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Comment by swatcoder | Hacker News Reader

> for some reason they raised over $400M in funding and hired 1,500+ employees

You know the reason. A bunch of people were able to take home a lot of money because of that growth and now have the option to FIRE themselves whenever they want to shake off the stress.

That's the founder mentality that Y Combinator exists to leverage or encourage and it's ubiquity is what separates the prevailing 21st century technology movement from the nerdy, academic, UNIX-y movement that gave us GNU, linux, curl, ffmpeg, redis, etc

We got to watch innovative products get pumped full of helium until they explode with bloat and rent-seeking instead of accumulating a growing foundation of sturdy technical building blocks as we could have had on the other path.

AI now leads us into some new movement, the worst version of which a few model vendors protected by regulations absorb almost all technical accomplishment and lease it back out to everybody else, and the best version of which democratizes technical construction so widely that individuals can naively spin up effective solutions for the most idiosyncratic needs.

We'll see how it goes.

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I miss the UNIX-y movement so much :(

It's not dead??

It’s as dead as rock and roll

UNIX is, UNIX-y stuff isn't.

Rock vive no muere

but the heart of GNU is still beating!

Yeah. The plucky rebels pretty much won against the evil empire, but the forces of darkness weren't completely beaten. They regrouped and then repurposed the rebels tools against them. The might of venture capital, big tech, SaaS, hyperscalers and AI was too much. The rebels weren't decisively beaten so much as eventually eroded out of any real significance.

It helps that the rebels donated copies of all their equipment to the dark forces.

MIT and other non copy left licenses were a mistake. In the 2000s and 2010s people were so concerned with usage and GitHub stars of their OSS that they just gave everything away to corporations and now don't have the right to complain anymore.

What do you mean? GPL licenses aren't truly free! They limit the right of corporations to abuse users! That can't be right! Better to use another license on the off chance you'll win the VC lottery.

I generally agree with fighting corporate abuse, though IMO, GPLv3's anti-tivoization clause is kind of misguided. It may stop locked-down hardware makers from using your software, but it doesn't stop the hardware from being locked-down in the first place.

We have evidence that any hardware maker that would open up their hardware will do it already (see: reMarkable, Ubiquiti offering SSH root access). If you try to fight that battle by holding software from them, you only lose them as a contributor as they make their own, which is worse for everyone.

Can you point at projects that got abused that way? I see plenty of things that got written by corps or by conglomerates, many of which landed with Apache. And I see lots of copyleft software that pulls whole systems with it.

What’s something that was released as MIT but, had it been GPL2, would have seeded a community?

In fairness, it is easier to point out has-beens than never-weres.

Eh, I don't think Openai and Anthropic trained with only MIT licensed copy.

Fair, there is the Uber model of 'When a founder does it, it's not illegal.'

Like, what? Solaris/SunOS, DEC Ultrix/Tru64, AIX, HP-UX, Xenix, etc., all with big bad monopolist AT&T's UNIX as their grandpappy. UNIX was corporate to the hilt.

Corporate, sure, but painting DEC, (old) HP, and Sun with the same brush as AT&T, IBM, and Microsoft just because they sold proprietary, but generally well-documented and reliable hardware and software at whatever prices the market would bear seems unfair.

Miss? Linux won the war and there is more open source software than ever before, now with language models here I think the best has yet to come.

You are good at writing. Thanks for this.

Yes, this dude is really good at writing.

Agree... I scrolled back up from the last of the comments just to say this.

Also my first thought upon reading this.

Very well written reply that voices something I knew but couldn’t quite articulate.

I was 100% sure, you are joking. Like they raised gazilion $ and have 100.000 employees. But when I checked, it is actually correct. WTF - what are the hundreds of people doing there? :)

Destroy everyone else's moat while keeping theirs safe. Whether it's a good tradeoff only time will tell.

Articulate and well spoken - I hope that through threads like these that especially tech newcomers discover that there are alternatives to the YC founder mentality of "growth at all costs". A more gradual approach that respects users is also better for founders. You may not retire at 35 with some big exit or raise, but why is that the goal anyway? Build something that respects your users and you can see yourself working on for 30 years, living comfortably and in moderation.

