Hard to have sober talk about this since a lot of discourse is AI psychosis vs. AI naysayers. Does software quality seem to have taken a jump in the past few years to anyone? Not to me, seems to be getting worse. Think that's a decent signal. Can tell you I'm dealing with a non-technical VP who loves blast submitting vibe-coded PRs and while there's some quick wins, overall quality is bad, and we had our first real production outage that Claude one-shot caused but could not one-shot solve.
There's an acceleration of current known processes that is being referred to as agent speed (vs human speed). But this is purely a mechanical effect. There don't seem to be augmentive cognitive effects. "AI has invented this revolutionary algorithm/workflow/architecture" is an article title you'd expect to see pop up quick, and often.
We sound similar, I've had some adventures on AngelList. Made an absolute killing, back when that was possible.
My total lifetime "ate it" figure is only $2k, and even that one the client kind of eventually offered to pay, but I just let it be because I wanted to put as much distance between myself and them for other reasons.
Best advice in the article? "Trust your gut". If something feels vaguely off, I walk away immediately. I can see those non-paying incubators coming a mile away. Biggest indicator beyond gut: do they have existing contractors who seem happy? Ask them pointblank if they're getting paid. Easy as that. And of course, if they are paying you, but then stop paying you, or delay paying you, then stop work immediately.
Prescribed workflows apply solutions from the wrong direction.
Determine what's impeding your organization, devise a solution.
The last guy I encountered who evangelized something like this had smart frames and a Lovecraft anthology prominently perched in the background of his Zoom shot.
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