The creation of downstream issues has gotten faster, in my experience. The rate at which shit is thrown against walls has also gotten faster.

Exactly. If you can free engineering capacity from tedious busywork (fixing bugs), you have them available for implementing/delegating to implement experimental features into new revenue streams.

Why fire anyone in this scenario? Growth is only going to keep coming.

> But I'm finding it hard to actually do any of that.

Based on experience of someone in my family, I ask: are you and your doctor sure that the mood stabilizers themselves aren’t making that hard?

“Circling this territory for decades.” Try millennia. The world is filled with hungry ghosts. Ask a Buddhist.

Try using spec kit. Codex 5 high for planning; Claude code sonnet 4.5 for implementation; codex 5 high for checking the implementation; back to Claude code for addressing feedback from codex; ask Claude code to create a PR; read the PR description to ensure it tracks your expectations.

There’s more you’ll get a feel for when you do all that. But it’s a place to start.

Unlikely that working a job leads to making as much money as possible.

The job I actually hate is white-collar crime.

All for one and one for all.

And I’m for myself.

We should just call it engineering. We got better tools. Big whoop.

But it's not engineering ...

Be on their best behavior according to whom? Else what?

When will these geezers age out?

How frequently is a technical moat the thing that makes a business successful, relative to other moats?

I mean, if taxi companies could build their own Uber in house I’m sure they’d love to and at least take some customers from Uber itself.

A lot of startups are middlemen with snazzy UIs. Middlemen won’t be in as much use in a post AI world, same as devs won’t be as needed (devs are middlemen to working software) or artists (middlemen to art assets)

But it's not technical, it's due to uber having spent incredible amounts of money into marketing.

It is technical :-) The Uber app is a lot more polished (and deep) than the average taxi app.

That's why you use Uber because the app has more depth and is more polished?

Most people use it for price, ability to get driver quickly, some for safety and many because of brand.

Having a functioning app with an easy interface helps onboard and funnel people but it's not a moat just an on ram like a phone number many taxis have.

No, Uber works nationwide but you'd have to download a Taxi app for every place you went and ... etc.

The economies of scale is what makes companies like Uber such heavyweights at least in my opinion

Same with AWS etc.

These guys are pursuing what they believe to be the biggest prize ever in the history of capitalism. Given that, viewing their decisions as a cynic, by default, seems like a rational place to start.

True, though it seems most people on HN think AGI is impossible thus would consider OpenAI's quest a lost cause.

I don’t think one can validly draw any such conclusion.