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Comment by thfuran | Hacker News Reader

If ten people make focused tools covering different 20% subsets of the giant ones, there's a good chance of having a choice that matches what any given customer wants. And for most customers, that's going to be a better match than a big tool that does tons of other stuff they didn't want.

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That is the alternative timeline for software I always wanted to live in, both as a user and as a developer. Make it 100 different tools instead to make it even more likely that there is a close enough match.

Games are closer to that than any other type of software even if they tend to cluster around popular genres and styles a bit much.

If you give people a limited set of tools they quickly improve until then they need (well, want) different tools. In order to keep your customers you'll inevitably end up adding new things.

Tiered versions work well.

I don't know anyone that doesn't use a combination of at least one simple, one feature laden, text editor. Most of us via notes apps, etc., routinely move between a range of text complexity, suitable to a range of things we want to write.

Having the simplest to the most powerful apps be consistent between each other, wherever they have feature commonality, would be really nice.

“…good chance at having a match” might be a reach, as more use cases create a viable market.

Are your customers selecting one of five features in your product, or choosing any twenty from among a hundred?

How do the consumers find which of the dozen tools support the 20% they need?

By, get this, trying out the products. Revolutionary.

How about less snark?

Especially when, who the heck has time for trying out a dozen products? That's at least a full day of work, which probably costs more than the software itself.

No, you just read a few reviews to find the best full price option and best budget option and figure out if the budget does what you need or not. And often go for full price just because you don't even know what features you'll need in 6 months which you don't need now, so safer to just learn the option that is the most future-proof.

You're right. Even across stuff I _really_ use it's hard to bring myself to try.

Anecdotally I haven't tried Codex and use Claude Code. The day I try Codex will be when I hear from my friends/communities that it's much better. Same for IDEs, STT tools, etc

I tried codex on a whim when my Claude code rate limited me. Canceled my max subscription and stuck with codex

It’s amusing how much of a difference in experience I hear about this. Almost hilarious if you take into account what this thread is discussing.

This post is about some highly interactive software with a lot of design decisions, and this thread is about finding whether or not your 20% feature niche is supported.

Let's be real, unless some soul somehow had the same 20% as yours and left a review somewhere, you won't know if the features you need, or their implemention, fit your need until you try.

I dunno. I get that we have different needs, but I enjoy testing out new productivity tools. I'm sort of a productivity-software-junkie. I don't use almost any of the things I try, but I enjoy exploring the market.

Then again, I do this in my free time. At work, I rarely deviate from what is provided and the handful of things that I explicitly added.

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