The post reads like written by someone who read too much about AI rather than tried to build a startup with the help of AI that they advocate so much. I'm still bounded by system design, UX, pricing and feature decisions, if not by the speed of code output, by the review time for sure. Yes, iterating is faster, but we're nowhere near agentic AI loops spitting out working products. Technically it's possible, but then you just spent that time planning and writing the spec up front, which you'd interleave with dev time otherwise. If the product is a simple CRUD database skin, then yeah, chances of success are lower I think, but this is not the type of startups the post seems to write about.
It's gotten to the point where, when I see yet another Thought Leadership article about software development, I search the page for the word "will". If I see unqualified predictions of the future (AI will change this and Agents will do that and developers will need to do thus), I think I can safely ignore the article. Who has the hubris to make such strong and unwavering statements about a future nobody can see?
How come all the talking heads telling us AI has made whatever we've learned or built obsolete never point the lens back at themselves? I personally thing knowledge from entrepreneurs who learned their lessons in previous decades is valuable, but if what they're spouting is true it doesn't make any sense to listen to them, i.e. these thought leaders are desperate to tell you of their irrelevance. Same thing for every CTO who tells me AI replaces developers. That's a stretch, but if we could do that, don't you think it would be trivial to replace your job?
I'm not, but this is not a great introduction. It's handwavy and makes the assumption that AI dev tools are much farther along than they are. I have seen this a lot lately; the farther up the management chain and farther away from putting hands on code, the more confident people seem to be in the power of AI tools.
For big complex real world problems, and big complex real worlde codebases, the AIs are helpful but not yet earth shattering. And that helpfulness seems to have plateaued as of late.
I will take a lot more hand waving from the 70-something year-old Stanford professor who co-created far-up the chain management paradigms that run a good chunk of the economy. That context kinda changes things but what do I know.
One year ago, the models were only slightly less competent than today. There were models writing entire apps 3 years ago. Competent function writing is basically a given on all models since GPT3.
Much of the progress in the past year has been around the harnesses, MCPs, and skills. The models themselves are not getting better exponentially, if anything the progress is slowing down significantly since the 2023-2024 releases.
One year before 1969 we had never been to the moon. In the 70s credible scientists and physicists predicted that large martian colonies would exist before the year 2000.
If a metric goes from 0 to 2 it doesn't mean it's on a long-lived exponential trajectory.
Seems extremely disingenuous to say that one year ago models could barely write a working function. In fact, there were plenty capable of writing a working function with the right context fed in, exactly as today.
One assumption that's also changed: small teams no longer need dedicated QA. Tools like Autonoma (open source, getautonoma.com) use AI agents to generate and run E2E tests in real browsers, and tests self-maintain as your app evolves. One of the things making the solo-founder path more viable.
Made me wonder if there's a live-streaming equivalent for blogging... some platform that both ensures the reader knows the blogger is a person, and promotes a parasocial relationship.
There's live-coding, so it's not totally a crazy idea.
As a way to get my feet wet vibe coding, I made https://seeitwritten.com with that idea. That by capturing how you write with all its fits and starts you can show that a human wrote it. So, sort of recorded live-streaming. But I'm thinking that a sufficiently cute agent could be prompted to write something and re-write something in a convincing manner. I'm not so sure about that, though, since their corpus is completed text rather than text in action.
Your comment immediately made me think about the extreme opposite: a Davy Force-like, Infochammel-style livestream of a never-ending AI generated Ted Talk, offering delectable morsels of tech startup wisdom, but is ultimately zero calorie.
Well of course it is, most startups are dead on arrival.
The big pinch of salt I throw in with advice like this though is that startup failure rate hasn't dramatically shifted despite two decades of lean startup methodology, accelerators, and an entire cottage industry of startup advice. It's never the fault of the framework, mind you.
If anything the failure rate has probably increased with more capital and founders chasing after the same opportunities. Being a startup founder gained prestige and became the default thing to do after college for certain types of people who before the GFC would have ended up in finance.
isn't this a problem of being able to see whatever we want in the data? For example maybe more startups than ever are created in part due to access to this info. Volume increase but rate doesn't. Or maybe magnitude of success increases. Surely this is true but largely attributed to internet overall. But maybe methodologies are indeed a factor.
edit: Tobi from Shopify has an insight that relates. His north star metric is user churn. sounds crazy on its face. he's known for that. But increasing churn means you've increased top line exposure to more would-be entrepreneurs. Not all of them will succeed, but shopifys mission is to create more entrepreneurs. Grow the pie. A focus on increasing conversion tends to have a narrowing effect.
Sure, but if the advice works, you'd see failure rate drops over time. It would work like medicine - we have more people than ever before, but almost no one dies of polio anymore. That's not what we see though, failure rate is basically the same.
If it was stretched before it's definitely snapped now. The only place I see convincing opportunity is resources and commodities. Everything else will be a game of its former self more detached from fundamental reality and live or die based on political favor.
> Founders who started pre-2025 typically have built a technical stack optimized for a world where software development was bespoke and expensive.
