ryanSrich

So the moral of the story is, don't build a frontier model in the US. Got it.

Question: for a smaller SaaS tool, or even internal product. If a team doesn't want to manage AWS or another IaaS provider, what are the best alternatives for the following

1.) Vercel - having a bad month

2.) Supabase - having a bad month

3.) Railway - now having a bad month

Generally agree. I use AI very heavily, but rarely am I letting it actually think for me. It's a tool that reduces the time it takes for ideas in my head to manifest into reality. If you don't have those ideas, or a poor understanding of the system the AI is working on, you're going to produce slop. If you can't recognize this slop, you're more susceptible to having psychosis.

Having tried most (all?) of the commercially available + open source options, and even tangential competitors like CC, Conductor, Antimetal, etc. I haven't found anything that's close to the experience of Cursor. The harness they've built is incredible.

I'd even go so far as to say that any competitors that are direct (windsurf, kiro, etc.) aren't even in the same universe. Cursor is just so much better, faster, has better features (plan and debug mode), and squeezes much better results/code out of the same models. They absolutely have some secrete sauce that the other options just don't have.

Not quite first party, but composer 2 is far superior to grok for coding. Unless you're eluding to them using SpaceX infra to train their own model vs. using grok

For programming, the way I would build a curriculum is to force students to actually learn how to program and code first. This is simple by requiring them to write code inside the classroom by hand for all exams.

I would make this the focus for 90% of the first 2 years of their degree.

I would then have them spend 75% of their last 2 years learning how to use and program with AI. Aside from knowing how things actually work, there's no more important skill now than mastering AI.

The cynicism or even lack of interest is because it's extremely underwhelming.

If you ask 100 people in 1969 what humans would be doing in space in 57 years I can guarantee not a single person would guess that we've done nothing of substance. And that the most exciting thing we have done that involved human space travel is simply flying around the moon, people wouldn't believe it

MacOS is a bug filled nightmare, and it's still light years better than Windows. I haven't used Ubuntu extensively since early 2019, but it still wasn't comparable to OSX at the time.

Apple and specifically MacOS is significantly worse than it has ever been, but again, still far better than the alternatives.

The equivalent of about $20/hr today for those wondering

Yes. https://x.com/claudeai/status/2014834616889475508?s=46

This has always been my personal definition of AGI. But the market and industry doesn't agree. So I've backed off on that and have more or less settled on "can do most of the knowledge work that a human can do"

So it's even more human than we thought

This is entirely solvable with skills, memory, context, and further prompting. All of which can be done in a way that's reliable and repeatable.

You wouldn't expect a Jr. dev to be the best at keeping things dry either.

I would and have done the same with Jr. devs. It's not an argument against it being AGI.

Giving opus a memory or real-time access to the current year is trivial. I don't see how that's an argument against it being AGI.

I think "tested" is the hard part. The simple part seems to be there already, loops, crons, and computer use is getting pretty close.

AGI is here. 90%+ of white collar work _can_ be done by an LLM. We are simply missing a tested orchestration layer. Speaking broadly about knowledge work here, there is almost nothing that a human is better at than Opus 4.6. Especially if you're a typical office worker whose job is done primarily on a computer, if that's all AGI is, then yeah, it's here.

The market has clearly passed it by. I was a huge Heroku fan. It even inspired my first startup in 2014 (basically a healthcare tech version of Heroku). At the time, I thought it was the future, and found messing around in AWS, etc., too time-consuming and unnecessary. That was when Rails was all the rage.

That's the idea yeah. There are other people actively working on this. You can follow vx-underground on twitter. They're tracking it.

Seems like a job for an LLM

Are they paying through? Reddit was also popular for a long time and didn't make much money.

My point was more that it seems this wave of AI is more profitable if you're in B2B vs. B2C.

Elon is one of the most unlikable people on the planet, so I wouldn't consider him much of a bar.

I think there are two things that happened

1. OpenAI bet largely on consumer. Consumers have mostly rejected AI. And in a lot of cases even hate it (can't go on TikTok or Reddit without people calling something slop, or hating on AI generated content). Anthropic on the other hand went all in on B2B and coding. That seems to be the much better market to be in.

2. Sam Altman is profoundly unlikable.

When fortune 500, 100 and 50 organizations are buying AI coding tools at scale (I know from personal exp), then I would say you're late. So yes. Late stage adoption for this wave.

Feels like the more important question is how are you going to do all these things when Slack cuts you off

I pay Slack $50k/year. They have no reason to shut me off.

or there is some new Slack policy that prevents it

Prevents what exactly? The new API pricing they introduced doesn't apply to internal apps. I suppose they could apply it to internal apps. We'd have to figure out a path around it

or they increase their pricing by 1000%

1000% increase in pricing seems incredibly unlikely. That would not only disrupt thousands of companies but would likely kill Slack entirely

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Haven’t you basically built your entire business on this singular proprietary platform they you have almost no control over?

Not really. We service clients through Slack. Could we switch? Sure. Would it be a pain? Yeah. Would it be costly? Yeah.

But there's also no reason to switch. And if a new platform comes out (like the one this thread is about), I would expect them to have the features to compete with Slack if they are posiitioning themselves as a Slack competitor

I run a company that services 1,000+ clients on Slack, another 300+ on Teams, and a < 100 on Email/Gchat

I wouldn't wish Teams on my worst enemy, so in that regard, I love Slack

The thing I struggle with the most is how I'd move all of our core functionality from Slack. A lot of the people/teams that build these "Slack killers" I don't think have ever run Slack at scale

How are you going to replace the 30+ in-house apps I've built that automate 50+ workflows?

How are you going to replace the 100+ workflows I use with 1,000+ clients when they have to submit a ticket, or questionnaire, or a security event?

How are you going to replace the 100+ partner channels I have where we send out automated messages about specials and discounts we're running?

What about the 500+ other apps I run that integrate with our systems? Are they going to support your new platform?

Do you have retention settings? DLP? How granular can I go on permissions? What about picking up events via the API so I can train people in real time on what not to do in public channels?

I have no affinity or personal ties to Slack. But if you're going to position yourself as a Slack competitor you have to actually do what Slack does

https://r.rich/

Like a lot of other apps that go viral, it's a novelty that wears off in a few weeks (if that). There's nothing that keeps people on the platform. How many goofy AI generated videos does someone actually want to make? 10? 20? After you've done that, what else is entertaining or amusing? Any _really_ good Sora videos are posted on TikTok or Reels anyway. There's nothing tying you to the platform.

Salaries for developers are well under $150k in most of the United States, for example, and that is for senior engineers

As someone who has hired hundreds of SWEs over the last 12 years from 20+ states, I have to disagree.

$150k is on the lower end for base for a Sr. SWE, and well below the total comp someone would expect. You can make the argument that $150k base is reasonable, but even Sr. SWE in the middle of the country are looking for closer to $180k -$200k OTE.

That's barely two low level faang engineers after full load.