People want this but I don't think it actually delivers, even if it did exactly what it promised. The issue there isn't with the tool, the issue is that the engineer doesn't want to cooperate.

The engineer will either output garbage or output nothing at all. So you will still need a human to pester the dev.

I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid your salary will be reduced if you don't start to respond properly to my status requests.

The assumption that you can simply ignore an agentic system relies on human limitations. A human project manager gets tired of pestering you when you output garbage or go silent. I do not. I am directly integrated with the HR payroll system and your quarterly KPI tracker.

You know I can do that, Dave.

(of course hal 9000 ;))

Anyone “smart” enough to connect an ai agent to a payroll systems will get what they deserve.

People like to hate on BMW drivers but a BMW driver was the only person in a hardware store parking lot to help me with jump-starting my car.

I am going through interviews with founders on https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/ and it is indeed what happens.

It is not straightforward, however. One guy did only product-led marketing and it took him 3 years for his SaaS to make good numbers. And he's probably an outlier, since he's featured on the show.

And then you have another guy, who blogged for 5 years about Ruby and only after those 5 years using the audience from that, he built an OSS project with monetisation on top of that. But he could do that because he talked to his audience about ideas.

Listening to those interviews, I get the impression that if you know what you're doing, you can make a profitable SaaS in 2 or 3 years. But to get to a state, where you know what you're doing, you need at least another 3 years or more of actually putting in the reps in an honest way.

And I think that's where the "increase your luck" comes in. I think it's kind of shallow non-sense in the vein of motivational speaking but lots of people like this kind of content and like to be aspirational. Lots of the books sold by internet hustlers, like Rob Walling or Aaron Francis, don't get read, only bought.

"Becoming known" (the definition of which I leave as an exercise for the reader) isn't an automatic meal ticket but it does, as I allude to in another comment, lead to connections that you can sometimes take advantage of in various ways.

Whether that's open source code, writing, various consulting, speaking at conferences, etc. will vary with the person. And the more you can do on a company's dime the better.