Of all the things that AI has changed, tech stacks aren't one of them. The bots will gladly write Typescript, Java, Python, Rust, what have you. They could not give less of a shit.
"You better be doing something in AI" applies to Startups - businesses that are expected to spend every penny as quickly as possible, to meet the metrics needed to raise the next (bigger) round of funding.
It is also not the same as, "If you want to be a profitable company...". For that you need to somehow make more money than you are spending.
This article resonated with me, especially since I've noticed the fund raising hoopla's in my circle has dramatically dropped. Either investors are tightening the belt so founder-investor fit has crossed into the realm of disillusionment
It’s easier to view it in terms of DCF - the value of a cash flow generating asset = present value of expected cash flows discounted back at a risk discount adjusted rate. In other words what you’ve invested into your existing assets is irrelevant - the cash flows generated by them and the growth assets through future investment, is what matters.
I read it less as “every startup now needs an AI feature” and more as “your assumptions expire faster than they used to.” That part feels true even if the examples are a bit overstated imo...
Seems like the headline should have been "is now dead on arrival". As currently written, it fails to convey the temporal aspect that is the focus of the blog post.
It also fails to convey that he's actually only talking about startups that were created 2+ years ago, rather than the many AI startups founded in the last 2 years.
Building SaaS businesses has become a whole lot less capital intensive. Solo founders can go much further than they've been able to previously. New startups probably don't need funding anymore.
depends on assumptions. thats the load bearing element. 99.99% of what was true then is still true. its mostly on the fractal churning edges where hyped change happens. things flip-flop too:
2021-2024: good time in US for EV startup
2025: terrible time in US for EV startup
2026 March/April: AWESOME time in world for EV startup
focus on fundamentals, not flakey ephemerals
2020: wise to have smart elite software engineers on your team
2021: ditto
2022: ditto
2023: ditto
2024: ditto (is this when ChatGPT launched? dont care. snore)
> Now, before you build a physical prototype, you can simulate more design variants, create digital twins, and stress-test assumptions earlier and much cheaper than before.
Hahahahahahahaha no you can't. The rise of LLMs has done little to nothing in this area because it's very much compute-limited. Digital-twins and other ML-based strategies predate ChatGPT by a long shot. There are definitely places in hardware design where LLMs and agentic workflows will help, but that's largely because the existing tooling is utter garbage, and now the industry has a fire under its ass to make things automatable so they can build their own agents.
I find the story of a startup founder who entirely missed the developments of the last two years and did absolutely nothing with AI difficult to believe. If that actually happened it's the exception, not the rule. Most startup founders are way more in-tune with AI developments. This makes it sound like Chris (the mentioned founder) is behind marketing people who use LLM bots to post slop on LinkedIn.
In that case, yes their startup is most certainly DOA.
Look around, you're most definitely in a bubble. LLMs are bleeding edge by themselves. Using agentic anything is mega bleeding edge. Having something actually working reliably is a tiny sliver of the bleeding edge audience. We have barely entered early adoption phase. Most AI users out there are Q&A'ing it and they have no idea what agents, tool calling or context compaction are.
I don't follow. Tech startups are bleeding edge. You may be over-generalizing here. I talk a lot of my dev friends, they are all using AI for work. So if Joe Blow at some consulting company is using it, then a SV startup CEO should be too.
>Most AI users out there are Q&A'ing it and they have no idea what agents, tool calling or context compaction are.
Again, talking about a tech CEO not a random "AI user."
I know a 60-ish year old serial startup CEO who never coded. Now he's running teams of Claude Code agents which he used to build a healthcare platform by himself which he is now selling. He's already wealthy, just doing it for fun. This skill set is the bare minimum for a startup founder today.
Going to VCs with a 2 year outdated deck with no AI functionality or plans or tool use is unimaginable.
Yeah I get what you're saying. Sounds like this guy is driven, smart and savvy then? Definitely a bleeding edge minority who goes where the puck is.
As to my original point I'll go and say that 95/100 of business owners out there in the world don't have any idea about Claude Code, Codex or anything of that caliber. It's too early. By the time that group gets to it there'll be tools tailored to their needs, not a terminal-based coding agent messing up filesystem.
You keep returning to this which is a strawman of my argument. From the start I have been talking about technical startup founders, which is also the subject of the blog post.
You on the other hand keep assuming that startup founders, even in SV are technical enough to envision AI or can change the thesis of their business on a whim of technology change that has been introduced less than a year ago. It's not realistic. Businesses have systems, people, obligations, legacy, etc.
Did you read the blog post? It seems like you may be missing a lot of context here.
I'm not assuming anything, that is my argument. I think you could do a better job countering it than pointing at the status quo of every business in the world. lol.
Me: 'cutting edge startups should use cutting edge tools'
You: 'every business in the world isn't using cutting edge tools!'
It's not about the status quo. It's about the speed of change and focus. While I'm all in on building custom agentic loops and building extensions for my pi I have enough bandwidth and xp to see that it's quite easy for business people to be focused on the matters that are completely non-technical. That plus plain sunk cost fallacy and blind denial ofc.
