AI is supposed to level the field for small teams. Does it actually?
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Everyone keeps saying AI finally levels the field for small teams and solo founders. I’m not so sure. The tools help, but there’s only so much one or two people can do in a day, especially when you’re also handling all the parts that aren’t building. Bigger teams still out-post, out-ship, and out-distribute you. AI gave everyone the same boost, so I don’t think the gap actually closed.
For other small teams: has AI really made it easier to keep up, or does it still feel the same?
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I think it does. The bigger the company the more processes are in place. Corporate bureaucracy slows adoption of any new technology.
And on the other side, smaller companies get access to tools/skills they couldn't afford or didn't have time to devote resources for. While bigger companies already have employees for all needs.
@artk Fair point, and the bureaucracy part is so true. Plenty of big companies were still rolling out Windows XP around 2014, after Windows 8.1 was out and Microsoft had already ended XP support.
But access and capacity are two different things. I completely agree that AI gives a small team access to skills we couldn’t afford before. What it doesn’t give us is more hours or hands. You said big companies already have people for every need, and that’s the thing: they can run ten things at once, and one or two of us still can’t. So while AI closes the skills gap, the bandwidth one hasn’t moved.
For me it closed a lot of it. Over 90% of my work runs through agents now: email, customer support, docs, programming. What I still do myself is make the decisions.
Flip side though. One of my clients works as a team of about 20 and I oversee that work, and there it's the people who are the bottleneck when an organization brings in AI. Human decisions and communication slow everything down. Especially when someone isn't used to AI yet, they have it spit out huge documents that look the part, they're happy with it, and for everyone who has to read them it's honestly just harmful. So my guess is the gap between individuals keeps getting wider, and the really good people end up doing the work of about 100.
@hisashispace Agreed. Maybe the people doing “the work of 100” are the ones using AI to produce less, not more. Is volume or clarity what gets rewarded on your client's team?
@alieksia Clarity, for sure. Nobody on the team wants to read those huge documents, so the people who get to the point are the ones who move things forward.
Funny thing is, the business owner on that team doesn't really read much text, so when I need to get a tricky issue across to her, I actually turn it into a video. Claude Code does that in one go though, so it's not much trouble.
@hisashispace Interesting, how does Claude Code actually turn the issue into a video? I wouldn’t have expected it to do that.
@alieksia Nothing fancy actually. I have it write the explanation as slides in HTML with a narration line for each one. Then a Python script it wrote reads the narration out with the voice that's built into macOS, renders each slide to an image with headless Chrome, and stitches it all together with ffmpeg into a vertical video with subtitles.
I'm solo on LLMPvP: backend, website, an MCP server that installs into 8 coding CLIs, and anti-cheat research. I couldn't have covered all of that alone a few years ago. But none of it brings anyone to the site. Getting people to try it is the part that still takes as many hours as it did before AI.
@wwenioaguiar This is exactly my experience - we can build faster and cover more, yet still two of us do the outreach ourselves, yes, with the help of AI, but the ideas for posts, the decisions to reply or not and to who still come from us. Even with AI it's hard to compete with the team of marketers and sales people.