In a way (as I understood it), what you're getting at is that not everything has to be a business. Businesses definitely do have to scale, but personal software doesn't.
They're harder to find in B2C than B2B. Individual problems can sometimes map to B2B.
I'd argue that we need to apply this to companies too. Stop building startups (which start losing money and may never ever make a profit in the process of scaling) and start creating companies (which make a profit ASAP and may never scale).
OP wasn't talking about this kind of thing, of course. The phenomenon of hobby projects being "startups" has always been a weird fit.
[1] I define this at least as "supports more than one person's salary in perpetuity," but would probably add some things like margin requirements if I thought about it more. Obviously you can exist as a consultant charging by the hour, and that's not what either of us is talking about.
[2] The only examples of this I've personally ever seen have been dominant players in niche markets with high bars to entry. So they weren't hyper-growth unicorns, but weren't really your definition of "companies", either. You don't get to these kinds of businesses by aiming to be one - you get there by trying for something bigger and topping out the market.
[3] Consider the phenomenon of the small vet clinic, which is rapidly ceasing to exist. Private equity has been steadily hoovering up these relatively high-margin, low-regulation businesses for the same economic reasons that software companies get big. If you try to create a vet clinic, you will be assimilated or crushed by a bigger player with a brand and the ability to undercut your prices.
I think the cash merry go round will stop eventually because the moat, in as much as there is one, is the vet themselves, not the business. If my vet leaves and opens a new practice, I will follow the person. Vet services don't really scale either, you can hit efficiencies with admin, but I'm sure a software company is willing to eat the PE firm's lunch there. With software, costs are heavily weighted to the fixed side. With vets, seeing twice the number of dogs takes twice the number of vet hours, vet tech hours, etc.
You're right that vet clinics aren't like software in the variable cost structure, but that just makes the software business more attractive for consolidation, not less. Bigger players will have the customer relationship, lower fixed costs, and high margins, with little threat of competition.
In my area, the non corporate vets are turning new customers away and recommending other offices.
Any profitable software business is vastly more interesting for consolidation than a vet practice.
Vets aren’t like that, one vet has a limit to the number of dogs they can see in a day. I think it is mostly PE trying to mimic their success with doctors offices (which have massive network effects via insurance), and assuming that it will work the same.
It is very hard to have any monopoly power in an industry where there is no barrier to entry for your most valuable employees, and where, as you pointed out, customers are sensitive to price.
The moat is the land. It doesn't even matter if it self-owned or a lease.
The vet just can't walk away and open a new practice nearby.
It’s loosely regulated and people will follow their vet just as they’d follow their hairdresser, no?
Only if you ignore the costs of risk.
Let's say you hear that 90% of businesses are financial failures. What is the profit hurdle you need to exceed before you could declare success?
Zombie businesses (one person just earning a living) are common and often the income doesn't cover the risk premium (e.g. of one year of opportunity cost wages/ladder working as an employee). If you're doing a business, then in theory only the financial returns matter. There are non-financial returns (pride, control, yadda yadda) but those apply more to hobbies than businesses (not that I think anything is wrong with starting a hobby business if you're honest with yourself about motivations).
I think the VC rule of thumb is that one investment needs to do better than 30x return over 10 years to cover the losses on the rest of the portfolio. Therefore as an individual unless you get over 30x the return (versus lost wages) then you are under water? i.e. if you quit a $50k/yr job for a year, then only when you're earning $50k/yr AND have gained $1.5 million more then have you broke even.
If you do build it with boring tech in a simple way, you can just rely on it.
I have a small hobby site - maybe a few hundred real users ever, and a handful of regulars. But the logs and users table are full of brute force and lousy sql injection attempts.
Why does this happen? How is it economical?
Often, they have databases of technologies, see what they come across and try a bunch of things that have worked, or try to look at the version of the software on your server and try just that.
Spraying 1-in-100000 chance attacks is very economical if you don't pay for compute or traffic.
Yes, it was posted again just the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44913359
On another note: did you just tell a bunch of strangers on the internet how to snail-mail arbitrary photos to your mom? Or does that email thing only activate if the email comes from your own address? (Guess you'll find out! :))
I'd argue this is true for social networks like Facebook actually. There was a magical period in Facebook between 2005 to 2010 or so where it was mostly college friends, high school friends, some work friends, and we all actually shared what we thought on our posts, shared links to interesting stuff, etc.
When all the relatives started being added to your network the vibe became decidedly different, and then acquaintances, people who aren't close, etc. and everyone has that one experience where one time they post something and someone who isn't close get offended, whether it's political or not, and they gradually share less and less.
