need to have a good
| understanding of the code. Just because the writing part is done
| quicker doesn't mean a developer can now shoulder more
| responsibility. This will only lead to burn out, because the
| human mind can only handle so much responsibility.
| crystal_revenge wrote:
| > but you still need to have a good understanding of the code
|
| I've personally found this is where AI helps the _most_. I 'm
| often building pretty sophisticated models that also need to
| scale, and nearly all SO/Google-able resources tend to be stuck
| at the level of "fit/predict" thinking that so many DS people
| remain limited to.
|
| Being able to ask questions about non-trivial models as you
| build them, really diving into the details of exactly how
| certain performance improvements work and what trade offs there
| are, and even just getting feed back on your approach is a huge
| improvement in my ability to really land a solid understanding
| of the problem and my solution before writing a line of code.
|
| Additionally, it's incredibly easy to make a simple mistake
| when modeling a complex problem and getting that immediate
| feedback is a kind of debugging you can otherwise only get on
| teams with multiple highly-skill people on them (which at a
| certain level is a luxury reserved only for people working a
| large companies).
|
| For my kind of work, vibe-coding is laughably awful, primarily
| because there aren't tons of examples of large ML systems for
| the relatively unique problem you are often tasked with. But
| avoiding mistakes in the initial modeling process feels like a
| super power. On top of that, quickly being able to refactor
| early prototype code into real pipelines speeds up many of the
| most tedious parts of the process.
| hnthrow90348765 wrote:
| They often combine front end and back end roles (and sometimes
| sysadmin/devops/infrastructure) into one developer, so now I
| imagine they'll use AI to try and get even more. Burnout be
| damned, just going by their history.
| ryandrake wrote:
| It seems like a more and more recurring shareholder wet dream
| that companies could one day just be AI employees for digital
| things + robotic employees for physical things + maybe a human
| CEO "orchestrating" everything. No more icky employees siphoning
| off what should rightfully be profit for the owners. It's like
| this is some kind of moral imperative that business is always
| kind of low-key working towards. Are you rich and want to own
| something like a soup company? Just lease a fully-automated
| factory and a bunch of AI workers, and you're instantly shipping
| and making money! Is this capitalism's final end state?
| mechagodzilla wrote:
| If anyone can pay-as-you-go use a fully automated factory, and
| the factories are interchangeable, it seems like the value of
| capital is nearly zero in your envisioned future. Anyone with
| an idea for soup can start producing it with world class
| efficiency, prices for consumers should be low and variety
| should be sky-high.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| If I'm buying soup, I'd prefer the manufacturer, the retailer,
| and any other part of the supply chain to be as efficient as
| possible, so they can compete in the market to offer me soup of
| a given quality at the lowest possible cost.
|
| An individual consumer doesn't derive any benefit from
| companies missing out on automation opportunities.
|
| Would you prefer to buy screws that are individually made on a
| lathe?
| mikeocool wrote:
| Personally, the best soups I've ever had were not made in
| kitchens that were optimized for efficiency or automation,
| they were optimized for quality.
|
| They weren't cheap soups, but they sure were good.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Quality is a function of the ingredients used and the
| correct preparation. Neither of these things are something
| machines can't do.
| awb wrote:
| Luxury goods and staple goods have distinct optimizations,
| both viable for generating profits and economic utility.
|
| A high end soup and an affordable soup might be serving two
| different markets.
| goatlover wrote:
| I'd prefer not to live in a fully automated society where
| shareholders and CEOs reap all the profits while the rest of
| us scrape by on just enough UBI to prevent a revolution.
| jack_h wrote:
| I don't understand this scenario. If everyone is on UBI
| then most people are essentially near poverty. Where are
| these CEOs deriving all of their profit from?
|
| I personally think a far more likely scenario is that small
| businesses of one or a few people become vastly more
| commonplace. They will be able to do a lot more by
| themselves, including with less expertise in areas they may
| not have a lot of knowledge in. I don't think regular
| employees today should see LLMs as competition, rather they
| should see it as a tool they can use to level the playing
| field against current CEOs.
| rightbyte wrote:
| > Would you prefer to buy screws that are individually made
| on a lathe?
|
| I don't think that was your point but pressed screws got way
| better properties than cut screws.
| delusional wrote:
| You're picturing a utopia at the limit of some idealized
| world. Try and take a second to return to planet earth.
|
| There will not be a "quality" dial that you get to tweak to
| decide on your perfect quality of soup. There will be
| graduations, and you will be stuck with whatever the store
| provides. If you want medium quality soup, but the store only
| carries 3 brands of soup (because unlike in your utopia
| somebody actually has to maintain an inventory and
| relationships with their supply chain) and your favourite
| brand decides to bottom out their quality. It's not "good
| actually" because of economic whatever. Your soup just sucks
| now.