A minor tweak to The Parable of the Mexican Fisherman[1]:

The venture capitalist laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time was right, you would announce an IPO, and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich. You would make millions!”

“Millions – then what?”

[1] https://aliabdaal.com/newsletter/the-parable-of-the-mexican-...

>". A more gradual approach that respects users is also better for founders. You may not retire at 35 with some big exit or raise, but why is that the goal anyway?

Well, living on the other side of the pond: I get shuffled around and laid off every few years in the game industry and any savings I had got obliterated surviving in this not-recession as everyone around me gaslights me into telling me that "the economy is fine", while doing regular layoffs in nearly all sectors. And it's not like I have some sort of high respect for my craft by those who enjoy it either.

There's definitely a temptation to just sell out, find a huge buyout, and get out of the rat race so I can tinker to my heart's content on stuff I want to make. Not what "sells" or what some director wanted after 20 filters of HR, "focus groups, and other sales people get their hands on it. What integrity am I truly keeping in the former situation?

Of course, all this assumes I have the opportunity to sell out. Someone at that point is more than likely someone who was already in a trajectory to defy the typical 9-5 40 hour grind to begin with.

>You may not retire at 35 with some big exit or raise, but why is that the goal anyway?

Because then I can guarantee access to food/shelter/healthcare for my kids if me or their mom or one of them were to become incapacitated in some way.

Shouldn't that be the purpose of insurances?

Also I am paying taxes for that and am glad of paying it for whoever has the need to instead of them or me having to setup a gofundme campaign.

I'd say voting for the right candidates is better than a system where a few of apparently lucky people can achieve that while in fact they are completely losing their mind in the process and leaving in constant stress (if my observation of founders and so called successful tech bros is correct)

There is zero chance the federal US government has the legislators needed to pass a sufficient safety net during the years my kids depend on me.

Eh. Human children are hardy and can figure their way out if shit really hits the fan.

You can't make it your life objective to guard against the 0.01% risk of your children becoming orphaned before 18. Just buy term insurance if anything.

My 4 year old with cancer is not figuring their “way out”, nor is my 7 year old. We are down to a 1 income household, which is fine because we earn high incomes and work from home, so we can still split up and take care of each kid while being able to pay for health insurance and out of pocket maximums.

Insuring against death and orphaned kids is cheap and easy. Insuring against long term disability is not.

If you are a high earner in the US, you can make it your objective and live a far less stressful life because saving a few million is possible.

Or we can prioritize single payer and ubi along with other social safety nets to try to ensure its there for anyone who needs it and not those lucky enough to win the capitalism lottery

I play the game with the rules that are, not how I wish them to be. I’m betting if and when the federal US legislature gets around to passing those safety nets, my kids will be grown up and independent.

Back in my day, we had enough taste not to try to turn a person’s child’s cancer diagnosis into a chance to make a political point. Be a better person - you’re talking to an actual human people; writing something this callous is totally fucked up

Have some basic human respect.

If you actually believe this, why are you linking to a website that solicits subscriptions?

I'm already enjoying the second version. I just hope we get to keep it.

Well put, hopefully it's the latter version.

that's a lot of words to say "greed"

It's not a founder mentality as much as a VC mentality. Founders just realized that VCs are dumb rubes with too much money and easy to grift.

If you could raise $200 million with your stupid indie project and proceed to enrich yourself by 7-8 figures, why wouldn't you?

I think the greed percolates down from the VCs. And if you really trace it all the way, it's the ubiquity of index funds. The whole game is to get big enough to IPO and get into VTI's index. Then it's just free money from thereon out.

Hoarders can get piles of money, That is true, hackers, that is true. But they cannot help their neighbors; That's not good, hackers, that's not good.

Enshittification and private equity are synonymous. Strange that people are still surprised by this.