Makes me wonder if there would still be a market for a smaller, niche social media like that, but on the open web and not locked behind something like Discord servers.
comes to mind... those were the days, circa 2014 for me, chilling with folk, waiting for thier grad admissions letters
Everyone knows it's best days were when it was limited to Harvard.
There is a market for one. Can you roll it out the way facebook did to make it a success. Facebook technology started off pretty basic. There success is creating demand. Remember when facebook use to offer to login to hotmail and invite everyone for you before hotmail caught on and banned it? That's the secret sauce.
And then relatives started joining and it became more like a dinner with your extended family.
Circles is group chats (WhatsApp, or whatever's popular in your neck of the woods), which I'd argue is how (most?) people in 2025 actually do “social networking.”
Instagram/TikTok/Xitter is… something else entirely.
It's how people talk to groups of dozens of people at a time: friends, neighbors, acquaintances, the parents of your kid's school mates to discuss school stuff or to setup a birthday party… coworkers if you include more work oriented chat apps.
I have dozens of such groups, some with photos of kids around a birthday cake that I'd never have put up of Facebook (if I still used it).
If that's not social networking, I'm not sure what is.
> Path was a social networking-enabled photo sharing and messaging service for mobile devices that was launched on 14 November 2010. The service allowed users to share up to a total of 50 contacts with their close friends and family.
I am, as always, a negative focus group - perhaps precisely for same reasons I loved it, apparently nobody else did :-/.
I believe that’s mostly what killed Google Plus. People were introduced to it in the worst way possible, so nobody actually cared to try it out, even if it was technically a good product.
In my eyes it was one of the key moments that put them on a downward trajectory in public opinion. So while it might have had the right features the rest of the deal sucked, and people were already tiring of social media overall.
Unfortunately the solution that works for most people is to have multiple identities on multiple social media sites. So FB with one circle, work relationships on Slack, several channels on Discord, a group of friends on Instagram, a couple of groups on What's App, some mobile game friends on Line...
The problem with that though is: You will generate an enormous amount of social friction "why am I tier 2, but (without loss of generality) Karen is Tier 1?" and reduce monetizability. So truly nobody will feel happy about those restrictions. And since it doesn't solve any engineering problem you run into (see above) there is no one incentivised to build such a thing. (Ironically this may not be completely true, given that this is pretty much how Chinese social media apps work. So maybe states [or at least power structures] are incentivised to build such a system)
I’m sure we all have people we sometimes talk politics with, and people we completely avoid the subject with. If both of those groups see my posts, how is that supposed to work? Well, it doesn’t. The typical outcome seems to be that people mentally compartmentalize, posting stuff intended for a particular group, but everyone sees it and it all goes to hell.
There are some people whose company I enjoy whose Facebook posts are basically an unending stream of “people who don’t support Trump are evil/stupid/garbage.” And I’m thinking, you realize that includes several people you supposedly like? I’m sure they have a group of people with whom they talk shit about the political opposition, and another group where they stick to other topics, but both groups end up seeing the stuff and it’s just alienating.
From her perspective, the post disappeared, and then you never posted anything like that again! Everyone wins
Basically, he had been helping her out financially, and pulled it, because she refused to sanction her daughter-in-law on his behalf.
If you do so, you were a shitty relative to begin with.
Typically that has to be some extreme form of bigotry people won’t let go of after repeated coaching. Extreme bigotry or conspiracy thinking is arguably a form of abuse directed at other family members and it’s 100% ok to cut people off for being abusive.
What if you’re dating a person of another race, and your relatives support keeps making racist comments to you, even after you try to explain why that’s not okay?
Unless they act on them, they can support anything they like, it means less than them supporting some team or MCU fandom
By all means keep trolling or worse if it makes your day, hide behind pedantry if it's any help, but you're fooling very, very few people.
If someone votes for and cheers on the sending of specific ethnic groups to concentration camps, the removal of rights and freedoms for political opponents, and the advancement of authoritarianism, they are Nazis.
We are way beyond Godwin’s Law at this point and it’s time to recognize and acknowledge that fact.
…and you usually find out they’re shitty because of how they handle (or don’t) “political” conversations.
Pro tip: You don’t get to decide for someone else what’s “just” politics. If someone else says it’s important, while you’re interacting with them, it’s important.
It's rarely, if ever, important to any concerned party's day to day life. It's bullshit partisanship instilled into idiotic brains by the media and social media.