|
| Oh but "the market will eventually provide a new brand" is a
| terrible strategy when they start spicing the soup with lead
| to give it cinnamon flavor or whatever.
|
| I'm not an ethereal being. I'm a human, I need it to be good
| now. Not in theory land.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| You describe three potential undesirable outcomes:
|
| - consolidation, such that there are only a few different
| choices of soup
|
| - a race to the bottom in quality
|
| - poisoning
|
| These are all possibilities under our _current_ system, and
| we have mechanisms (laws and market competition) which
| limit the extent to which they occur.
|
| What is it about extreme automation technology that you
| think will increase these prevalence of these issues? By
| what mechanisms will these issues occur more frequently
| (rather than less frequently), as production technology
| becomes more capable?
| Hammershaft wrote:
| Sounds unironically great if we could do it, the productivity
| improvements would allow dramatic improvements in living
| standards with moderate redistribution. I don't think this is
| where these llms are getting us.
| WXLCKNO wrote:
| I'm working on a bunch of different projects trying out new stuff
| all the time for the past six months.
|
| Every time I do something I add another layer of AI
| automation/enhancement to my personal dev setup with the goal of
| trying to see how much I can extend my own ability to produce
| while delivering high quality projects.
|
| I definitely wouldn't say I'm 10x of what I could do before
| across the board but a solid 2-3x average.
|
| In some respects like testing, it's perhaps 10x because having
| proper test coverage is essential to being able to let agentic AI
| run by itself in a git worktree without fearing that it will fuck
| everything up.
|
| I do dream of a scenario where I could have a company that's
| equivalent to 100 or 1000 people with just a small team of close
| friends and trusted coworkers that are all using this kind of
| tooling.
|
| I think the feeling of small companies is just better and more
| intimate and suits me more than expanding and growing by hiring.
| charliebwrites wrote:
| > Every time I do something I add another layer of AI
| automation/enhancement to my personal dev setup with the goal
| of trying to see how much I can extend my own ability to
| produce while delivering high quality projects
|
| Can you give some examples? What's worked well?
| jprokay13 wrote:
| If you haven't, adding in strict(er) linting rules is an easy
| win. Enforcing documentation for public methods is a great
| one imo.
|
| The more you can do to tell the AI what you want via a "code-
| lint-test" loop, the better the results.
| crgwbr wrote:
| Honestly the same is true for human devs. As frustrating as
| strict linting can be for newer devs, it's way less
| frustrating than having all the same issues pointed out in
| code review. That's interesting because I've been finding
| that all sorts of stuff that's good for AI is actually good
| for humans too, linting, fast easy to run tests,
| standardized code layouts, etc. Humans just have more
| ability to adapt to oddities at the moment, which leads to
| slack.
| malux85 wrote:
| For us it's been auto-generating tests - we focus efforts on
| having the LLM write 1 test, manually verifying it. Then use
| this as context and tell the llm to extend to all space
| groups and crystal systems.
|
| So we get code coverage without all the effort, it works well
| for well defined problems that can be verified with test.
| haiku2077 wrote:
| - Extremely strict linting and formatting rules for every
| language you use in a project. Including JSON, YAML, SQL.
|
| - Using AI code gen to make your own dev tools to automate
| tasks. Everything from "I need a make target to automate
| updating my staging and production config files when I make
| certain types of changes" or "make an ETL to clean up this
| dirty database" to "make a codegen tool to automatically
| generate library functions from the types I have defined" and
| "generate a polished CLI for this API for me"
|
| - Using Tilt (tilt.dev) to automatically rebuild and live-
| reload software on a running Kubernetes cluster within
| seconds. Essentially, deploy-on-save.
|
| - Much more expansive and robust integration test suites with
| output such that an AI agent can automatically run
| integration tests, read the errors and use them to iterate.
| And with some guidance it can write more tests based on a
| small set of examples. It's also been great at adding
| formatted messages to every test assertion to make failed
| tests easier to understand
|
| - Using an editor where an AI agent has access to the
| language server, linter, etc. via diagnostics to
| automatically understand when it makes severe mistakes and
| fix them
|
| A lot of this is traditional programming but sped up so that
| things that took hours a few years ago now take literally
| minutes.
| handfuloflight wrote:
| Even things that took days or weeks are being done in
| minutes now. And a few hours on top to ensure correctness.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| I worry that once I've done all that I won't have time for
| my actual work. I also have to investigate all these new AI
| editors, and sign up for the API's and work out which is
| best, then I have to learn how to prompt properly.
|
| I worry that messing with the AI is the equivalent of
| tweaking my colour schemes and choosing new fonts.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Definitely agree small teams are the way to go. The bigger the
| company the more cognitive dissonance is imposed on the
| employees. I need to work where everyone is forced to engage
| with reality and those that don't are fired.