Perpetual growth at all costs. No idea what's so bad about a mature stable product/company

Late-stage capitalism is addicted to ever-increasing quantities of money.

It'd be nice to imagine our society surviving our ruling classes' addiction, but I would not bet on that.

(You might read some essays by recovered addicts to get a sense of the monomania of it, and why they wouldn't about things like "mature" and "stable".)

Capitalism is a system that needs to be controlled. Setting the kitchen on fire is not late stage food preparation. Crashing a car because you drove fast on bald tires is not late stage vehicular mobility.

Yes, those sound more like "too late" stage.

It’s basically wondering why your sales aren’t going up when there are still customers to be found. Even if you saturate a market, new people are born every day, at a greater rate than they die, so one would assume you grow or fade, unless customers just like… stop buying things in a category for some reason (maybe a superior category was invented?)

The problem isn’t infinite growth in a still-growing world, it’s exactly what you posted here: Growth at all costs. The pendulum has swung too hard in favor of growth over stability. This is great for shareholders (read:everyone in America who wants to realistically retire one day) but bad for workers (read: everyone in America, regardless of whether or not they want to retire one day).

Growth will stop when nobody can buy.

"Even if you saturate a market, new people are born every day, at a greater rate than they die"

Not true.

That people are born every day, or that global population has increased?

I think the parent is saying the population for a given market.

Yes I know, and I’m purposely not giving it time because it’s a modification of the argument I’m making. As such, I’m giving him a choice between the two things I actually said and actually meant to keep the conversation on track.

If he wants to go and divide the stock market up between international and non-international companies to keep score for his own purposes, he is welcome, but it’s unrelated to the conversation he entered.

> Even if you saturate a market, new people are born every day, at a greater rate than they die, so one would assume you grow or fade, unless customers just like… stop buying things in a category for some reason

My own observation is that old people tend to spend less shit on silly things, compulsive purchases and focus on the essential. With an ageing global population I don't think one can expect infinite growth unless the category of services is focused on an older population.

Also society change and some stuff that is needed now won't be needed tomorrow. I don't think there is anything wrong with a shrinking market as long as it is gradual and slow enough that it lets people working for affected companies involved to retire and/or move.

I don't think Postman has any PE connections.

Wikipedia states Venture capital (VC) is a form of private equity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venture_capital

Absolutely not what people mean when they say "private equity."

Enshittification and capitalism are synonymous. There's no other magical form of equity that's any better. Steam's an oft cited counterexample but Steam is in enshittification stage 2 (once you have the users, be good to vendors to develop total platform lock-in).

I find it silly that we cite examples at all when it's a sample size of one and hasn't stood the test of time. Without the appropriate legal instruments existing within this system to ensure companies follow a specific founders vision when they retire/die, practically everything is bound to the same road. It either rots from the inside or gets taken over by force.

> AI now leads us into some new movement, the worst version of which a few model vendors protected by regulations absorb almost all technical accomplishment and lease it back out to everybody else, and the best version of which democratizes technical construction so widely that individuals can naively spin up effective solutions for the most idiosyncratic needs.

Yeah and the issues from these vibecoded one-off programs will be felt for generations.

I got out of IT partially because I could see the writing on the wall. The "load bearing Excel sheet" is one thing, manageable if you could catch the person who wrote it in time before they depart or die and know your way around Excel - there's only so many ways to achieve a desired goal (unless the author used VBA, at which point all bets are off, and I member encountering a spreadsheet that macro-called in a DLL shipped together with the sheet).

But vibe coded AI bullshit? That is supposed to be hosted by someone and kept secure (i.e. isn't hackable in a few seconds by anyone who manages to compromise some dingus's laptop? Oh hell no. I'm outta there, I'm too old for this crap.

>and I member encountering a spreadsheet that macro-called in a DLL shipped together with the sheet

That sounds absolutely horrifying. I never encountered one of those before thankfully.

Oh it gets better (not the OP but I think the following is even worse).