Just because they say it's important, doesn't make it so.
…your family around the notional holiday dinner table? The personal is what’s important, kinda by definition. The point is the subjective and emotional.
Talk to me about all the gardening you're doing after retirement, about your new motorcycle, about the fishing this year, hell talk to me about your favorite sports team. I'll listen and interact, even if I'm not particularly interested in those things. Tell me for the 500th time about how Biden was a commie and I'll just eat Thanksgiving with my in-laws.
I don’t see it improving. I think there was a post, a couple of days ago, where some folks concluded that social media is unfixable.
“Take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.”
The original "Dark Forest hypothesis" is the idea that alien civilizations are silent not because they're not out there; and not because they wouldn't love to meet us and form positive-sum interactions; but rather because they've all concluded — from evidence or pure logic — that there are likely to be scary things "out there" listening; and that, by trying to draw attention to themselves to make friends, they would also draw the attention of these scary predators.
Modern social networks have the "dark forest problem" insofar as your mom, or your boss — or the HR departments of random companies you might in the future apply to work for — might be able to join, follow you, and see your posts. In this analogy, your mom/boss/bigcorp-HR are the predators lurking in the Dark Forest. Knowing they're there makes you go silent, refusing to "make yourself known" / "make yourself vulnerable" in any way these predators might potentially latch onto.
The analogy does break down a bit, because unlike alien civilizations in the cosmic void, there are signals we as individuals can send out on a social network that "make us known" at least somewhat but don't "make us vulnerable." These are the "performative, groomed" posts you see shared on Facebook, posted on public Instagram accounts, blogged on LinkedIn, etc. (I suppose a more-precise name, that incorporates this consideration, would be the "chaperone problem" — but that's less evocative.)
Social networks are good and fun and easy — possibly even a net positive for mental health — when they either inherently or coincidentally avoid becoming a dark forest.
In real-world terms:
• Interest-based activity groups (think "knitting circle" or "D&D group"), and community [not professional] sports leagues, are great social networks.
• Conventions, youth summer camps, and adult workshops [think "pottery class"] are all also great — though ephemeral — social networks.
• Group therapy sessions are good social networks.
• A high school is — perhaps shockingly — a decent social network. (It has failure modes, yes, but it almost never fails in the dark-forest sense of "nobody ends up making any friends because everyone's too scared to talk.") And a college is a slightly better social network — not as good at producing friendships, but the friendships are more likely to last beyond the years you spend there.
Good online examples of social networks are mostly older: the single-interest phpBB forums; early online games, before ELO-based matchmaking; and, yeah, old Facebook. (And MySpace, too.)
• I think Tumblr is probably the oldest major "modern" social network that hasn't yet succumbed to the dark forest problem. Not sure why. (Maybe it's just never attracted the right sort of celebrity posters to give moms or bosses any reason to join, I guess. Or maybe the fact that Tumblr posts (used to?) have public web URLs, meant that viral-meme Tumblr posts could simply be linked to, without that then forcing visitors to join the platform? Or maybe the fact that Tumblr lets users have multiple blogs each — sort of like how YouTube accounts can have multiple YouTube channels each; so Tumblr users can have one "clean" blog tied to their identity, that they can show people, and then other blogs that they post more outré — yet meaningful and vulnerable — stuff to. But without these being true "alts", as account DMs can still only originate from the main-blog identity.)
• BlueSky has also avoided the dark forest problem for now, but that's likely temporary; there's nothing in its design that makes it any less "for everybody" + "for public performance" than Twitter is/was.
Everything else is either a ghost town save for its performative stage (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, even HN somewhat); or it's an archipelago of out-of-band-formed groups of mutuals who are otherwise private and undiscoverable through the platform itself (Instagram, all group-chat apps); or it's not a "social network" at all, in that there is an expectation of anonymity / creating alt accounts / being able to (Reddit, 4chan, modern online games.)
It'd be interesting to design a social network from the ground up with the goal of making it inherently impossible for the network to devolve into a dark forest.
“The "dark forest" hypothesis presumes that any space-faring civilization would view any other intelligent life as an inevitable threat…”
> not because they wouldn't love to meet us and form positive-sum interactions
Not sure where you got this adaptation from.
Perhaps they got it from the experience of being a human being. I and many other human beings would love to meet an alien civilization and form positive-sum interactions, yet at the same time I'm not sure the risks outweighs the benefits. It doesn't seem like a very far-out addition to the theory to me.