| ujkhsjkdhf234 wrote:
| Instagram was 13 employees before they were purchased by
| Facebook. The secret is most employees in a 1000 person company
| don't need to be there or cover very niche cases that your
| company likely wouldn't have.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| A while back, someone here linked to this story[0].
|
| It's a bit simplified and idealized, but is actually fairly
| spot-on.
|
| I have been using AI every day. Just today, I used ChatGPT to
| translate an app string into 5 languages.
|
| [0] https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/superhuman-what-can-ai-
| do-i...
| stephen_g wrote:
| Hopefully it's better for individual strings, but I've heard
| a few native speakers of other languages (who also can speak
| English) complaining about websites now serving up AI-
| translated versions of articles by default. They are better
| than Google Translate of old, but apparently still bad enough
| that they'd much rather just be served the English
| original...
|
| I guess similar to my experience with the AI voice
| translation YouTube has, I've felt similar - I'd rather
| listen to the original voice but with translated subtitles
| than a fake voice.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Exactly. I wouldn't use it for bulk translations. This was
| literally, 4 words.
|
| What was useful, was that I could explain exactly what the
| context was, in both a technical and usability context, and
| it understood it enough to provide appropriate
| translations.
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| I think this is the beginning of the end of early stage venture
| capital in b2b saas. Growth capital will still be there, but
| increasingly there will be no reason to raise. It will empower
| individuals with actual skill sets, rather than those with fancy
| schools on their resume
| lmeyerov wrote:
| I think bar for b2c, prosumer, SMB, yes.. folks want to see
| fast revenue growth (vs eyeballs & ideas)... but enterprise...
| not as much, and that's half the b2b market
|
| Reverse there afaict, enterprise + defense tech are booming. AI
| means get to do a redo + extension of the code automation era.
| It's fairly obvious to buyers + investors this time around so
| don't even need to educate. Likewise, in gov/defense tech,
| palantir broke the dam, and most of our users there have an
| instinctive allergic reaction to palantir+xai, so pretty
| friendly.
| nemothekid wrote:
| I'm not entirely convinced this trend is because AI is letting
| people "manage fleets of agents".
|
| I do think the trend of the tiny team is growing though and I
| think the real driver were the laysoffs and downsizings of 2023.
| People were skeptical if Twitter would survive Elon's massive
| staff cuts and technically the site has survived.
|
| I think the era of the 2016-2020 empire building is coming to an
| end. Valuing a manager on their number of reports is now out of
| fashion and theres now no longer any reason to inflate team
| sizes.
| simonw wrote:
| I think the productivity improvement you can get just from
| having a decent LLM available to answer technical questions is
| significant enough already even without the whole Agent-based
| tool-in-a-loop thing.
|
| This morning I used Claude 4 Sonnet to figure out how to build,
| package and ship a Docker container to GitHub Container
| Registry in 25 minutes start to finish. Without Claude's help I
| would expect that to take me a couple of hours at least... and
| there's a decent chance I would have got stuck on some minor
| point and given up in frustration.
|
| Transcript:
| https://claude.ai/share/5f0e6547-a3e9-4252-98d0-56f3141c3694 -
| write-up: https://til.simonwillison.net/github/container-
| registry
| jordanb wrote:
| Eh I felt that way about the internet in 2010s. Seemed like
| virtually any question could be answered by a google query.
| People were making jokes that a programmer's job mostly
| consisted of looking things up on stack overflow. But then
| google started sucking and SO turned into another
| expertsexchange (which was itself good in the 2000s).
|
| So far from what I've experienced AI coding agents automate
| away the looking things up on SO part (mostly by violating
| OSS licenses on Github). But that part is only bad because
| the existing tools for doing that were intentionally
| enshitified.
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| > expertsexchange
|
| My vote for the unintentionally funniest company name. I
| wonder if they were aware when the landed on it, or if they
| were so deep in the process that it was too late to change
| course when they realized what they had done.
| nemothekid wrote:
| I'm not denying LLMs are useful. I believe the trend was
| going to happen whether regardless of how useful LLMs are.
|
| AI ended up being a convenient excuse for big tech to justify
| their layoffs, but Twitter already painted a story about how
| bloated some organizations were. Now that there is no longer
| any status in having 9,001 reports the pendulum has swing the
| other way - it's now sexy to brag about how _little_ people
| you employ.
| TZubiri wrote:
| "and technically the site has survived."
|
| Only if you squint. If you look at the quality of the site, it
| has suffered tremendously.
|
| The biggest "fuck you" are phishers buying blue checkmarks and
| putting the face of the CEO and owner to shill scams. But you
| also have just extremely trash content and clickbaits
| consistently getting (probably botted) likes and appearing in
| the top of feeds. You open a political thread and somehow
| there's a reply of a bear driving a bicycle as the top
| response.