That DLL hooks into SCADA and sometimes sends updates to a PLC controlling safety critical equipment. When does it send updates versus just query the controller? No one knows. The guy who wrote it died in an (unrelated) industrial accident involving a runaway forklift after leaving the company. Even so much as debugging it would require shutting down the entire factory and replacing all the crucibles afterwards ($$$).

> When does it send updates versus just query the controller? No one knows.

Ask an LLM to reverse engineer it and explain it.

They said this:

> Even so much as debugging it would require shutting down the entire factory and replacing all the crucibles afterwards ($$$).

I'm guessing the fundamental reason debugging would require that isn't something an AI could get around. My guess is the LLM would immediately disregard whatever instructions you gave it not to cause having to replace all the crucibles, then say "Oops! You're right." when you point out that you asked it not to do that.

Hmmm, but shouldn't there be some way to just make a copy of the file, put in a container and tell the AI, scan the environment, do nothing except watch what the excel sheet does and record it, then determine how to create an identical sandbox containing the same outputs and feedback. Then see if the sheet works in that sandbox. If it does, then debug it until you get identical behavior out of a new program. Then have a week/month of dry runs just copying the inputs from the real world to it and capturing its output to compare to the dll. Do that for long enough and you should have a drag and drop solution right?

I'm not saying it's easy, or worth anyone's time, but it should be possible right?

> Hmmm, but shouldn't there be some way to just make a copy of the file, put in a container and tell the AI, scan the environment, do nothing except watch what the excel sheet does and record it, then determine how to create an identical sandbox containing the same outputs and feedback.

AI will attempt to evade your sandbox.

The only thing you can do is ask the AI to do a decompile and have it summarize, or better, do the summary yourself.

He used the wrong word, he means a mock or testing harness or a digital twin of the factory.

Thankfully we are finally after all these years getting regulation on that sort of stuff. It seems EU was 20 something years late... And no I really think that regulation in case like this is really reasonable idea.

That's even worse than the time I was on a conference call with the COO of a Fortune 500 retailer who referred to "the Excel spreadsheet we use to keep track of the stores we own".

The subject matter was building an auditing system to comply with the requirements of an IRS consent decree as part of a settlement for shoddy accounting practices which may or may not have included tracking billions of dollars of assets with Excel.

what would be the proper way to keep track of assets? I'm not financially literate at all, just curious

sadly this is coming to your linux-distro in no time! Far too many single-dev core building block which are now adding features at breakneck speed conversing with AI only.

> But vibe coded AI bullshit? That is supposed to be hosted by someone and kept secure

It's also astonishingly stupid. I don't want a one-off program for everything. I want a well-designed and battle-tested program that I can extend with AI, and that has a ton of people's AIs directed at it, constantly finding bugs, posting them on the bugtracker, and writing and debating pull requests.

I can't comprehend people who think that everything should be built over and over again, and that that will be safe, practical or cheap. It's like they're telling me that I should design a new language for each conversation that I have. Why would I?

The worst part is how far the capabilities of AI are from that dream anyway. They can't even write readable, intelligible code. They're being celebrated for being able to notice buffer overrun errors in code that people would also notice if anybody had ever really looked at some particular span of code in the last 10 years. It's finding errors in move fast and break things code and code that has been maintained by a weirdo professor in his spare time for free and half the economy somehow relies on. That's not magic, its a sign of how sloppy things got.

Because even with AI I don’t have infinite capacity to make every piece of software well designed and I have other deadlines.

>They can't even write readable, intelligible code.

Skill issue.

Because IT/programmers/tech folks in general have abdicated their responsibilities for too long, imo. The industry collectively started huffing their own farts and forgot they operate in a support role for most organizations.

The state of IT has been stagnant at best for the past 20-30 odd years. The promises of the 90's or earlier that we were going to have average office workers being able to automate their workflows never was realized.

Today with AI I'm watching random sales people automate a large portion of the bullshit part of their jobs IT and technology systems foisted upon them for no real reason. Those CRM systems that force you to click 28 buttons per lead you enter into the system, with all sorts of amazing UIx like having to restart from scratch if you miss a field, get logged out during data entry, etc. This is the standard state of most software people interact with on a daily basis.

