Post #1483742

Recommending Blacksky users on Mastodon to choose the 4th option in their recent poll. Blacksky is deciding on how much (if any) agentic coding that they should be using. Right now, the developer team is erring towards using agentic coding. They make it clear that this will only be used for coding. Here are the 4 options listed below: Option 1: Ship new features, grow our user base, and organically grow the business by better supporting our members as well as other communities that want to use our infrastructure. This does require using agentic coding within our developing of features as needed. Option 2: Raise venture capital and use the funds to hire more developers so that we can offset using AI coding tools. Leaving aside the various ethical problems with venture capital, in the current environment, raising money for a startup that is not building an AI product – and we are not doing this – is incredibly difficult. The founder, being a Black, first-time founder, makes these odds nearly impossible. Doing this with a commitment to not using AI coding tools makes us uninvestable (which is not necessarily a bad thing!). Option 3: Implement traditional social media business models that will let us hire more developers without relying on AI coding tools. These include selling user data to advertisers and/or running ads in the app. Option 4: Not grow. Keep the existing Blacksky product as it is, use existing funds and time to manually maintain existing infrastructure and pay moderators, but this will put Blacksky at a higher risk of cannibalisation from competitors that provide feed services, and leave the core team with the hard choice of possibly stepping away from their work with Blacksky in order to find viable full-time work to support themselves. To me, Options 1, 2 and 3 would increase anti-Blackness with only the 4th not having that. There is also the fact that currently Blacksky is the only alternative to Bluesky for the protocol used and that there does not seem to be short- term risk for other setups due to how computationally expensive it is. Link to article for details: https://blackskyweb.xyz/blacksky-algorithms-policy-towards-agentic-coding/ #Blacksky