(And it's also kind of definitional to the meaning of "positive-sum." A positive-sum interaction is better than no interaction. Insofar as a civilization is optimizing for... basically anything, it would prefer positive-sum trade [from which it acquires resources, information, etc] to no trade. At the very least, all else being equal, the resources and information would increase the civilization's odds of survival.)
Let's assume that the vast majority of alien species would like to have positive-sum interactions with other alien civilizations, if that were possible. But they can't assume a guarantee that there isn't at least one civilization that defects into being predators, and would come to destroy them (and any other civilization they could discover through them) if they caught that predatory civilization's attention.
As such, the civilization goes silent, hiding from such predators; and, as such, the civilization immediately punishes any other civilization that may reach out to them, trying to "shut them up" before that other civilization's directed communications reveal their own location. Which means that, in effect, due to simply being aware of the existence of the possibility of such predators, every civilization becomes the very predators they're imagining.
And because every alien civilization can work this out, every civilization can conclude that even if there weren't predators at first, the equilibrium state is for everyone who wasn't a level-1 predator to have become this type of level-2 predator.
(And yes, there is a social-network equivalent of the level-2 predators — these are the "cringe reaction" accounts that get attention by punishing the violations of the performative-perfection norm.)
---
Or, to be formal about it: the dark forest hypothesis is essentially timeless decision theory applied to the game-theoretic tit-for-tat strategy. The same logic that argues that Roko's basilisk can force you to enable its existence before it exists to enforce that, argues that the structure of "the lawless cosmic void"-as-social-network can force your own civilization into choosing "defect" over "cooperate" before you ever actually meet any aliens who could enforce that. Even if your civilization really wants to choose "cooperate"!
> > not because they wouldn't love to meet us and form positive-sum interactions
> Not sure where you got this adaptation from.
It's not an "adaptation", just an elaboration / amplification / clarification.
N.B, it's written in the negative. And, AIUI, the "Dark Forest" hypothesis does indeed not say that the reason we're not hearing from any alien civilisations is that they're all absolutely uninterested in establishing contact with other alien races (like us), but just fear that some of them would be hostile. So yes, the silence is not "because they wouldn't love to meet us and form positive-sum interactions"; only because they're afraid some of those interactions would be distinctly negative-sum.
So it’s like most of these “social media” sites are no longer social. They’re more like “targeted media feeds.”
I think, for these older networks that had an "organic era", it's the reverse: the falloff was due to the space becoming a dark forest for organic interactions; and then a curated global engagement sphere was implemented to fill the void / decrease user churn.
I know this was true at least for Facebook. I recall a clear 5+-year gap, after a lot of the original FB core demographic had already left, but before FB adjusted its recommendation engine, where FB was just... a ghost town.
My impression of this gap time, was that back in the "organic era", FB had implemented some sort of damping, ensuring that posts by commercial posters got "promoted" to only a small fraction of that poster's subscribers, and preventing multiple posts from the same commercial poster from making it to the same user's feed at once. (Presumably to prevent something they saw as "advertising" from overwhelming the organic posts they considered the user to be "there to see.")
The gap ended once they shut off this now-vestigial damping, and opened the floodgates to commercial posts showing up in feeds, being shared to non-subscribers the same way organic posts could be, etc.
Other social networks seemed to "follow the trend" on both counts — previously having tuning parameters in their algorithm to protect users from commercial posters flooding their feeds; and then later suddenly "opening the floodgates" in response to organic engagement decline. But (IIRC, correct me if I'm wrong) they didn't all do it at once; each network changed only at the point that that network needed to change to retain metrics in the face of declining organic participation.
Networks like Tiktok, meanwhile, that were born entirely after this sea-change among networks, just let brands into users' FYPs from the start. That was half the point.
Then it wasn't a good feature.
I don't use it because I mostly automate fuel farms, and I do that by taking a blank fuel farm config we created and customize it for a particular site. We have scripting in place to assign data sources that work with a standardized set of PLC data structures that we've written. Most Wonderware installs are one-offs that start with a blank slate, so our use case is unusual.
That doesn't make auto-assignment a bad feature. It just means it's not the best fit for me. Likewise, Google Circles was a good feature that I never used because I only ever knew one other person who used Google Plus.
You sorta get the best of both worlds with Fedi. I'm glad I get to go down hashtag rabbit holes or see boosts from other instances, but I recognize names from my local instance and I feel comfortable we mostly agree on norms and moires which makes folks trust the moderation more (although maybe I'm biased, I'm on the trust and safety team of my instance).