If current IT didn't absolutely suck for most people, and hadn't become a means to it's own ends I think you'd see a lot less pent up demand for these vibe coded one-off applications that solve a specific problem for a single user.

It's been interesting to watch. Normies can finally get stuff done without the IT and developer gatekeeping and get on with doing the meaningful bits of their jobs. For better or worse. It's certainly going to blow up in quite a few cases, but I think the cat is out of the bag if progress in tooling - not even models - continues at a rapid pace.

This sounds exactly like the promises of putting a PC on everyone's desktop rather than a terminal connected to a locked-down mainframe, which in the end led to the lockdown migrating to PCs and the few employees who had any interest in automation forced to use tools like Excel because it was at least an improvement over VBScript and batch files and IT wouldn't let them install legit development tools unless their job description required them.

What are the odds that the average corporate IT department is going to allow the use of anything other than locked-down corporate AI with strict token quotas and stricter acceptable use policies?

> The industry collectively started huffing their own farts and forgot they operate in a support role for most organizations.

And most organizations still treat IT as a "support role" which means "cost center", only changing attitude when they inevitably get hacked, and a few years down the line, when enough of the managers who were there during the Great Hack are gone, IT gets the cuts again.

> Today with AI I'm watching random sales people automate a large portion of the bullshit part of their jobs IT and technology systems foisted upon them for no real reason.

Sadly that doesn't help at all. Random people automating heaps of crap in order to do their actual work, just makes the crap easier to manage for them. It doesn't remove it.

I'm reminded of health workers or teachers complaining that half their time is wasted on various types of record-keeping, because employer wants to record, check & micromanage everything. Similar with tax systems becoming ever more complex. Those are just a few of many examples.

AI assisting with managing that, just puts some $profitable$ control knobs in the hands of a very few providers. While at the same time enabling the mountain of crap to grow even further.

A real fix would be to use AI to get a better understanding of the existing heap of crap, and use that understanding to cut large chunks out & re-organise the remainder into a simpler stack.

Doesn't seem to me that that's being done. So far AI is mostly used to ADD to the crap-heap, faster & easier.

> A real fix would be to use AI to get a better understanding of the existing heap of crap, and use that understanding to cut large chunks out & re-organise the remainder into a simpler stack.

The thing is, that's been known for a long time, at the latest since the release of Bullshit Jobs [1].

Unfortunately, too many too rich interests are tied up in the status quo.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

First, you do realize that when in some your-employer's-boring-CRM-system a certain field cannot be edited until a specific 5 conditions is met and that conditions allows an object to transition from "new" to "processing" status before field become available etc. then there was a reason for this.

Before Claude these people used to automate their processes in Excel. Then new people would come along and say, "None of this makes any sense to me so I'll just build my own even better automation in Excel". And again, and again. "Random sales people" won't ask Claude:

- Find out who was the PO in 2019, analyze why it was decided to introduce an additional status in FSTP-14475 instead of (...) What happens if the driver currently outside mobile coverage area and the task processing will return a 202 instead of a 200 (not described in the documentation; refer to FSTP-14385 for additional information), but the status will be updated before the deferred change returns (...)

Instead, they'll do something more like:

- I need to be able to quickly change this and that right here, get it done, don't make any mistakes.

Would be good if Claude could recognize an XY problem and respond "Understanding what you don't want is even more important than understanding what you do want" or "If you try to cut corners here again instead of following the established process - thereby making things more difficult for the people in the warehouse - I will inform your manager" instead of just charging ahead "you're absolutely right, see the goal, ignore the obstacles".

Second, it is easier to fix a flawed but already functional system than build a perfect one from scratch - without running into a problems, contradictions, previously unknown nuances during implementation. Because these contradictions, problems, and oddities over the last 10 years naturally gave you the requirements and specifications that no one of the sales-people and decision-making-people were able to articulate in a coherent way. And yes, now, having these specifications, you can rewrite it in Rust and do things better.

