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“I do believe that cost of producing code is approaching to zero, and that means hundreds or even thousands of offerings will exist in every shape, way and form we can imagine.”

What proportion of T does R need to be to see thousands of Ashbys appear?

Ashby is a good example to discuss because it is serious software for serious businesses, it isn’t a calorie counting app. Serious business expects so much more out of their suppliers than software, Ashby is so much more than a bunch of code.

So, a thousand people generate their own ashbys, then what? Are companies like Shopify and Ramp going to trust their ATS to some person who generated some software in a day?

I agree that the cost of building software has gone down a lot and that lowers the barrier to entry for building a software business. I completely disagree that the market could support even 10x the number of companies in each vertical, let alone 100x or 1000x.

You could clone Ashby today and go to Ramp and offer them a 50% discount on whatever they’re paying Ashby and there is zero chance you win their business. You could clone Ashby and the add 10x the features and go to ramp and offer a 75% discount and there is zero chance of you winning their business.

“What happens to the SaaS markets when the cost of code approaches zero?” … “Few people truly grasp how hard bringing a software product to market is.”

Are these related? The difficulty of bringing a software product to market has never been that it takes time to produce code. We’ve had the concept of MVPs for decades and pre-AI companies have raised hundreds of millions off of no code prototypes.

YC has always preached that you launch. Launch today. Launch as soon as is humanly possible. And learn. And iterate. You get something into the market as soon as possible. Spending years building the perfect software has never been the strategy pursued by technology startups, and not because of the time it takes, but because you need users to know what to build.

I think we could even go as far as to counter your argument. We know that constraints are powerful. Constraints force us to focus. Imagine you decide to build an ATS. You spend a bunch of money on Claude Code to generate hundreds of features, every little idea you can think of, you include it. You launch with the most complete ATS on the market. Ashby can’t hold a candle to the depth of your software. Do you have a better chance of success than if you had launched with a much smaller surface area, experimented, found the right area of focus, and iterated according to user behavior?

I encounter a lot of vibe coded software products that people are launching and I am not precious about code, a good product is a good product whether it was hand crafted over a decade by a thousand well paid programmers or generated in an afternoon by Claude Code from a laypersons prompt. I can name one single vibe coded product I pay for that is genuinely good software. All that the AI age has done is show that most of us absolutely suck at building products, and that even with free code, what we produce is garbage.

“How could the market afford to build and sustain each offering?”

I think you’re conflating build and sustain here. Nothing fundamental about business has changed. Sustaining a business isn’t about being able to generate code. Even in a world where code is free, how could the market sustain 10,000 Ashbys? Where are the customers coming from?

As a concrete example: how many customers does Jira have despite Linear being better software in every single way? Would generating 1,000 more Linears change Jira’s market position? Or Microsoft Teams, Teams is awful, there are so many better options. Will generating 1,000 more better options change Microsoft Teams’s position?

The subscriptions are not available to enterprise users. Enterprise users must pay per-token. A $200 subscription gives you roughly the equivalent of $1500 in per-token billing.

is this with a subscription or pure API billing?

oh come on, a paid shill?

Simon is very fascinated by AI and at times he can be a little too optimistic but he is generally balanced and his perspective evolves over time which can be seen in his writing.

Nerd who loves nerd things a little too much? Sure. Paid shill by Big LLM? Nah.

No, we know from the financials of these companies that API prices are close to being at cost and the individual developer plans are heavily subsidized (because they are roughly 10% of API cost per token[1]).

If plans were at cost and API pricing was marked up that would mean there’s a 90%+ profit margin on tokens and instead of raising money and talking about revenue, Anthropic and OpenAI would be talking about their obscene profits.

[1] the caveat is that the average plan user probably doesn’t use all of their quota, I guess maybe 30% is the average across all users.

That’s a very simplified view of HR. Human Resources does a lot of things. During the cash rich days a tech company HR department might end up doing a bunch of nonsense[1] but the fundamental value of the department is there and will continue.

HR is rarely involved in hiring decisions, that’s the responsibility of the hiring manager which is typically the new hire’s manager. At a very big company you might have HR screening applicants but that’s to save time for hiring managers.

[1] just as engineering ends up doing a bunch of nonsense when the money is flowing.

As people in tech we live very expensive lives but if you are in a major city and own your own home and have worked for a decade or more you probably have a lot more opportunity to retire today than you might think. Even with children, life can be much less expensive by moving to a low cost of living area. Often in online discussions about FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) high income people will discuss needing many millions to retire, but you can retire on less.

Switching industries is a romantic idea but it is very difficult, especially going from the tech world with big money to the normal world with small money. You can still work to keep yourself busy but thinking about it as retirement will better help you plan. Going part time in tech is usually more sustainable than trying to switch industries.

A good place to start is thinking about what you want from life without work. Where do you want to be? Where does your partner and your kids want to be? What do they want out of life? From there you can assess the financial needs and plan accordingly.

“Mythos Preview continues a long-term trend that we’ve been warning about for some time: within 6 to 12 months […]”

The only trend Mythos continues is Anthropic’s trend of warning that disaster is always 6 to 12 months away.

I thought you wrote the convincing explanation:

“One could argue that Groq’s datacenters alone could make them worth billions of dollars.”

Groq is a successful datacenter business with a high-revenue cloud product. That’s a compelling investment in its own right, right?

I could be completely off the mark but I thought the non-exclusive license was necessary because Groq’s datacenter business uses the technology already? Nvidia acquired the assets but Groq needed to retain rights to use the technology for their own product.

Hiring outside your network has always been difficult. A rigorous hiring process should be able to withstand the bad actors. Some people have a good eye for candidates, others do not. Impersonation should be the easiest problem to solve, i.e: if someone is claiming to be someone else based on their LinkedIn profile or website, you can ask that they verify it is theirs. If their profile itself is fraudulent, it will be obvious from their lack of connections and registration date. If you cannot confirm the person is genuine, move on to the next candidate. A good hiring process doesn’t pick people based on where they have worked.