jeffreyrogers

I think being able to read a spec and implement business logic to that spec is a basic coding skill, just like being able to read and summarize an argument is a basic literacy skill. If people are worse at that it means they are less proficient at programming than they used to be. It might not matter since LLMs are very good now and will continue to improve, but it's strange to see the quality decline.

I do a lot of interviews for my employer and anecdotally the current batch of college hires seems worse at answering the questions I give them than prior groups. I try to avoid leetcode style questions unless they tell me they've done competitive programming. Typically I ask a somewhat open ended question that requires implementing some complicated but not particularly tricky business logic. I used to be able to ask a few follow-up questions that added additional requirements but lately I've found candidates struggle to even finish the original question. It may not matter since the reality is LLMs could handle the sort of questions I ask just fine, but I do wonder what the long-term affects of this decrease in coding fluency will be.

If The Great Game you mentioned is the one by Peter Hopkirk, it's fantastic.

If you enjoyed those books I can highly recommend John Biggins' Otto Prohaska series, which I've seen described as "a techno-thriller set on a WWI submarine". Biggins books are really fun and well researched.

I recently finished George Vaillant's book Adaptation to Life and immediately picked up the follow up The Wisdom of the Ego. Vaillant is a psychiatrist and was a director of the Grant Study, which followed about 250 Harvard undergrads from college until they died.

Both books are largely about how the psychological defense mechanisms a person uses play a large role in determining how successfully they adapt to and navigate life.

> LLMs are stochastic and probabilistic

So are humans. Every codebase I've worked on has duplicated code that has been written in slightly different (but hopefully equivalent) ways, often by the same person.

Most managers don't read the code of their direct reports. They just trust that the code is "good enough" and that there are enough other processes in place to catch bugs before they cause too much damage. I think I'm a pretty skilled programmer, or I'm at least good enough at interviewing to convince other people of that, but it's pretty obvious from comparing LLM generated code to code I'd write myself that in many domains LLMs are superior to me. They do make mistakes, but so do I, and those mistakes are eventually found and corrected.

We're in the very early stages of LLM driven programming, so it's hard to say how it will all shake out, but my anecdotal experience is that LLM written software is very reliable and easy to extend and develop. I have a side project that is about 90% LLM generated code (about 25k lines of production code and a similar amount of test code). This is a revenue generating product and I've had no issues with reliability, security, or performance.

For what it's worth this app is a rails app and I have no plans to switch to anything else. Rails works nicely, the LLMs extend it easily, and almost everything is I/O bound so I don't need C++/Rust level performance.

I think there's aspects of this viewpoint that are true. I'm sure I'm less skilled at programming now in some ways than when I started using LLMs, but I'm a lot more productive and I can work on a broader variety of software than I could before. Writing probably weakened people's auditory memory, and calculators probably reduced people's mental math skills, but I don't think either are a net negative. It just requires some adjustment to get used to the new way things are. I also think my programming skills would come back pretty quick if I started programming without LLMs again, just as my leetcode skills come back pretty quick when I prepare for interviews.

People are still interested in chess even though computers are much better than humans.

Not really unique to VC, similar things are happening to private equity with secondary funds.

I rarely use image search, but I went to look something up recently and I was shocked at how many obviously AI generated images showed up. I couldn't even find an image of the thing I was looking for and eventually gave up. Bing has the same problem.

I do think it is kind of funny when VCs talk about how they can tell who will be a successful founder. They are picking the people who get to call themselves founders so it is close to tautological that who they think will be successful matches who ends up succeeding. You don't get to see the counterfactual world where the non-funded people get given money and then you see what personality distribution the successes from that group have. The problem probably is worse now since there are fewer IPOs and more companies exit in private transactions where it's not clear how much economic value was actually created vs how much is just what the investors agree the business is worth.

There's a trend in top MBA programs called entrepreneurship through acquisition (ETA) where you raise money to buy a business that you acquire through a mixture of debt and equity. Basically lets MBAs skip the building phase of building a small business and go right into operating it.

I run a small business on the side, and although I did a ton of preparatory reading and learning not much of it was useful in retrospect. Most of it you learn by doing and it's not that hard to learn. The top three things that were useful to me to learn were sales, basic accounting and how to read financial statements, and what metrics to track/manage with. You can learn the basics for all of those in less than a month.

My advice is just start. You are probably wrong about what the market wants unless you are selling a product or service that you know there is already demand for. Figure out what it is you're offering and try selling it to people. If they want it you figure out how to make it better, if they don't you try something else.

Edit: I had wanted to start a business for a long time. I thought I needed some tricky new idea to be successful. That's really hard to come up with since most new ideas are bad or are too hard to sell/explain to people. In my case it was also a form of procrastination since I had to wait for the right idea. Things got easier when I just picked an existing problem/industry and decided to do that with my own proprietary software to make it easier for me. I know a guy making a couple million a year from owning multiple tanning salons. There's a lot of opportunity out there that doesn't require any special insight.