[strgcmc]

To your last point -- I didn't say large number of junior contractors would write good code or whatever. The change that is happening in the startup scene now, as compared to say 10 years ago, is more about lowering the barrier to MVP and making it easier/cheaper for startups to experiment with finding product market fit, than anything to do with "productivity" or code quality or whatever.

We're probably just talking past each other, because the thing you care about is not the thing I care about. I am saying that, it used to cost some reference benchmark of $X/idea to iterate as a startup and experiment with ideas, but then it became 0.5X because gig workers or overseas contractors became more accessible and easier to work with, and now it's becoming 0.1X because of LLMs and coding agents. I am not making any sort of argument about quality being better/good/equal, nor am I making any sort of conversion chart between 10 interns or 100 LLM agents equals 1 senior engineer or something... Quality is rarely (never?) the deciding factor, when it comes to early pre-seed iteration as a startup tries to gasp and claw for something resembling traction. Cost to iterate as well as benefits of having more iterations, can be improving, even if each iteration's quality level is declining.

I'm simply saying, if I was a founder, and I had $10k to spend to test new ideas with, I can test a helluva lot more ideas today (leveraging AI), vs what I could have done 5 years ago (using contractors), vs what I could have done 10-20 years ago (hiring FTEs, just to test out ideas, is frankly kind of absurd when you think about how expensive that is). I am not saying that $10k worth of Claude Code is going to buy me a production grade super fantastic amazing robust scalable elegant architecture or whatever, but it sure as heck can buy me a good enough working prototype and help me secure a seed round. Reducing that cost of experimentation is the real revolution (and whether interns can learn or will pay off over time is a wholly orthogonal topic that has no bearing to this cost of experimentation revolution).

[steveBK123]

Yeah in this context I get what you are talking about. I got through your first paragraph and thought of the startup founders using overseas / gig workers a decade ago to test ideas.. which is exactly where you went!