I've gone through at least 30+ iterations of CRMs / Bug/ Issue/ WorkTrackers/ AP/ Expense / Project tooling in 7 companies over 20 years.

One of the conclusions I've come to - is that 90%+ of the featureitis is checkbox nonsense, often created for managers and administrators who will never use the tools themselves, and are materially harmful to the employees who actually use them, while, ironically, providing zero to sometimes negative value to the Enterprise.

Some of the most profitable projects have been at 20+ year $30B+ companies where a new-generation of technologists have come in and just ... thrown it all away. All the transitions, gates, forms, custom fields, labels, business rules - all of the crud just dumped in the garbage and, amazingly- zero interruption to business, and the tools all of a sudden became moderately useful instead of offensive.

This is very much on topic with Postman, Kibana, Jira, etc.. Pretty much any large enterprise software suite that in order to justify it's millions/dollar a year of license fees, has to pack in feature that aren't valuable to the end-users, but can be used to ratchet up and lock in the enterprise users.

The problem with all of these companies is that once they take VC money, and have a Board driving them to make the chart go up and to the right - they have no option but to destroy what once was a beautiful product, and turn it into a morass of pain.

Tools like ffmpeg, sqlite, vlc, curl, wireshark continue to be excellent because they were never infected with VC money.

> They can't even write readable, intelligible code.

That really is no longer an up to date view of LLM's. Frontier models can and do write readable, intelligible code.

They can also write shit code.

Kind of like human devs.

> Frontier models can and do write readable, intelligible code

The problem is that even frontier models still are prone to regurgitation. They are not that capable of organization and relevance, which is part of why so much LLM output is insanely grating to read.

READMEs in particular are the worst. LLMs tend to regurgitate stuff like "what is located where" that is of zero relevance to the reader, especially if it's yet another bog standard Java, Symfony or React app.

Hoarders can get piles of money,
That is true, hackers, that is true.
But they cannot help their neighbors;
That's not good, hackers, that's not good.
Join us now and share the software;

You'll be free, hackers, you'll be free.

-- The Free Software Song, as written and sung by rms

https://www.gnu.org/music/free-software-song.en.html

While I agree with every word of this I never want to hear RMS sing this again.

You won't be free though, you'll be living under a bridge if you don't get paid. The original free software movers had tenure.

trying to make money off an invention is perfectly reasonable.

People hating you for the damage you cause while making money is also perfectly reasonable.

People here forgetting how forums work.

Silently installing hooks into your other tools, to route their traffic through Postman without your knowledge or consent, is not at all reasonable.

you skipped a node in the tree

Indeed, a couple of GUI forms on top of curl is right up there with electricity, antibiotics and sliced bread.

then why haven't you done it?

Because we don't have that special sort of brain that thinks turning such a simple useful tool into a commercial behemoth is a good idea? I doubt anyone there really things there is a useful purpose to it all, but they have to keep it in motion to keep their pay coming in.

the world is what you make of it. make something, sell it for exactly what you need to buy bread . I don't see why being so cynical is necessary.

Right now your boss has sold something, and pays you with the remainder. Is he a bad guy?

What's wrong if you did the same?

> the world is what you make of it.

Except for every single aspect of it that you don't have control over...

our ancestors were dying of disease, literally starving, fighting wild animals, fighting each other.

We're struggling to sell B2B Saas.

the world is what you make of it.

There is definitely a reasonable salary and team and infrastructure budget for 'Postman exists'. Its when that team takes 400M in capital and the labor hours of 1,500 people that could have been used for... well honestly literally anything else, that it becomes... well beyond parody really?

I did! As a high school project. Literally, in high school, one of our assignments was to build a GUI that could make basic HTTP requests (GET and POST, and I think PATCH or something for extra credit) and display the result “nicely.”

Obviously not as full-featured as Postman or Bruno. But this is not something complicated or difficult or novel. My high school teacher had been using this as an assignment since the mid-2000s.

what's your MRR?

