[vanillameow]

I can't help but feel a little bit of ... pity for a lot of the people who call themselves "entrepreneurs" in this survey?

"I live hand to mouth, zero savings. If I use AI smarter, it may help me craft solutions to that cycle."

"Relaxing while my AI gets the work done, builds the wealth. It’s a shadow of me, just a very, very long one."

etc. I do believe AI currently accelerates businesses, especially in software dev. We work with a contractor who use Claude Code to reach incredible development pace for the size of their team, but also when we sit down with them in meetings they understand what's being created, they are able to argue their architectural choices, and they know how to propose business value.

You can't just buy a Claude subscription and have magically solve your problems. The thing is, as soon as Claude can do this without a business savvy human in the loop, then a) everyone can do it, so you won't actually have any value to propose, and b) Once the AI can run businesses without humans in the loop, you can bet your ass they will not out of the goodness of their hearts keep giving that ability away for $20.

In summary, AI if used to accelerate businesses _CAN_ be good. Buying it as a magic bullet to bring you out of poverty is probably a worse choice than just buying a lottery ticket.

[eloisant]

That really reminds me of the "mashup" bubble in the late 2000's, when all services started to provide API and people were calling themselves "entrepreneurs" for combining 2 sources of data, like putting craigslist ads on a map.

That didn't last long!

[darkwater]

Are you sure? We have many SaaS and final products which are just stitching together more SaaS. We have a very vocal part of the HN community always reminding you to buy a SaaS solution and connect it to your business instead of maintaining an in-house bespoke solution.

[nsnzjznzbx]

Isn't almost everyone doing that. Deploy docker to AWS connecting to Slack, Open AI and Anthropic to do X Y Z.

[agos]

that's like saying my job is to transfer money from my employer to the homeowner. Technically true but something else happens in the process

[nsnzjznzbx]

So you saying mashups were literally just connecting 2 things and selling it.

[vbezhenar]

I think that there's a "time window" right now, before most people realized the scale of AI. Those who jump there first, can monetize it. It certainly won't last forever, but you can earn some money while it lasts. And you will have years of AI-relevant experience afterwards.

[vanillameow]

Not incorrect, but it honestly borders on grifting a lot of the time imo. At least it's a spectrum. If you are supercharging your existing technical and domain knowledge, and actually caring about the security of your customers while doing so, fair play. That is real entrepreneurship.

Then there's people who are "well intentioned", I guess, but lack the technical knowledge. A friend of a friend with no technical background is selling websites to companies that he writes with Claude. They look shiny, everyone's happy in the short run, but I don't doubt issues will come up down the line that someone will have to be responsible for. I'd personally feel like I was ripping people off doing this, but I think also Dunning-Kruger prevents you from knowing any better if you are the type of person doing this.

Then there's the whole B2B SaaS gang that are basically just producing vaporware and telling other people how to produce more vaporware. This is no different from crypto, NFTs etc. before it really. Just people trying to hustle others.

And then there's the whole clawdbot gang probably burning more in tokens everyday than normal people use in a month so they can sort 18 e-mails.

So yeah I mean you're right, there certainly is a subset of people who are using this ethically (as ethically as you can use LLMs but that's another story) to make some money on the side. Certainly not the majority though I'd say.

[freefaler]

If the technology becomes cheaper, this creates more market pressure, by changing the cost base of certain product. For example books when printing press was invented went from luxury to something expensive but more affordable. In software markets that means that will have more software, more competition and in free market segments profits will evaporate.

The pseudo "entrepreneurs" who think they could outsmart the market by working less, are just naive. In a free market economy optimization is brutal and a freelancer developer will sell the same "product" cheaper, because he has the same technology available to him.

So the only way to get the gains from these AI technologies is to have something that can't be easily copied like market knowledge, data access or sweetheart deals with big companies that can pay more because their profits support the higher spend.

Also, services based SAAS especially B2B will not die, because a tyre shop won't have the time to write/debug/host it's own solution and will not want to depend to a single contractor who can disappear for a vacation. But the margins will go waaay down. 25$ for a set of forms and a database, not gonna cut it anymore.

[vanillameow]

> Also, services based SAAS especially B2B will not die, because a tyre shop won't have the time to write/debug/host it's own solution and will not want to depend to a single contractor who can disappear for a vacation.

True in the current state of LLMs, possibly not true forever if someone finds the magic bullet that turns the one-shotting (reliable) software dream that companies like Anthropic and Perplexity currently peddle into reality. Seems far-fetched ATM but the gains since GPT-2 have been very real.

We're quite a ways away from this though, even with Opus 4.6 and the like. And even further from it being part of Claude Code rather than some proprietary $1000/mo. closed-source solution.

As you say though, _if_ such a technology were to exist, it's Anthropic that holds all the cards, not random entrepreneur #25721 who is asking the Anthropic API the same thing that the actual customer could just be asking directly. At that point you're an undesirable middleman, not a business.

[keiferski]

It’s funny how so much of market demand ends up just ends up boiling down to basic needs. Everyone’s always trying to hustle so they don’t have to worry about financial instability.

The quote about being temporarily embarrassed millionaires comes to mind….

[bossyTeacher]

> You can't just buy a Claude subscription and have magically solve your problems. The thing is, as soon as Claude can do this without a business savvy human in the loop, then a) everyone can do it, so you won't actually have any value to propose

Louder for those at the back.

[gavinray]

  > You can't just buy a Claude subscription and have magically solve your problems.

Devil's advocate: The operating intelligence of Opus 4.6 is higher than the average persons and has orders of magnitude more domain knowledge.

If Average Joe were to delegate most of their life decisions to the chatbot, it'd probably turn out better, or in the worst case, more informed.

[array_key_first]

> The operating intelligence of Opus 4.6 is higher than the average persons

Okay how are we measuring this? We can't even quantify intelligence for humans accurately, let alone compare it to machines. Hell, we can't even really define intelligence.

I mean, humans can learn on the fly and progressively, and currently no LLMs are capable of that. Literally none of them, and no context doesn't count. So if that's the measure, then LLMs sit at a 0 along with rocks and twigs and humans closer to a 1.

Obviously that's not really the measurement, LLMs are quite good. But I don't think we can say, for sure, LLMs are a replacement for humans. They might replace some specific tasks, but humans are not a set of tasks. I'd still rather have 10 engineers than 0 engineers and 10 Claude Code licenses.

[judahmeek]

> If Average Joe were to delegate most of their life decisions to the chatbot, it'd probably turn out better, or in the worst case, more informed.

Even if true, no one is ever going to do that because of Dunning Kruger, so it's still not magically solving problems.

[nsnzjznzbx]

A great AI future is the robots doing stuff so we can be free. But none of the major isms are geared up to provide that i.e. capitalism or communism. Maybe hackable with UBI and capitalism mix.

[lm28469]

> I can't help but feel a little bit of ... pity for a lot of the people who call themselves "entrepreneurs" in this survey?

Fake it till you make it mentality that degenerated completely once we got the internet. It used to be "crypto will make you rich, buy my coin/course", now it's "AI will make you rich buy my tool/course", the same type of people will get fleeced

These are the people getting all the attention: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwaUMBQ3Wgg

[jdefr89]

That’s what I really gets me. These folks who are “so rich from said technology” always need you to buy their course for $5,000… Likes buddy if you were bringing in so much money you probably wouldn’t be pestering people to take your “course” and you certainly aren’t going to give any info away that have value only because they are obscure or hard to do… They are also almost ALWAYS self proclaimed experts. Oversight everyone because an AI expert. Before ChatGPT they probably had zero AI was a large field and machine learning is one small part of it..