[acrooks]

I wonder if some of this output will take a while to be visible en masse.

For example, I founded a SaaS company late last year which has been growing very quickly. We are track to pass $1M ARR before the company's first birthday. We are fully bootstrapped, 100% founder owned. There are 2 of us. And we feel confident we could keep up this pace of growth for quite a while without hiring or taking capital. (Of course, there's an argument that we could accelerate our growth rate with more cash/human resources)

Early in my career, at different companies, we often solved capacity problems by hiring. But my cofounder and I have been able to turn to AI to help with this, and we keep finding double digit percentage productivity improvements without investing much upfront time. I don't think this would have been remotely possible when I started my career, or even just a few years ago when AI hadn't really started to take off.

So my theory as to why it doesn't appear to be "painfully obvious": you've never heard of most of the businesses getting the most value out of this technology, because they're all too small. On average, the companies we know about are large. It's very difficult for them to reinvent themselves on a dime to adapt to new technology - it takes a long time to steer a ship - so it will take a while. But small businesses like mine can change how we work today and realize the results tomorrow.

[AndrewKemendo]

This is exactly how it’s going down

Companies that needed to hire 10 people to grow, only need to hire 9 now

In less than 5 years that’s going to be 7 or 6 people

I’m doing more with 5 engineers than I was able to do with 15 just 10 years ago

Part of that is libraries etc have matured too but we’ve reached the point from a developer perspective that you don’t need to build new technologies, you just need to put what exists together in new ways

All the parts exist for any technology to be built, it’s about composition and distribution at this point

[mixmastamyk]

Curious, if you don’t mind mentioning what AIs you’re using (besides the obvious Claude, etc) and what for to augment your reach?

[acrooks]

I think it's important to start with identifying your bottlenecks, and work from there to determine the solutions you need. In the case of our business, I feel that my time is best spent talking to customers and prospects. These discussions directly impact revenue, retention, product strategy, etc.

So then I start thinking ... what sort of things am I doing that take me away from talking to customers? I spend a lot of time on implementation. I spend a lot of time on administrative sales tasks (chasing people for meetings, writing proposals, negotiating contracts). I spend a lot of time on meeting prep and follow-up. And many more. So I'm always on the hunt for tools with a problem already in mind.

In terms of specific tools...

Claude is a great backbone for a lot. Both the chatbot but also the API. I use the chatbot to help me write proposals and review contracts. I used it to write scripting to automate our implementation process which was once quite manual and is now a button click.

Cursor has been a game changer. In particular, it means that we spend very little time on bugfixes and small features. This keeps my CTO almost 100% focused on big picture needle-moving projects. We are now doing some research into things like Codex/Claude Code to see how we could improve this further.

Another app that I really love is called Granola. It automatically joins all of my meetings, writes notes, reminds me what promises I made, helps me write follow-up emails, and helps me prep for meetings.

Finally, we use an email client called Sedna (disclaimer: I used to work at Sedna) which is fully programmable. We've been building our own internal tooling (leveraging the Claude API) on top of Sedna to help automate different workflows. For example, my inbox is now perfectly prioritised. In many cases, when I receive emails from customers, an AI has already written a draft that I can review and send. I know there are a lot of out-of-the-box tools out there like Fyxer to help with things like this, but I've really appreciated the ability to get exactly what we want by building certain things ourselves.

[aitchnyu]

Do existing teams (and ossified office politics) benefit from n-times faster devs? I witnessed (implied) Gantt charts so shaped that shrinking dev activities won't shrink the chart.