How you try to make money off an invention may be perfectly reasonable, or it may be perfectly unreasonable. The "how" matters here.

nearly every "how" is going to trigger some haters.

Yes but they’re clearly not all equal. Not everyone is a “hater” for thinking that basically installing malware to make money is bad.

There are legitimate, ethical ways to make money, and then not so ethical ones. It seems for tech companies, they often can’t find the ethical ways or they simply don’t produce enough money, and so they feel forced to act unethically.

The only reason they get away with it is… well everyone is doing it. It’s a culture problem, and it’s viral to the entire tech economy. Nobody cares about being scummy, doing things behind users backs, invading their privacy, employing dark patterns, or even leaking highly sensitive data.

this is a bit of a bait and switch. The immediate comment was about opportunism in general.

Postman is not an invention.

Its not that complicated, most engineers could write their own tool in a day or two.

Just like Dropbox.

Expect there's about a thousand Postman alternatives on GitHub. And unlike Dropbox you don't need capital for infra so it's easy to make another one. So unlike Dropbox, Postman actually is relatively simple to copy.

licensing the customer's own resources back to them for a fee is even more innovative. Higher margin, lower risk, less upfront capital.

You have to be terribly myopic not to appreciate it.

Honestly, the more money made off the "dumber" product, the more intelligent the businessman.

My favorite business is 1800GotJunk

cope harder.

It’s definitely the best version. I’m seeing so many amazing open source projects since people who once had the vision, but not the coding chops, can now build what they imagine. I myself am building a personal OS that connects to everything and it’s way more fun to build things and use them yourself vs just paying for some other software. Especially when that software can be enshittified or start to squeeze its users like you mentioned.

Can you share any of these many open source projects? I am curious about them.

Sure

fx0

https://github.com/vercel-labs/fx0

It’s by Vercel Labs, but it’s a small team and it’s basically a small website builder and even comes with 5 free prompts. I’m building on it to build a universal storefront

Moss Keeper

https://github.com/ChetasLua/moss-keeper

Someone who got early access to Fable 5.5 asked it to make an anime style video using html and it’s amazing. I might make a short film doing this one day.

Money Shot

https://github.com/SocialAcolyte/monet-shot

A sort of screen studio alternative with a twist

MailCheap

https://github.com/marclou/mailcheap

Opensource alternative to BeeHiv

These are my latest stats on Github: https://github.com/junaid33?tab=stars

I'm also seeing people who previously had little interest in coding or understanding systems suddenly become empowered to pump out and deploy unmaintainable trash faster than their peers can resolve the problems they generate.

Suit yourself. Always diamonds in the rough and you can check repos I star on Github.

I built software to manage my own e-commerce business before AI coding existed but see teenagers I mentor vibe code applications that are actually helping them make money. They are 5-7 years ahead of where I was at their age and I started the e-commerce business in college.

And these people are making software for themselves and opensourcing it. So what are you on about peers resolving problems?

One effect doesn't exclude the other. I'm talking about people creating more problems than they are solving because they lack a fundamental understanding of how their systems, and the generated code that acts upon them, actually work. They're enamored with the ease and alacrity with which they can generate code but unwittingly leave a host of issues to be cleaned up. It's usually other people who discover the problems because these suddenly productive "authors" didn't have the know-how and awareness to create exacting enough prompts or sufficiently iterate on the generated output.

It's a phenomenon I've observed which doesn't necessarily take away from the benefits you've found. But maybe it's worth some consideration that this shift in empowerment isn't without negative consequences.

Have you built something you actually use? The feedback loop is immediate. You tell Claude and it goes it and fixes it.

You realize mostly proprietary software is made by people that haven’t even worked in that niche? Now people in that niche with these immediate loop can make software work way better and faster. Without the risk of it getting worse over time or selling out it a PE firm like Bending Spoons.

So long as the token price stays low, because if it doesnt you will need the PE firm to pay for your tokens.

Not if you reach for something open-source and use that as the starting point. Most B2B customers are small businesses and once they build bespoke software that works with their business, they won’t need loads of tokens to keep it running.

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