A laundromat isn't a startup in that sense. There's no potential for exponential growth. A VC would never give you money to open a laundromat, you'd go to a bank and get a business loan for that.
Washio was an American on-demand laundry cleaning and delivery service. The company was founded in 2013 by Jordan Metzner, Bob Wall, and Juan Dulanto, and raised $17 million in funding.
LinkedIn influencers
For big complex real world problems, and big complex real worlde codebases, the AIs are helpful but not yet earth shattering. And that helpfulness seems to have plateaued as of late.
I am extremely skeptical of posts like this.
These guys don't get to have it both ways.
The man is an economist, not a crony operating at the federal level (one does not imply the other, and I know nothing of the man's background).
One year ago models could barely write a working function.
One year ago, the models were only slightly less competent than today. There were models writing entire apps 3 years ago. Competent function writing is basically a given on all models since GPT3.
Much of the progress in the past year has been around the harnesses, MCPs, and skills. The models themselves are not getting better exponentially, if anything the progress is slowing down significantly since the 2023-2024 releases.
If a metric goes from 0 to 2 it doesn't mean it's on a long-lived exponential trajectory.
This is a false claim.
Claude Code was released over a year ago.
Models have improved a lot recently, but if you think 12 months ago they could barely write a working function you are mistaken.
We can’t say for sure yet which trajectory we are on.
90% of blog articles created in the last two years are probably dead on arrival
There's live-coding, so it's not totally a crazy idea.
The big pinch of salt I throw in with advice like this though is that startup failure rate hasn't dramatically shifted despite two decades of lean startup methodology, accelerators, and an entire cottage industry of startup advice. It's never the fault of the framework, mind you.
If you have good product idea, the methodology to get there mostly affect profit marigins, not whether it will be success or total failure
edit: Tobi from Shopify has an insight that relates. His north star metric is user churn. sounds crazy on its face. he's known for that. But increasing churn means you've increased top line exposure to more would-be entrepreneurs. Not all of them will succeed, but shopifys mission is to create more entrepreneurs. Grow the pie. A focus on increasing conversion tends to have a narrowing effect.
You’ve always needed to constantly learn and innovate to launch a successful business.
Startups are mostly all default dead. That's why they need VC money.
Of all the things that AI has changed, tech stacks aren't one of them. The bots will gladly write Typescript, Java, Python, Rust, what have you. They could not give less of a shit.
What is he getting at? How does the code and infra stack differ at all between a company that is using AI, vs one that is not?
It is also not the same as, "If you want to be a profitable company...". For that you need to somehow make more money than you are spending.
This trap has killed many startups, well before AI.
Now that code is cheaper to write, hopefully it becomes less of a problem?
In either case, founders should never fall in love with their solutions.
It also fails to convey that he's actually only talking about startups that were created 2+ years ago, rather than the many AI startups founded in the last 2 years.
VC for conventional SaaS is dead.
2021-2024: good time in US for EV startup
2025: terrible time in US for EV startup
2026 March/April: AWESOME time in world for EV startup
focus on fundamentals, not flakey ephemerals
2020: wise to have smart elite software engineers on your team
2021: ditto
2022: ditto
2023: ditto
2024: ditto (is this when ChatGPT launched? dont care. snore)
2025: ditto (what are YC/HN/VC hyping now? snore)
2026: ditto
2027+: ditto, likely
Hahahahahahahaha no you can't. The rise of LLMs has done little to nothing in this area because it's very much compute-limited. Digital-twins and other ML-based strategies predate ChatGPT by a long shot. There are definitely places in hardware design where LLMs and agentic workflows will help, but that's largely because the existing tooling is utter garbage, and now the industry has a fire under its ass to make things automatable so they can build their own agents.
Now with AI, it is likely going to be 98%.
Like this?
In that case, yes their startup is most certainly DOA.
>Most AI users out there are Q&A'ing it and they have no idea what agents, tool calling or context compaction are.
Again, talking about a tech CEO not a random "AI user."
- The AI jump happened in Q3-Q4 2025 with Opus 4.5 so it's been six months or so? Not long enough.
- Most developers out there use AI for their coding work, not for re-envisioning business models.
Going to VCs with a 2 year outdated deck with no AI functionality or plans or tool use is unimaginable.
As to my original point I'll go and say that 95/100 of business owners out there in the world don't have any idea about Claude Code, Codex or anything of that caliber. It's too early. By the time that group gets to it there'll be tools tailored to their needs, not a terminal-based coding agent messing up filesystem.
You keep returning to this which is a strawman of my argument. From the start I have been talking about technical startup founders, which is also the subject of the blog post.
I'm not assuming anything, that is my argument. I think you could do a better job countering it than pointing at the status quo of every business in the world. lol.
Me: 'cutting edge startups should use cutting edge tools'
You: 'every business in the world isn't using cutting edge tools!'
If your business is selling services at 40% margin that are entirely digitally based, then maybe you’ll need to cut some margin, sure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washio_(company)