|
| Twitter is dead, just waiting for someone to call it.
| dboreham wrote:
| Like Johnny Depp in that movie..
| khazhoux wrote:
| You're gonna have to be more specific
| noman-land wrote:
| How come you put two dots instead of one or three?
| satvikpendem wrote:
| I read a few books the other day, _The Million-dollar, One-person
| Business_ and _Company of One_. They both discuss how with the
| advances of code (to build a product with), the infrastructure to
| host them (with AWS so that you don 't need to build data
| centers), and the network of people to sell to (the Internet in
| general, and more specifically social media, both organic and
| ads-based), the likelihood of running a large multi-million-
| dollar company all by yourself greatly increases in a way it has
| never done in the history of humanity before.
|
| They were written before the advent of ChatGPT and LLMs in
| general, especially coding related ones, so the ceiling must be
| even greater now, and this is doubly true for technical founders,
| for LLMs aren't perfect and if your vibed code eventually breaks,
| you'll need to know how to fix it. But yes, in the future with
| agents doing work on your behalf, maybe your own work becomes
| less and less too.
| JaggerFoo wrote:
| Some excellent ideas presented in the article. It doesn't matter
| if they all pan out, just that they expand our thinking into the
| realm of AI and its role in the future of business startups and
| operations.
|
| Revenue per employee, to me, is an aside that distracts from the
| ideas presented.
| TaylorGood wrote:
| It's true, especially with the "vibe" movement happening in real-
| time on X... "you can just do things" -- I am building ai app
| layers b2c/b2b and while I do have an ml technical co-founder, I
| am largely scaling this with AI from strategy, visuals to coding.
| For example, with Claude created a framework for my company to
| scale, then built an AI powered dashboard in cursor around it as
| the command center. At scale we don't need a team of more than ~5
| to reach 7 fig MRR.
|
| Greg Isenberg has some of the best takes on this on X. He
| articulates the paradigm shift extremely well.. @gregisenberg --
| one example:
| https://x.com/gregisenberg/status/1936083456611561932?s=46)
| delusional wrote:
| > 26. lots of first-time founders will build faster than
| veterans because they are more AI fluent/grew up on vlogging.
|
| Ahh yes, fantastic insights.
| runako wrote:
| AI gets top billing, but the assault via tax code on engineering
| employment is likely a bigger factor.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44226145
| spacemadness wrote:
| I think we're going to have to deal with the stories of
| shareholders wetting themselves over more layoffs more than we're
| going to see higher quality software produced. Everyone is
| claiming huge productivity gains but generally software quality
| and new products being created seem at best unchanged. Where is
| all this new amazing software? It's time to stop all the talk and
| show something. I don't care that your SQL query was handled for
| you, thats not the bigger picture, that's just talk.
| delusional wrote:
| This has been an industry wide problem at silicon valley for
| years now. For all their talks of changing the world, what
| we've gotten the last decade has been taxi and hotel apps.
| Nothing truly revolutionizing.
| altairprime wrote:
| The subhead makes a specific misstatement:
|
| > _Startups used to brag about valuations and venture capital.
| Now AI is making revenue per employee the new holy grail._
|
| The corrected form is:
|
| > _Startups used to brag about valuations and venture capital.
| Now AI is making_ rate of revenue growth _per employee the new
| holy grail._
|
| Specifically, as with all growth capitalism, it is long-term
| irrelevant how much revenue each employee generates. The factor
| that is being measured is how much each employee increases the
| rate of growth of revenue. If a business is growing revenue at
| +5% YoY, then a worker that can increase that rate by 20% (to +6%
| YoY) is worth keeping; a worker that can only increase revenue by
| 5% contributed +0% YoY after the initial boost and will be
| replaced by automation, AI, etc. (This is also why tech won't
| invest in technical debt: it may lower expenses, but those one-
| time efficiencies are typically irrelevant when increasing the
| rate of growth of income results in far more income than the
| costs of the debt.)
| neom wrote:
| One area of business that I'm struggling in is now boring it is
| talking to an LLM, I enjoy standing at a whiteboard thinking
| through ideas, but more and more I see push for "talk to the llm,
| ask the llm, the llm will know" - The LLM will know, but I'd
| rather talk to a human about it. Also in pure business, it takes
| me too long to unlock nuances that an experienced human just
| knows, I have to do a lot of "yeah but" work, way way more than I
| would have to do with an experienced humans. I like LLMs and I
| push for their use, but I'm starting to find something here and I
| can't put my finger on what it is, I guess they're not wide
| enough to capture deep nuances? As a result, they seem pretty bad
| at understanding how a human will react to their ideas in
| practice.
| lpa22 wrote:
| AWS, GCP and other cloud providers play just as large of a role
| in allowing for tiny teams. Used to need an ops team of 10+
| people to do all the stuff on premise that AWS can do
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