Nothing new to see here

Summary

A founder I’ve been emailing with sent me something that made me laugh. Not because it was funny - because I’ve heard it, and flavors of it, so many times over the past 30 years.“I committed to Cursor and went heads down for about 4 months. Our platform went live in January. We have about 400 users across 50 paying customers. With the exception of the AWS IAC, the platform was 100% built with AI. Unfortunately, I’ve had very seasoned engineers emphatically tell me, ‘It’s not possible,’ ‘It’s a house of cards,’ or ‘It has to be AI slop.’”She’s not an engineer by training, but she’s tech savvy enough to have run product, dev, and operations teams at scale. She committed to a tool, went heads down, and shipped a platform that now has paying customers.And now “seasoned engineers" are telling her it’s not possible.I told her that was nonsense. There is a ton of crappy AI-generated software out there - I won’t argue that. But you can build high-quality, production-grade software using AI right now.Then she asked the money question.“I also hear that investors are reluctant to invest in AI-developed platforms… especially one not developed by an engineer. Here’s my question. From your experience, is the approach I took a pro or a con for investors?”Investors who don’t think very hard will have that reaction. But a React app hacked together by two technical co-founders in a garage isn’t inherently better than one built by a domain expert using AI tools. Code quality at the seed stage has never determined whether a company succeeds. What matters is whether you can find AI-first engineers to join your team and help harden the systems as you scale.As a devotee of Battlestar Galactica, I can comfortably say, “All this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.”The Internet - “It’s a toy.” I sat in meetings in the mid-1990s where smart people explained patiently that the Internet was a curiosity for academics. I had a CEO friend tell me to stop bothering him abou...