The Bootstrapped Founder

Hey. It's Arvid. Welcome to the Bootstrap Founder. This episode is sponsored by paddle.com, my payment provider of choice. I use it in a lot of my properties.

If you run a software business and you don't wanna deal with the intricacies of stuff like sales tax or having to integrate every single money related thing yourself, I can really recommend it. Earlier today, I was adding a Black Friday discount code for PodScan into the system. And It took me less than 30 seconds just to create this time limited plan restricted coupon that just works with all the things that I've already set up. I'll put it in the show notes if you're interested, the coupon code. And again, Paddle makes this all super easy.

So go check it out. It will make operating your own software business much easier. I recently came across a poem by Joseph Fasano titled to a student who used AI to write a paper. And I wanna share this short poem with you right now. Here it goes.

Now I let it fall back in the grasses. I hear you. I notice life is hard now. I know your days are precious on this earth. But what are you trying to be free of?

The living? The miraculous task of it? Love is for the ones who love the work. This final line struck me deeply. Love is for the ones who love the work.

When I copied the poem into my notes, Notion then immediately asked me if I wanted to improve the writing, which was such a weird moment, an AI feature, that felt almost comically ironic in this very moment of me being overcome with emotion when I just wanted to really just paste the thing and work on it. And this poem with its powerful message and this lyrical tone to it needed no improvement. It captured perfectly the emotional state that I've been grappling with as an entrepreneur in tech using AI. And as I sat coding today, I hit a familiar wall was another moment that felt kind of remarkably well known to me. The feature that I was building at this point wasn't quite working right, and I found myself behaving very strangely in retrospect.

And I observed my own behavior. Instead of engaging my developer mind, just stepping back and solving the problem manually as I've done countless times before, I caught myself after a couple minutes just desperately tweaking prompts and asking the AI to try again, to give me the full code in different segments and variations, all to avoid writing 20 simple lines of code that I could have easily written myself. And that moment made me pause. Had I become so dependent on AI tools that I was actively avoiding the work that I've done and loved for decades? It was quite a sobering realization that led me to reflect on my relationship with coding in that moment.

Every line of code that I've ever written over the past 20 years, all manually, was either good or bad. And let's be honest, it was probably mostly bad. But it filled me with a certain pride. Maybe not immediately in that moment because it didn't always work mind you, but a slow building accumulation of joy and love for the craft of creating software. And the code I write today is built on the foundation of trying to figure things out for 2 decades.

It's constructed from thousands of lines of past code, from the experience of learning to do it right, from failing repeatedly and getting incrementally better each time. That's all in me. That journey of becoming a little more optimal, a little bit better, a little bit more performant with every iteration, that's where the love lives for the craft. Love for the craft, love for having developed and honed skill. And we're in this fascinating phase right now, particularly as technologists and entrepreneurs, because we're using AI tools to eliminate the very jobs and the very joys that allow us to express ourselves.

And coding might seem different because it's really just writing instructions. It's like writing a recipe for cooking. That's really very little creative work you would think. But I'm starting to see parallels in how AI affects our relationship with the work. At PodScan, I use AI extensively and behind all these conscious interactions that I use it for things stuff like customer service automations or like generating text for example, there's a lot of automated back end work happening constantly.

Transcription, entity recognition, inference, sentiment detection, all of this uses AI. But there's a crucial difference between automation that handles tedious tasks and AI that replaces creative work. Significant difference. I want AI to sift through documents and find patterns and summarize information. Those are tasks that don't necessarily need a human component.

But I don't want it to replace this spark of creation, the potential of human to human connection and interaction that gives meaning to my work. When you start delegating work to another person that, you know, the time old thing of how you build a business, you hire people and give them tasks, There's a relationship of trust, empowerment, and collaboration, where you actually have a person doing the work for you with you and you both kinda shine in the results of it. But with AI, you're delegating to this ephemeral entity that only exists for milliseconds. The text you send to the GPU, the text that is processed by the large language model, well, all it does is create this spark of technology and there comes a response and then everything vanishes. There can be no relationship here.

No trust, no connection, no excitement in this exchange. Right? It's just a tool, like a hammer or a blender. It's an externalization of yourself rather than a true external collaborator. A hammer is an extension of your arm and that's all it will ever be.

It's better at hammering stuff than your fist Or a blender is, I guess, a second set of teeth or something. And for that matter, a computer is an externalized brain, but it's still just a tool. And this reminds me of Immanuel Kant's lesser known categorical imperative. Not the one where it says, like, treat others as you want them, treat you. But that's also one of them.

But there's one that says, we should treat others not just as a means to an end, but as an end in themselves. Every human interaction should be mutually beneficial. Then it's a good thing. But with AI, no matter how many times you say thank you in a chat prompt somewhere, there is no real relationship. No back and forth.

It's simulated. It feels like it. It's not real. You're interacting with a blink of consciousness, maybe, who knows, that disappears forever after each response that you get. And you can talk about context windows and, your embeddings and knowing stuff and retaining things in memory, but that's really not where the connection is.

And as I integrate AI more deeply into my daily work, I'm realizing that we need to develop a crucial skill as a society, but also in particular in our community of entrepreneurs. We need to understand which of our tasks and of the tasks that we help people solve are worth delegating to these systems. Because creative tasks that build relationships and express our humanity, well, those should stay with us. I barely want another person handling my customer interactions or social media presence. I wanna do this myself.

Why would I want an AI doing it? A thing without a heart. The poem that sparked these thoughts could technically have written by an AI as well. There are probably a lot of really good poems out there that AI has created, but this one wasn't. It was written by a person who became proud enough of their work and joyful enough with their work to publish it.

To contribute something very meaningful that we can then trace back to them and engage with them and learn from them. Love is indeed for those who love the work and to love the work means to do it, to learn it, to fail at it and yes, maybe sometimes seek assistance from an AI if you have to. But having work done by something that doesn't and can't love the work will never create something truly lovable or worthy of pride and joy. As we rush to embrace AI's capabilities, which we as founders always do like the moment the thing comes up, perhaps we should pause to consider what we might be giving up in return and what might atrophy in our skill set. There are so many inventions now that take this generative capacity of AI to the extreme.

Podcasts narrated by AI hosts that are then faking a real conversation about topics that are sourced and summarized by an AI research agent. As much as they want the whole thing to sound human, there's no heart in that. And sometimes, the heartlessness stares us right in the face. Just Google Apple AI summary fails, and you will find the weirdest summaries that a human would have never written. The one I love the most here is when some guy's mom sends him a message like, oh, this hike almost killed me.

And then the AI summarizes it into attempted suicide, but recovered and hiked in Palm Springs. It's just as bizarre as it is hollow and without anything resembling humanity. As tech founders, we are responsible for this kind of stuff. So think about this poem when you find a moment. What are you trying to be free of?

The living? The miraculous task of it? Love is for the ones who love the work. And that's it for today. Thank you so much for listening to the Bootstrap founder.

You can find me on Twitter at Avid Kal, aravid k h l. You can find my books and my Twitter course tattoo. And if you wanna support me in this show, please tell everybody you know about PodScan. Fm. Leave a rating and a review.

It makes a massive difference if you show up there because then the podcast will show up in other people's feeds. Any of this will help the show. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful day and bye bye.