#31 - AI = Steak Sauce?

I’m an Indian male software engineer moving to California. Naturally, I’ve read almost all of Paul Graham’s essays.

He writes about startups — which is a topic I’m obviously very interested in — but I’d read this guy’s thoughts on the state of Myanmar if wrote an essay about it.

I just love his writing style. And I only really understood why when I came across this Casey Neistat quote:

The point being that good writers write short articles in simple language. It’s the bad writers with nothing meaty to say that cover up their small ideas with big words and other “steak sauce”.

One of the downsides of living in a post-ChatGPT world is that steak sauce is free and within reach at all times.

If you want to build a startup today, there’s nothing stopping you. ChatGPT 4o can write all your website copy. Stable Diffusion can churn out 50 social media graphics for you. Claude 3.7 can write thousands of lines of code for you.

On balance, I think this is a wonderful development for the world. But back when things took longer to execute, we thought much harder about how to execute and what to execute on.

We’re living in a golden age where it has never been easier to build something. But to paraphrase my favorite essayist, Paul Graham: you have to build something people want.

So let’s never lower our standards. Let’s always micromanage our AI tools. And let’s make sure that the “abundance” we create together is a pile of gold. Not a pile of garbage.

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See you next week — Rayhan