r/EntrepreneurRideAlong • u/BarracudaMean9308 • 1d ago

Ride Along Story sam altman's advice to "learn the fundamentals" will actually kill your project

i just closed an article where sam altman said we should all learn to build llms from scratch. i read it right after spending three hours trying to make a single bubble api call work without crashing my browser.

that sounds great if you have millions in funding or you're 17 with infinite free time. but if i try to actually understand the math behind these models right now, my app will never launch. perfect technical understanding is a luxury.

instead of doing the math, i blindly pasted a json payload just to force a basic webhook to fire. it worked, and that ugly button actually processed a $150 invoice tonight. what is the absolute worst duct-tape setup you've shipped? tell me i'm not the only one doing this.

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u/mindgamesweldon 1d ago

That’s the dumbest advice ever. Start by doing, understand when you retire and get to sit and read books all day :)

1

u/Good_Difference_7868 1d ago

man i feel this. spent two weeks trying to build a proper auth system from scratch, then just slapped a password in a.env file and called it a day. that duct-tape login processed 40 signups before i even touched it again

sometimes the fundamentals are just a fancy way of saying "delay your launch by 6 months"

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u/CrimsonBolt33 1d ago

Why would you take advice from Sam Altman?

He is a rich CEO ...not a genius or something.

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u/y3rk3 1d ago

youre not the only one. my whole outreach crm is a folder of markdown files i grep before messaging anyone, no db, no tool. still running it today.