Matt Dupree

Philosopher turned dev turned founder.

[Matt Dupree @philosohacker]

Been thinking a lot about UIs lately while doing customer research for @join_atlas_ai and I've concluded that UIs almost always get worse over time. Companies may hire better designers or PMs to avoid this, but their UIs will inevitably become harder to use anyway. Here's why.🧵

[Matt Dupree @philosohacker]

@SuprDeclarative Striking the balance between

A) shipping whatever the agents produce (has led to bugs, stability issues, and poor product quality)

and

B) clinging too tightly to old practices that will stifle agent-powered productivity gains.

[Matt Dupree @philosohacker]

If agents are going to replace me I’d expect my job to be getting easier. It’s getting harder.

[Nathan Witkin @NateWitkin]

This is a much more transparent way of reporting METR's time horizon results.

[Dan Robinson @danlovesproofs]

We built a bug finder. We're finding serious, "let's fix that right now" issues in every codebase we run it on.

Introducing Detail!

[Matt Dupree @philosohacker]

@sarahcat21 is that an inversion? seems like vanilla conway's law

[Matt Dupree @philosohacker]

@Microsoft, can you please demote the person who decided to replace the missing npm dependency quickfix powered by static analysis in @code with a copilot-powered one? It's slower, less accurate, and frankly, an absurd use of LLMs. Thank you.

[Matt Dupree @philosohacker]

Today's your lucky day, folks. @join_atlas_ai is winding down, which means @JoshShroyer -- an awesome engineer, person, and friend -- is on the market.

I met Josh 8 years ago while working at another startup. It was immediately clear to me that he was a brilliant engineer. Software was a craft that he cared deeply about and he studied with a fervor that I've haven't seen in anyone else in my decade long career.

Josh's humility was equally apparent when we first met. Although he knew more than his peers, he was cautious in his thinking and patient with how he communicated.

As I got to know Josh better, I learned that in addition to being humble and brilliant, he is also a ridiculously kind person. He really cares about people. He wants to do right by the users and customers he builds for.

After we parted ways, I knew I wanted to work with Josh again, so I sought him out after raising capital for my new venture. He has continued to impress me with his ability to quickly pick up new technical skills. He went from iOS dev to fully productive Fullstack web and AI dev in less than a month. He pushes himself hard, and it shows.

Although he works extremely hard, he has remained kind, patient, and calm through all the ups, downs, and twists of startup life. I'm grateful that I had the opportunity to work with him twice, and I'm especially grateful that someone so talented and kind put up with my first crack at being a CEO of a startup.

This isn't my last attempt at being a CEO, so if you hire Josh, treat him like royalty because I'm definitely going to try convince him to work with me again!

[Matt Dupree @philosohacker]

15 minutes left on this poll! I want your vote!

[Matt Dupree @philosohacker]

Trying to get a sense of developer attitudes about data privacy. Please pick the option that best fills in the blanks in the sentence below:

I am building a (B2B | B2C) product and am (happy | unhappy) with our privacy practices.

e.g., pick choice 1 if you're working on a B2B product and are unhappy with your product's data privacy practices.

[Matt Dupree @philosohacker]

Trying to get a sense of developer attitudes about data privacy. Please pick the option that best fills in the blanks in the sentence below:

I am building a (B2B | B2C) product and am (happy | unhappy) with our privacy practices.

e.g., pick choice 1 if you're working on a B2B product and are unhappy with your product's data privacy practices.

[Joshua Shroyer @JoshShroyer]

We've reached the point in platform maturity where businesses need to concern themselves with building for a niche, or delivering features @Apple won't go after, else risk feature absorption

@1Password is a good example, growing out of Apple's ecosystem.

https://t.co/Higkz0IT22

[Matt Dupree @philosohacker]

@david_laprade and I worked that AI-powered UI/UX startups are doomed at an offsite last quarter. Very glad we didn't try to play in the AI-powered UI/UX space.

[David Laprade @david_laprade]

There are a growing number of startups broadly dedicated to "personalized UI/UX powered by AI"

I hope it works out for them. But honestly I think there's an overwhelming case that Apple and Google are going to win here

Full argument:
https://t.co/oFZiCsVOeP

[David Laprade @david_laprade]

PSA: gpt4o's behavior is chaotic and unpredictable when temp is set just above the default (of 1.0). [0]

Past temp of 1.1 we're seeing nonsense responses in multiple languages and character sets

[0] https://t.co/rnfePfZC7E

[Matt Dupree @philosohacker]

There's consensus emerging among VCs that #LLMs will make software companies look more like services businesses because software will own a task end-to-end instead of merely enabling a human to work on a task faster. I've seen this from partners at @NFX , @FoundationCap, and @OpenViewVenture. The shorthand they like for this "LLMs enable service as a software."

I'm betting the company (@join_atlas_ai) that they're wrong. I'm trying to work with GTM/PLG teams instead of replacing them, not because I'm particularly precious about displacing jobs but because LLMs just aren't good enough to do their jobs and that won't change anytime soon.

LLM optimists point to LLM's effectiveness in domains like coding, prospecting, and SEO content gen, but the wins here are limited and will be short-lived.

Coding is unlike any other domain in that the content (code) generated by LLMs can often be unambiguously verified as correct. The code either runs or it doesn't. It's a mistake to generalize from the coding domain.

The effectiveness of LLM-powered SEO content gen and prospecting, moreover, is primarily a function of the competitiveness of the space in which these solutions operate. Once the competition shows up, no one is going to care about 80th percentile performance on cold outreach or SEO content. Humans will be back in the game. E.g., Dave Rigotti banned GPT for content gen at @Inflection_Io this week. I already use "better than ChatGPT" as a filter for content I want to write.

LLM optimists often think that there's a clear path to making these models much better. There isn't. Pay less attention to people who have a financial interest in having you believe otherwise. Don't take my word for it either. I'm just incentivized in the opposite direction. @GaryMarcus is too, but he's worth paying attention to.

[Matt Dupree @philosohacker]

You're right that LLMs aren't that smart but wrong about the relevance to safety work.

@GaryMarcus has already pointed out that LLMs don't need to be particularly smart to cause harm. Instagram's algorithm that feeds pictures of children to pedophiles (@nytimes just ran an article on this) runs on gold old fashioned machine learning and it's plenty harmful.

The key question we should ask is whether the invisible hand will allocate sufficient resources to AI safety and to the safe development of new technologies in general. I'm doubtful it will. AI-powered harm will often be a negative externality --- just like the Instagram pedophile example above --- and even the most pro-market economists agree that markets aren't good at handling externalities.

@janleike's resignation from OpenAI actually shows how the market is broken here. The invisible hand didn't give Leike enough resources to pursue safety seriously so he left. @sama is unhappy with his departure too. LLMs will continue to develop into increasingly powerful tech that will hurt folks. Everyone loses.

Capitalism is great, except when it's not.

[David Laprade @david_laprade]

Anyone else notice that #LLaMA3 performs differently on @GroqInc's API than it does locally?

I’m running llama3-8b-8192 (instruct) via @ollama on an M1 mac and seeing consistently better accuracy than the same model on groq for the same tasks (mostly 0-shot text classification)

[David Laprade @david_laprade]

Theory for B2B SaaS: the smarter your customers seem, the more likely you're nearing product-market-fit

[David Laprade @david_laprade]

@stripe cc @jeff_weinstein low hanging UI improvement that would help new dashboard users: semantic search over your UI

would match queries like "add user to account" to the page the user intends to go to. You shouldn't need to know the magic word "member" to get there

[Matt Dupree @philosohacker]

@saksenarjun @forumventures @amruthagujjar @ycombinator https://t.co/9VsWLUYMjv

[Matt Dupree @philosohacker]

Met @saksenarjun -- a fellow @forumventures founder and former growth PM at Adobe -- and @amruthagujjar -- @ycombinator and x-Meta engineer -- this past week at #PLGTM.

We're all working #LLM-enabled tech for GTM and #PLG teams and thought it would be fun to invite folks around SOMA to have breakfast this Thursday and hear some lightning talks about what we're building and why.

Registration link is in the comments.

We likely have space for one or two more presenters, so if you know someone else working on LLM-tech for GTM teams, tag them in the comments!