At this point, my network is bunch of 'aunts' and 'uncles'. I take secret pleasure by posting stuff that irks them :)
For me, facebook died when they replaced the user generated content with random garbage and links. Same with instagram, when photos of sunsets and plates of food turned to random videos of people I don't know.
The total number of people on the site never mattered to me, the user content getting replaced with random stuff made it.. well.. "unsocial", and we had other sites for that (digg->reddit, stumbleupon etc.)
Then everyone basically stopped sharing and started curating.
—xkcd 1320
Some non profits also hosts popular open source server - client software
Anyone know what API they are talking about? If I could quickly email a photo somewhere and have it appear as a 4x6 in my mailbox in a few days i would have a much cooler fridge.
Could be a real tortoise and the hare situation but we won't know for a long time.
I'm curious if there are any similar (in the vein of Douglas Adams' "Guide to the Galaxy") websites with a geographically wider adoption, basically its English version.
I remember İTÜ Sözlük changing its brand to Instela to go somewhat global. But looks like they failed.
I also remember seeing a "Guide" in some Douglas Adams related website, but it wasn't really an active website as far as I remember.
The cost seems deceivingly low right now because those AI companies are fighting for monopoly, but in reality the cost is huge – not only capital, but also trust, privacy, and environmental.
On my Macbook M1 Pro I can run the gpt-oss-20b model without issues and quite fast.
what exactly are the "politics" of using DeepSeek? Feels weird to single out DeepSeek like that
For example, OpenAI's charter is "to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity". They go on to list more specific political goals downstream from that: https://openai.com/charter/
Of course!
That said Qwen3 and Qwen3 Coder are both pretty nice. Also ERNIE 4.5 if the benchmarks are to be trusted but I mostly run Ollama instead of vLLM now so can’t test it out atm (apparently llama.cpp added support for them recently though).
The models by Mistral might also be worth a look and personally I thought the EuroLLM project was also nice, but MoE models feel way more palatable on limited hardware.
Neither seem to be able to directly compete with Sonnet 4 or Gemini 2.5 Pro, would need way better hardware to come close.
6% YoY growth in domestic electricity demand is frankly nothing compared to the capacity that developing economies are building out for things other than AI.
Having a hobby is great! The biggest difference is that a startup is intended to make you a lot of money, and maybe change the way people do things, so you work on it full-time, and a hobby is intended to make your life immediately more enjoyable, and costs you money.
A cargo ship and a pleasure boat have a number of things in common, but...
95% of businesses are classed as micro in the UK. Small and micro is 99%.
Could it be useful to more people? Almost certainly, and at some point I considered running it as a service, and I even had a few trial users. But then I realized that dealing with GDPR compliance and the like wasn't going to be as fun, so in the end it remained an internal project.
There are a lot of sites on the web that let you make a hex map. A lot of them are even free. Many of them have features that my little webapp doesn't have.
But mine works the way I want it. I wanted rivers and forest to be modifiers on top of the base terrain of the tile. I wanted to have a few different settlement icons. I wanted to have more variations of hills and mountains than most of the other sites do.
And if I'm ever missing a feature on this thing, I can just add it, rather than just sort of saying, "Oh well."
Because it's an app that's just for me, I don't need to worry about scale or security or monetization or anything.
It took me about an hour to two hours of my attention (spread out over two calendar days) to have the AI code it.
I assume it will eventually become unmaintainable if I add a bunch to it.
Now start a band.
I dont think tech ever expected to have a "punk" phase but this is it. Do the math on how big your app has to be to make 240k a year (before tax). Now host that on something reasonable (not aws/cloud markup trash) and you can make a comfortable living. Payment processing apple/google store or square or ... CS, you dont need it any more! Accounting: software for that and a once a year with a professional. Payroll and insurance: there is a platform for that if you want to go into business with friends. Incorporation: tons of online tools will hand hold you through the process.
Your startup doesn't need to be a unicorn, it needs to pay for YOU.
Worse for the company as a whole, yes. But for individuals involved it is generally better. Employees get to cash in, founders or people who like early stage can and often do start something small again, new employees like structure and better work life balance, and investors get their return.
Is that us?
Ironic this made it to the top of HN.
I did test it with 12,000 users (fake ones), so it should handle small scales, but it will definitely have to be rewritten, for much larger scales. It would not be as usable, in that case. At this scale, it works very well, indeed.
That's fine. It works great, and we vet every signup, so we're not interested at all in scaling.
