apsurd

sorry this landing page is going hard on claudish. it's unreadable.

This truism is intuitive to everyone but always funny to me how everyone never has any time, needs to save time, needs to hire staff workers for every mundane job and robots can't come soon enough… all so we can binge watch Game of Thrones and 90 day Fiancé.

And watch 10 hours of football on Sunday for our DraftKings bets.

mine would be something like

    p { color: red; }

as a teenager my mind was blown as I reloaded the page and there it was; text now in red. I did that!

> The hard part of a product is not the idea, but the experience of using it.

solid

People don’t actually want to build software. There will still be a market for hosted software that feels like magic. The next shape and UX is still getting fleshed out.

Also: the coded apps that AIs build are unmaintainable without a tech background. They may work for exactly their proposed happy-path and that may be great. But over time I can’t see how it’s possible these apps get maintained.

how so? which model? because it’s def not claudish.

the author commented otherwise.

You wrote your readme yourself. It shows. So refreshing and i was able to finish it too.

you’re on HN and it’s as if you’ve never even heard of “thinking in systems”

The bit about "but the UI" sounds like a developer thinking "UI is a solved problem" in the same way MBAs are told "coding is a solved problem".

Product people do seem to think it worth exploring "personalized software for everyone" like literally each person gets their own custom UI. This does sound like a support mess but it's not obviously wrong when you think about the Microsoft Word alternative.

maybe ill read the article, but i mean you’re financially motivated to think its good for the world arent you?

humans are excellent at justification.

There's nuance though. Poetry even.

> we should fight for human survival

All problems arise from this statement. It's baked in us and it's why we do in fact survive. But it isn't so neatly righteous. When we struggle to agree on what defines a human, who ought to have rights, and basic equality, it's easy to see how much harm "we should fight for survival" does.

"If a death ray comes from the sky and obliterates the entire planet, at least we all go together." There is something comforting about being together with the human race even in doom. Perhaps especially in doom.

only if you specifically ask Claude to use AskUserQuestion tool. otherwise i would hardly say claude acts as a collaborator naturally.

Agree due diligence is required. FTX, Theranos, Enron are a reality. But it’s also tempting to color the assessment with virtue.

Im morally against Meta but it’s the world’s greatest money printing machine ever conceived. To say they or Uber don’t make money would be too virtue-tainted.

Previous YC founder so they’re already connected and vetted. Since then they’ve proven another 0-1 success with masks and manufacturing. Now they’re onto something very obviously hitting tailwinds.

The investment is peanuts to the fund. You’re missing the full-story deck and if they’ve shown traction it seems like a no brainer.

(btw for Lloyd the founder, Jason hired me right here from HN for ownlocal. It was my first professional software job. You guys made my career. Thank you)

downvote isn’t personal. it takes more than one to become gray.

Im trying to say it doesn’t matter what we plebs think about these massive entities. Maybe it should but if we’re talking creating (economic) value, they clearly are.

at $156B market cap someone sure is making money.

I've no say in the manner in which they ran/run their business but judging a mega-corporation on lemonade-stand level accounting is a fool's errand.

React is a frontend framework. How do you get around that? It's invented entirely to handle client-side UX and reactive DOM updates which have to be DOM because it for the browser which is a frontend. Are you saying nextjs is the backend and react is just react, it's not nextjs' fault?

I'd say we disagree on the simplicity then: hydration, nextjs API reinventions of every interaction else 'use client' as an escape hatch which means it runs on the client but then what does the non 'use client' code do if nextjs is not a client-facing framework?

that’s likely the promise but it’s so confusing and high cognitive overhead to maintain that backend <-> frontend relationship. ‘use client’ - i think the special sauce for why people use nextjs is all frontend based. the frontend that comes from the backend.

nextjs dx is a special kind of hell. disclaimer: im just a simple rails guy.

akshully it does work like that. it sounds like you’re arm-chairing macro economics so ill try my hand too.

No one said anything about dollar-in revenue dollar-out dividend. only you.

if i have vested interest in a company and that company’s value is perceived to increase then i get to leverage that value into economic power. yes

It can be ineffective to act based on principle but ineffective isn’t the same thing as meaningless.

multiplied a hundreds times a day. Yes.

i’m working on a little ios widget display currently. even a tiny little one view box has hundreds of nuanced design and structure decisions behind it.

That reasoning is the thickness not the amount of code that powers it though they are somewhat interrelated.

Phrased this way, my aspiring product leader hat activates: that 5 years of work cannot be of much value to a company worth billions because a 5 year estimate is the lowest possible qualification you can make. Its a “will never happen” shelving.

all work is stack ranked against other opportunities. no matter how many teams help to parallelize, leadership basically comes down to ranking the stack correctly. Valuable work will be at the top by any means necessary. “mvp”, probes, task forces, code yellows, and so on.

edit: it’s even a backhanded compliment to agentic coding. Asana a public company considers a $12k outlay for something they’d never spend real resources on worth a case study =|

that subject line is pretty bad though.

(i know much of it is a crap shoot and easy to quarterback on Monday morning.)

maybe but the person you're replying to went out of their way to qualify their reasoning, and it's quite well reasoned.

haha you're right! That is the entire nuance of the discussion. There's a line somewhere in there. And it's not as pedantic as it seems. I still do cook my own food. I don't grow it and butcher the meat. But thousands of years of cooking people still cook food. (and not me but people do still grow their own food).

Efficiency and automation isn't some objective linear path toward enlightenment, that's not unreasonable, is it?

And you might say "people cook because they want to". Not exactly given the whole socioeconomic realities. But also "want to" is nuanced. Cooking is a lot of work and there's many parts of it annoying. It's worth it. <insert philosophy on value and how to assess value and is hedonism 'value based' and how can we know>

umm, its like the hallmark of adulthood to learn that life is a lot about doing things you don't want to do. There's obviously a spectrum. And I don't mean forcibly through coercion. I mean yeah it sucks to wake up early and clean up and get your exercise in and be accountable to your team or take your kid to basketball practice or feed the cat. Or go out your way to pick up that trash someone else threw out, or let someone go ahead of you in traffic even though you were there first or take the stairs because someone is moving in today and needs the elevator more than you or take your dad to dialysis and listen to him mention the same things 5 times, there and back or not just eat anything you want whenever you want.

I don't know it sounds like you're advocating for doing only things you want to do. Automate everything else. It's all philosophy at this point. Life doesn't really work that way "and it shouldn't" - where shouldn't is wholly in the philosophy category, of course.

You've articulated what I found unsettling about Boris' pov that "coding is a solved problem". I listened to a few of his talks and was instinctively off-put by that sentiment. I figured a fellow programmer would understand and speak on the nuances.

Granted it did make me think about my biases and to lean into more future facing inevitabilities. But you've nailed it, for Boris and Anthropic, they are betting that coding is a solved problem in the sense that any person can one-shot any random idea and the output will be in some abstract sense "good". And then at what cost and toward what end?

but why is it a tired argument?

You'd clearly never believe this but there's even an argument that cars are of dubious benefit to society. Personal/passenger cars mostly in that they've reshaped our entire civilized landscape to be inhumane and all the long-term and downstream health effects that that entails.