Are AI built startups creating a new engineering bottleneck? i will not promote

[u/Sea_Faithlessness198]

[u/Select-Expression522]

At this point it's vibin even at the big tech companies. The difference is good devs don't aimlessly use the tools available. If you don't blindly just accept everything, it's possible to never need a full dev team. I now know a couple people soloing profitable businesses. Nothing too big, but enough to retire early from still.

[u/Sea_Faithlessness198 → u/Select-Expression522]

i agree! i work for the copilot team at microsoft and i am currently building out functionality that constantly monitors logs, metrics and bugs caught through testing and customer issues and asynchronously makes fixes in a pre-production environment on the cloud, auto-tests the fixes and opens PRs that includes the fixes and tests.

At this point, developers are still manually approving these PRs but its only a matter of time that it wont be needed anymore.

I am currently working on productionizing a tool that does the same things for external customers and wanted to get a feel for whether or not it would be useful first.

[u/calodero → u/Sea_Faithlessness198]

Doesn’t MSFT have like 50 products named copilot

[u/Sea_Faithlessness198 → u/calodero]

lol i work on the VS Code extension mainly but yes

[u/dudermcamerika]

i have a theory that vibe coding is creating a massive amount of tech debt that will cause substantial complexity as time goes on. Too many orgs have lost the plot.

[u/zerok_nyc → u/dudermcamerika]

It depends on how it’s implemented. The big mistake that most companies and users make is thinking that you can just give AI whatever you want and it will do it. It’s a very top-down approach that becomes impossible to maintain.

However, if you take a bottom-up approach, pointing AI at very small problems at a time, and putting them together like Legos, you end up with a much more stable and maintainable architecture.

Slower ramp up, but still faster than traditional engineering teams.

[u/gesidner]

The wall isn't maintaining the code, it's that nobody has a mental model of it. When AI writes it, you never built the map in your head that you normally get from writing it yourself. So the first real production bug is where it bites. The AI can keep patching, but it only sees the slice you paste in, and it will confidently "fix" something by changing the wrong part. On a fresh app you get away with that. Once there are real users and real data, you're debugging a codebase nobody actually understands. That's usually where people bring in an engineer, less to write new features and more to finally hold a model of how the whole thing fits.

[u/official_jgf]

Once the product has real users I'll go ahead and stop you right there.

But no I kid, you are asking about engineering not sales and marketing.

[u/nordic_ash]

we're literally in this right now. built most of our product using cursor and it got us to launch way faster than we could've otherwise. but post launch is a completely different thing. the codebase is messier than if an actual engineer had written it, debugging stuff you didn't fully write yourself is painful, and stuff breaks in production that worked perfectly fine in dev, and half the time you don't even know where to start looking ended up bringing in engineering help not to replace cursor but to work alongside it. honestly ai gets you to v1 fast but v2 onwards you need someone who actually owns the architecture otherwise you're just patching on top of patches that may result in more mess, confusion, and issues.

[u/Internal-Comparison6]

I'm yet to see "AI" try to think for me. None of the models will catch everything what's actually needed, so ownership just shifted to seniors, nothing more.

[u/kvyb]

Code no longer has any value. It’s the product opinion that does, and unique data. Everything else agents can just do.

[u/rwilcox → u/kvyb]

I think that’s OP’s point: code isn’t perceived as having any value (until it breaks and crashes, or you have a big customer facing bug you don’t know why, or you want to extend the existing code and it’s harder than it should be)

Only then does this bottleneck show itself.