We've been finding that as engineering becomes less about the code itself, it becomes more about deciding what to build. Which in our experience is limited by creativity more than anything else. What has everyone else's experience of these shifts been?
Man the dichotomy of you have autonomy to now you're a data labeler in a short span of time must be incredibly rough to deal with. How does culture recover after something like that...Anyone have thoughts when this bubble is going to pop? What a bananas time
But will look into this now, see if we can swap some stuff out. We’ve really liked the idea of an offline mirror, makes a lot of collaboration use cases simpler
The surprising part was that “AI-generated prototype” is not a single artifact type. Some tools emitted clean standalone HTML, some produced Vite/React apps that needed bundling and asset inlining, and some depended on hosted runtimes or CDNs enough that they weren’t truly portable. The result was 6 fully offline files, 1 HTTP-served case, and several tools that were effectively not self-contained.
I wish, but maybe it’s more fair to say how people think has changed. It’s like for these complex questions, they can break the problem down quickly into smaller functions, but implementing the functions is slow? Sometimes a non-starter? Idk, it’s different. Our old ways of interviewing aren’t working the same
We’ve added collaboration and communication as big facets in our hiring loop rubrics, and reduced the complexity of our questions. We also tell candidates this ahead of time - been honestly working pretty well so far, it indexes more on those soft skills and gives us just enough insight into the hard skills to make a call.
We’ve also been increasingly finding very few candidates know how to solve a complex question these days without LLM support lol. How are other folks changing their loops these days?
Disclosure: I wrote this as a founder of ProductNow. The last couple of sections highlight what we're building, so I wanted to be upfront about that. Though the broader thesis that software is becoming a utility and the physical world is the next frontier is something I think about all the time, independent of the company. I deeply feel that software is just a means to an end, so can we get back to solving problems that matter, here in the physical world? Curious what this community thinks, especially where the argument breaks down.
The single file is interesting, we’ve been observing something similar too. Do you have a specific prompt that you load in by default to make this work? Are these react files, or just pure HTML/JS/CSS? Aka do you compile it via Esbuild or webpack or something, or are you asking the model to generate something that works out of the box?
We’ve been seeing Claude artifacts sometimes come out as JSX or TSX
What are people doing with prototypes afterward? Do you end up shipping it as is to production? What about at work? Are the prototypes useful in that context?
I think we need to look past software and spend more time and energy on the physical world. Let the digital world just be a means to an end, and we spend more time and resources on problems that matter. Reallocate societal attention to the next frontier
Btw these posts are embedded documents from ProductNow. Been experimenting with more 2-way communication between writers and readers. What do you think? Useful?
Curious how other's have been driving alignment on their teams. We've been finding as AI sped things up, keeping people in sync has been increasingly challenging. We personally have found a doc-driven culture has been super helpful - what are other's trying?
Didn't quite get around to open sourcing the code, but I have some code snippets in there in case someone else is inspired enough to try. Curious what other's think? Seem like a fun genre?
Yeah I like that, there’s probably something to this full stack builder persona that could keep people motivated long term. So long as they feel ownership, seems like that’s a pretty good bet for long term engagement
Curious what other teams are doing to keep encouraging people to think critically about their code? I’ve been finding it harder to keep people motivated, keep them engaged with all the changes coming in. And I can’t blame them, it’s been overwhelming. Is everyone else just using more AI..?
I really think as code becomes cheap, misalignment between people, teams, and organizations is going to hurt a lot more, especially when everyone is trying to move at break neck speeds.
I also think a big piece of this is human attention and inertia. Aka, why bother doing the hard work to coordinate with others when you can just ship whatever you’re thinking. I think whichever organizations can figure out the human and cultural aspects to this will do phenomenally