[eloisius]

If you have runway, it’s a good time to start your own thing or join someone who is. Personally, I cannot force myself to wade through slop PRs from careless coworkers. If that’s the job now, I’d rather run a hotdog stand or something.

Luckily, I don’t think things are that dire. I think the companies issuing AI mandates are manufacturing sawdust, and even if it works, it would just enable them to burn through customer goodwill in record time as they make user-hostile decisions free from engineer pushback.

These are going to be a few tough years, but I think the opportunities to start something new are everywhere.

[dfedbeef]

Pretty sure it's going to be a tough couple of decades, not just years.

[eloisius]

Of course I don't know either way. However, I feel like it's going to be different, but maybe not apocalyptic. The market I am building for is photographers, and from what I can gather (and know first hand as a customer) is that there's real discontent with the toolmakers in our ecosystem.

It seems like in the quest for every tech company to become a multi-billion dollar empire, they've lost the plot on making hammers for their customers and have instead turned into some kind of strip mining operation. A totally AI agent-driven company is a MBA wet dream, and I think a fever dream. If Adobe, for example, were to achieve it, I don't think they'd use it to fix the backlog of bugs overnight. I believe they'd just become an even more incoherent zombie, trying to extract rents from creative cloud subscriptions.

In the meantime, photographers still need tools. If you wanna run a software company as a regular small-to-medium-sized business, you may find some customers that are happy to buy a quality hammer. The unicorn startup days might be behind us, but I'd be okay with that.

Now, if AI obviates creatives altogether I don't really know what to say. I'd morn the loss of a world that became so tasteless that AI-generated decorations are good enough, for starters.

[ElProlactin]

But even the market for "photographers" is arguably in secular decline. Smartphones and AI have turned everyone into a photographer. The world is awash in visual content.

[eloisius]

It's true. Magazines sales are dead. Product photography is probably toast (I'm seeing companies test what they can get away with using AI generated images of their food/products right now). Sports? I don't even follow it but I suspect it's all video content now. Funny enough wedding photography seems to be doing fine as far as a commercial segment goes.

But there are segments of the market that were always small, and AI doesn't threaten. Namely, fine-art and long-term documentary. The kind of work that gets shown as exhibition and sold as prints or photobooks. I can't imagine this stuff be supplanted by generative AI, because it has never been about economic efficiency. It's a labor of love for a photographer to work on a project for years at a time because the subject is important to them. And the customers of these works are not likely to accept lower-cost substitutes produced by a AI. The whole thing is too much about taste and thoroughly infused with humanist ethics. When I buy a photobook, I want to know that the artist lived and produced what I'm seeing, not just that it's pretty ink dots on paper.

From a market analysis perspective it's foolish to cater to these tiny and commercially nonviable artists. However, they have enormous esteem and influence within the community, and make part of their living as educators. I believe making tools that they need, and without blood-sucking cloud subscriptions, you are indirectly marketing to all the creatives (usually tending toward commercial) who attend workshops and see what tools they are running the workshop with.