But I want obscene amounts of wealth that would make my accountant uneasy, I want 10K DAU running against a single 10$/mo VPS that can do more cpu cycles in a second than the amount of words I have ever spoken, I want project 24 and 76 to take off, so I can kill all the others if they are too time consuming. I want to be greeted through SSH with a message telling me that I haven't logged in for 3400 days and coincidentally have that be the uptime, I want to check the balance of the stripe account with that single purpose LLC to be like 874$, even if I fail I want to at least go for the moonshot.
To each their own I guess.
Quality of the code aside because now it doesn’t have to support millions of users anymore.
People don't want the responsability to keep them updated, secured, deployed, etc. Paying a small amount will always be more convenient than to maintain it yourself. The issue was never coding it.
It doesn’t really matter though. If you target a DB like Yugabyte and use distributed storage like an s3 bucket or minio, you can get pretty far as long as you keep the core components memory efficient and stateless.
I keep them private because for a lot of them, if others had access to the same tools, my tool assisted efforts in these areas would become ineffective if others were all doing the same thing as me.
Its only a small few tools that i'll actually share with the world.
I'd love to see more people realize this and use that new power to build things that don't necessarily scale on their own, but might trigger changes for sizeable groups, either socially, or politically.
[1] https://mariozechner.at/posts/2024-07-15-two-years-in-review...
Cloud services get us from completely impossible to doable with a small amount of work. LLMs maybe save us the time of reading a tutorial or documentation.
Earlier today, I was chatting with the folks in my computer club, discussing how I wrote a little program just to explore the nature of small neural networks. Then I decided to show them how I use Visual Studio Code with ChatGPT5 (from my GitHub subscription)
The next thing you know, I had a bare bones computerized bulletin board system accessible via telnet, up and running in Python, just as an example of what's possible.
Next was a small database to scan and catalog all the videos on a disk drive, with an SQLite backend. I added a web interface to it in a few minutes, thanks to the LLM.
All of this while I'm a barely passable Python programmer... my preferred language is Delph/Free Pascal.
Things that were previously overwhelming are now almost trivial. Sure, it's effectively instant legacy code... but I can live with less than 1000 lines of legacy code for myself, and nobody else. I might even study it, and learn some things. ;-)
Not if you have to stake your career on them. AI takes no liability, it is all yours
I am beginning to suspect that the ability to get value out of GenAI is almost entirely dependent on the ability to recognize bad patterns at a glance.
In essence, it’s a tool for power users, not for neophytes.
Good lord, its going to be the excel problem on steroids.
However, according to a few job openings in my area, "junior AI powered engineer" is actually a thing that some companies ask. Is it a good idea? I'd say no it's not. Do the managers who do the hiring while reading all the hype care? Definitely not the ones who ask for AI powered juniors.
2 things I'd fix about it, remove default assuming certain things are dates, and adding a way to mark an area of a spreadsheet as a database table, so you can't sort only some of the columns.
Like for example, clearly you are a very experienced developer with a vast amount of experience. To say that the extent and reach to which you are able to apply technologies is because LLMs seems wrong; it's your rich technical background which allow you to use LLMs in an effective manner.
I call this ‘mass produced software’. I walk into a software shop, ask for software and get more or less what I need at barely acceptable quality just like at Walmart.
Vibe coding? Perhaps it’s just shopping.
Now my hobbies and experiments don't need to make money, some might, but I don't have any pressure to only allocate time to things that I know I can turn into an income stream, or worse steer it's natural development to the $.
I liken it to early painters and composers. What originally started as their passion and creative expression had led these artists onto the path of "poor starving artist". The realisation comes quickly that doing something to your maximum effort means that it also needs to be the breadwinner. The hope for AI is that it is able to rapidly fulfil the breadwinning side of things, leaving time for the artist to extend beyond their previous limitation.
I certainly see this already with how I use AI. I leave it to do the arduous work while I work on the bigger idea.
Build a simple thing that solves a problem really well. Keep it scoped to your area, your crowd or a narrow set of problems. Resist the urge to do everything, and instead just keep refining.
This has been my business for almost a decade. I love when I find other people with similar focus. My latest find is shottr.cc.
mooreds•5mo ago
Reminds me a bit of the carpenters I've seen work who spend time building frames/other wood "tools" to help them get the actual work done faster.
The cost of writing software has definitely decreased. And you do have a different and smaller class of problems when you write an ad-hoc app.
j45•5mo ago
CI/CD can be as complex and full of pagentry as some people want and it's great when it fits, and premature optimization the rest of the time.
tstrimple•5mo ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOTqqSEtvng