apsurd

hah, that made me laugh. To this day I'm so proud to have learned how to repeatedly just wipe my PC C drive when needed then reinstall XP or whatever. I'm just a web-dev that got their start by googling "how to make a website". As I leaned in there came a turning point where I wanted badly to switch from windows, php, scripts, to Ruby on Rails. But installing ruby at the time just didn't work. I worked up the courage - eventually - to partition my drive and install linux. After that, I got to experience a proper terminal and the rest is history.

easy: we all need breaks. breaks are not bad. living doesn't only mean "doing actions"

come on now.

so even if you're right, checking out emotionally and spiritually just means more life lived. That ain't some kind of bad thing.

life is good sometimes. hard sometimes. and it's long sometimes, so give people a break.

Agreed, I'd say tinkering for profit has become the defacto optimization and tinkering for its own sake is less fashionable because it commands no attention. and everyone is obsessed with the modern currency: attention.

To be clear, I'm seeing this as an observed phenomenon, not that everyone made up their mind that they hate tinkering and love money. I just think it's getting really really hard to exist in the world as a normal person when the entire human collective is getting pumped commercialized hyper-media from all angles at all times now 100X'd by genAI bots. It's really exhausting and so you either opt-in to the game, monetize your now AI side-hustle to pay the rent, or opt-out and live in the woods. and get packages delivered by Amazon. heh.

My read is that there does seem a clear difference between simple -> advanced machines vs simple -> "smart" machines. Nearly every smart machine is bullshit enshitification-in-waiting. Rent-seeking in-waiting. Smart tvs, smart cars with touch-screens. some would argue apple products. These things proclaim advancements but what they really do is black-box and dumb everything down to the lowest common denominator, then quite literally impose control over the air, and shove ads to you.

I'm all for just getting to where I need to go by using the appropriate tool, like a reliable car. But no not if it means foregoing the liberty of other options.

The financialization of everything is what's ruining everything. In the computer and internet realm, there's warm nostalgia from hours spent tinkering, building one's own PC, reformatting C drives due to malware, searching for "snippets" to add a forum or pimp a myspace page. But inevitably the money incentives come to dominate. It's all of our doing, we all dream of a better life to put it charitably.

Now everything is a means to a commercial end. Tinkering for fun and knowledge just isn't profitable. And it matters less and less what each our stance is on money and capital if the people that optimize for money and capital gobble up all the money and capital. Of all that's going on, the wealth gap is what's most troubling to me, closely followed because it's closely related is "post truth". I think post-truth is roughly caused by the fact that people are happy to believe what they want to believe toward some commercialized and/or idealogical end. You're much more likely to hate and blame your neighbor when you look around and you're the one not doing too well.

writing well is really hard. other mediums are other mediums.

sure the new mediums have reach going for them, but im not sure socrates would’ve enjoyed or optimized for popularity.

also: https://www.wordware.ai is the fastest company to raise some threshold of millions of dollars, something like that, had rapid adoption and they've pivoted their entire company to their new thing https://www.sauna.ai.

it's a good example because they're still very much an AI company, it's just that their initial traction was a "workflow builder" but strategically, they realized nobody wakes up in the morning wanting to build workflows. They want things done.

Sauna is the AI thing that just gets things done. They are betting their entire company on it. I found their story compelling https://www.wordware.ai/story albeit very long-winded =P

Thanks for sharing your story. Your third iteration looks polished and professional on the outset. I haven't used it, I'd like to comment purely on positioning and messaging:

Appaca seems to addresses the internal tools realm of medium+ sized businesses which carries a lot of competition because that's where sizable budget lives. This playbook requires strong targeted sales teams motion because Appaca need to connect the dots from Appaca -> business value. This is because your features are 1:1 technical capabilities, not direct value capture chains: spreadsheet to app, custom dashboard, custom CRM, app builder.

Now I may be totally off regarding Appaca, but I'd expect your sales to come from sales-teams and not product-led growth meaning the website itself doesn't convert people on its own without human touch/intervention. You noted that your previous products had crazy churn - this is my thinking why - because biz-ops tools are high investments even if they start light. A churned customer was not able to connect the value chain on their own.

All this to say, with the current approach and offering, Appaca is entirely a sales-lead motion. Nothing wrong with that at all, it just means that whatever is on the website is not the driving force, the sales team knows best what's landing, are they getting calls at all, are they getting calls but not closes, are they closing but customers churn later because they don't see value etc.

---

Ok that said, what's most interesting me is which ICP (ideal customer profile) to target in the first place with biz-ops tools. That space has a ton of surface area and we are nowhere close to an ideal end-state. For workflow automation and internal tools space, as said, heavily saturated because the motion and value capture is proven. For things like Lovable and the AI builders, these things exploded and proved out the indie entrepreneur space. I find it incredibly amazing how successful they've been. I personally want to deep dive into who their ICPs really are.

From a strategic upstart pov, there's got to be opportunity in smaller businesses in a way that wasn't economically viable before. There's a large chunk of businesses that are too small for any concept of a tech department; it's the owner using wix.com to build their website. This is a different problem all together but generally, in 2026 the fact that website builders are used by business owners to literally build websites, pages, with content, and images positioned, is far from ideal.

Businesses care about outcomes. digital tools are means to an end. A platform that works from that lens with prescription and batteries included is something I want to see and think has latent value. A platform that orients a business around their industry vertical, with prescribed capabilities/goals, then deploys them all in a way that's outcome oriented, the deployment, data, UI, etc are materializations on top of the goal.

Anyway, wanted to get this out before I left the coffee shop. Happy to talk about this more, it's something I've been ruminating on for a while.

> but suggesting that the people who run FAANG don't understand the dangers of bad metrics is... interesting

You're far too charitable. Understanding has nothing to do with it. Big companies are too far insulated from bad metrics. Middle managers get away with anything and everything because their decisions are too far removed from reality. And they're nowhere to be seen when the other shoe drops. And they'll just leave to a promotion elsewhere if they stay and results are bad.

Everything is far removed from reality in bigco. So you get a bunch of theater and house-playing with "data-driven" posters up on the wall. It's a show that everyone is aware of and seemingly we all still attend.

llms don’t produce anything on their own.

the sibling reply puts it very well how it doesn’t really make sense to gg mankind because a computer can endlessly answer questions and code. it is truly amazing! technology has been mind blowing for centuries now.

people still need to put in the work to master the tools.

it’s not wrong. it’s what is unique about the AR medium in particular. “heightening reality” is whats in discussion. we can talk about it, but its not the sane discussion as photos, or video games, or VR.

I wouldn’t say that “what if the world was digital!” is some kind of apex creative insight.

More practically the people in power need to own real estate. The metaverse, VR, AR, you’re giving these builders way too much credit by connecting it to creative expression.

They want to own the land.

I used to think this but you only know which were the right corners to cut after the fact. And most things are not obviously right or obviously wrong, instead it’s a slow zombie death by a thousand fuzzy signals.

And the management tier of the startup will too easily color the signal by the flavor they want to see.

My latest take on this matter is to separate speed as in fast from quick. Quick is the thing you want and almost always good. Fast is what usually gets lauded and measured but fast just gets you large volumes of fuzzy signal faster.

(quick means that something can take time and be measured, not rushed, things can bake, and the feedback loop is responsive quickly throughout the loop. while fast is looking at wall clock time and goaling on the end-result yield from the loop. i think it’s very misguided. things very often need bake time)

Yes, the main issue I had was regarding how anyone can get good without first being bad. Your comment highlighted a very particular worst engineer persona, as if there was an obvious way they could have avoided it preemptively.

Since we’re talking about learning in particular, my callout is it’s in no way helpful to shame people that aren’t good at something. It’s counterproductive.

“Master all prior art before naively trying to do anything on your own” - also, very much does way more harm than good in a learning context. (it narrows the top of the funnel for no good reason)

The gripe seems to be the negative effect on the team, business/project outcome etc, sure work doesn’t pay you to write your own compiler.

But again, its such a disservice to learning to dictate a shape, largely academic, largely top down (vs bottoms up failing & flailing).

Well, the inventory of primitives has to be earned. Else they can't actually be composed. Composition requires tacit knowledge. There's a learning pyramid thing that describes it. Just asked chatGPT to jog my memory (heh, heh)

    Remember → Understand → Apply → Analyze → Evaluate → Create

citation: see "Bloom's Taxonomy"

Discussions on learning typically bring up the need for rote learning, repetition and vocabulary building. It is essential, but to focus on it "as the mechanism for learning" does more harm than good. It's necessary but in no way sufficient.

It's much, much more nuanced than that.

On one hand, it's very good advice to be clear about PMF. If you have to ask your product doesn't have it. It'll be servers-on-fire obvious when you reach product-market-fit.

On the other hand two things stick out: 1) for every example that proves polishing doesn't matter, there's a successful exception that broke every rule and succeeded anyway. The founder of Figma for example, said he worked on its foundation for something like 4 years before launching. 2) Internet, consumer tech, mobile, sass are all mature markets and the quality bar is very high at this point. It's not obvious that some novel concept will be enough to overcome sheer inertia of status-quo incumbents.

I'm younger, but not by much and I too feel instinctively sad by how abruptly the entire industry has changed. And there's no going back. It's because I'm a craftsmen, I care about the code. And you learn in your career that it's a bad idea to care about the code, especially in a business context, which one's career is very much trapped in the business context.

I care about the code because the code is the product interface to the people working on it, my peers and team. The UX around that code affects us every day, every hour. We should care about it! It took me a decade to realize caring about the code is not bad, it's just a dualism we have to hold: two truths. The code is a means to an end, the outcome and end-user value is the only thing that matters, it's true! Also the code matters. The code is a manifestation of the effort and human attention toward an interface that becomes a product that produces business value for people.

Writing code is changed forever. And I'm saddened by it because I spent so much intimate time and attention writing code. I felt proud and it was beautiful to me, the code itself, the APIs created, and the end user state. (I'm a product developer, and believe it or not, I even enjoy CSS). But also the code is just code. AI writes code. And everyone is rightfully so losing their minds over it all. My hours "coding" are changed forever.

But I fully believe the pendulum will swing back to what has always been true. It's not a failure of AI. It's just what has always been true: creating useful and usable product experiences, for people, is hard. It's a very hard iterative feedback loop with experiential, tacit, actions and actors in real life.

So I think, we're ok. The variance is high and wild, but, it's all good, it's all still ok.

Thanks for your writing, I enjoyed it. (edit: TLDR I think you're product person caught in backend-dev circles. Human-centric, make things for people. In this world, AI is more obviously a tool. On the other side of the pool, the more backend-heavy the dev, the more everything is just one skill file away: marketing, sales, UX, design, writing, strategy, consciousness.)

I just recently learned about hooks[1] from another HN comment. Conceptually, running CI doesn't have to impose an Agentic tax right?

In other words, isn't there a way to orchestrate this NOT as a long running token maxxing setup given that triggers and CI runs can be run deterministically.

disclaimer: I haven't done this, just interested.

[1] https://code.claude.com/docs/en/hooks

incentives aren’t aligned

/advisor has been really good experience for me especially with having only a Pro plan.

I exclusively use sonnet and advisor is basically “hey opus chime in on my approach”. been working great as far as i can tell.

"it's not that deep" as the kids say.

In fact postgresML took naming heat because Postgres is right there in the name and they weren't affiliated with the brand. "pg" is just two letters. like WP-engine (literally the name as they say it is "double U P engine").

And a cat and a dog is fun.

don't think they're trying to get one over on you.

yes at some point language evolves as the new normal, as designed.

My curmudgeon gripe with system card and research preview is really the parroting; so cant blame anthropic for what others do. It’s just… no, prediction markets for dogs doesn’t have a research preview.

The trailing snark at the end will likely get you downvoted but I'm latching on: wtf is "system card". My previous coworkers popped that in the general slack channel when Mythos first "dropped" - "have you seen the system card" without any context whatsoever. The nerds get their clique!

Also research preview pops across new upstarts in place of beta. It's eye-rolling coming from a lifelong curmudgeon.

Just talk normal!

i hope you don’t actually refer to these others as “deeply stupid people” to your presumably young kids.

or they can just prompt you for help.

Interestingly, as a professional developer I had the opposite first experience. It's a tracker. It looks like every other tracker. Everything is really small and "clean" which means they just hide everything, for that modern look.

I was thoroughly unimpressed. "This is it?" - "It's a tracker"

I feel comfortable saying this because in the weeks after, actually using it is the aha experience. Linear nailed the UX of working where people already work. Which again is really funny because the best part of Linear is how well it works outside of Linear.

(disclaimer: I actually now use their UI a lot. It's a helpful dashboard. But it suffers from every other hard-problem of information dense task-based dashboards.)

dude's in love

reminds me that there's built in color names in CSS. I use them extensively and I think this is what the OP is getting at? Not overthinking it. cornsilk and tomato are two of my favorites.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/V...