Code is probably just 20% effort. There is so much more after that. Like manage the infra around it and the reliability when it scales, and even things like managing SPAM and preventing abuse. And the effort required to market it and make it something people want to adopt.

Sure, but the premise here is that making a gmail clone is strategically necessary for OpenAI to compete with Google in the long term.

In that case, there's some ancillary value in being able to claim "look, we needed a gmail and ChatGPT made one for us - what do YOU need that ChatGPT can make for YOU?"

Those are still largely code-able. You can write Ansible files, deploy AWS (mostly) via the shell, write rules for spam filtering and administration... Google has had all of that largely automated for a long time now.

We haven't written rules for spam filtering in a while now: it's been a successful machine learning problem for ages.

Nice we haven’t faced this cold start problem. We like the idea of Lambdas being offered in a simple runtime platform where you can store and run the code as needed.

And chain it with other stuff as well which is where workflow engines like n8n or Unmeshed.io works better. You can mix up lambdas in different languages as well.

Unmeshed.io is another alternative. You don’t even need to write code for your schedules

For the sake of argument 20x means you have basically suddenly got access to 19 people with the same skill set as you.

You can build a new product company with 20 people. Probably in the same domain as you are in right now.

Output doesn't necessarily scale linearly with as you add more people. Look up mythical man.

We are using a workflow engine called Unmeshed - which has what you are asking about. Workflow definitions can be updated without running interfering with running instances and if you choose to you can patch updates on to running workflows. And you can also rerun workflows with the same input from an older execution.

Built on Lovable? Looks neat. If yes, how was your experience? Did you have to customize much by hand or did it take care of most of the work?

It was great, am glad it saved a lot of my time. Of course prompts are important but it would surely cut down your overall dev time.

> After years of skepticism, you'll reluctantly become an AI evangelist, but will still add 'I'm still skeptical about how far it can really go' to the end of every recommendation.

Oh man, I feel seen :)

Nice, just spent 2 mins popping.

It requires the Pro subscription which I don't have. Does this mean websites like clay.com and copy.ai can be replaced with Operator? If something like that can be done then we are looking at an interesting future.

My personal experience has been that very basic stuff like converting an object to another shape or creating a simple validation function or things like that has been super effective with AI. I've gotten so lazy that I try and prompt it to exactly what I want instead of even editing a bit.

But the moment it gets a little less basic, its a different story. I absolutely hate the experience. So I love it and I hate it at the same time. Is it going to replace me? I don't feel like its there yet. And this has been the case for a while now.

There is just too much money and people invested in this that its hard to say anything negative about it. Nearly every VC has rebranded their websites around an AI-driven future. And, to be fair, it’s not a fad—it genuinely works well for many things. But for now, I’m still skeptical about how far it can really go.