$20 claude code subscription for a month can replace the $15 + $10 for each month. How is that 3x more espensive? The user just saved $280 per year, on just two subscriptions alone.
Hardly doubt that this was the 'most waste of ones time'. For one, it's not like most of us can decide to "work" for 3-5 hours on a Saturday and get any money. I play games on my pc while claude codes for me. I alt tab each few minutes and see if it needs any input. Then I can (not that I do it), read and perhaps learn from the code.
Yup. thats more expensive because each hour of your time is at least 50USD
And each hour on weekend that you would have spent with your family etc is probably 500-1000 usd at least, so yeah, it is much cheaper to pay 15 usd for SaaS
Most apps rationale for subscriptions is "Ongoing development" without an option like jetbrains etc. to fall back to a perpetual license.
In practice, regardless of whether an app needs ongoing development or not, this is the best way to try to guarantee continuous income and make a living off of a project I guess.
Perhaps LLM's will force developers/companies to change their stance and to stop users from recreating what they have already created, just buy an at-a-time snapshot of their app for a one-time-fee? Probably not but one can hope.
One-time purchase software would become dramatically more sustainable if platform churn could be ground to a halt. Most types of software achieved peak usability and functionality somewhere between 5 and 25 years ago and there wouldn't be much reason for anybody to upgrade if their one-time purchases continued to work in perpetuity. A substantial number even prefer e.g. Word 2000 or Photoshop CS1 over their modern incarnations but can't use those for either technical or legal reasons.
Instead, the reverse has happened and platform churn has risen to new highs, necessitating subscriptions.
Part will be for new features, but no doubt that another big part will be for platform support over time. There's just too little backwards compatibility guarantees nowadays from the big players. We need more Microsofts in that sense!
> Instead, the reverse has happened and platform churn has risen to new highs, necessitating subscriptions.
... Even for desktop Linux users? I can't say I've felt it. I switched almost 4 years ago and it just keeps feeling better and better (in a "Luigi wins by doing nothing" kind of way).
Linux desktops (not the kernel) are actually among the worst when it comes to platform churn. It's one of the reasons why Flatpak, AppImage, Snap, etc require relatively complex machinery and runtimes and whatnot to function. The churn is just masked by package managers.
It's come across to me so far that this just results from application developers targeting a specific DE and not really thinking about compatibility, or even really whether they need specific functionality provided a specific way.
Would be nice to see the XDG stuff like portals etc. better respected, though, yeah.
> It's come across to me so far that this just results from application developers targeting a specific DE and not really thinking about compatibility, or even really whether they need specific functionality provided a specific way.
They are, but it's not their fault - Wayland removes so much functionality that X had, and delegates that to the WM/DE.
I tried to do a small personal app last year for myself that intercepted and injected events for keyboard and mouse. Not possible in Wayland (so I switched to X instead) - that is delegated to the WM/DE.
There's hundreds of these tiny little cuts that cause friction for app devs.
DE stuff is part of the picture, but there’s churn outside of those too. glibc, which is used in practically everything, is the classic example but across the whole of the Linux desktop sphere, it’s unusual for libraries to maintain compatibility.
The only reason why Linux desktops work at all is thanks to package managers and their maintainers doing the heavy lifting of keeping applications and the libraries they use in lockstep. If it weren’t for that random programs would be breaking every other update.
It is not irrational on the part of the developer -- I've definitely felt this too. The problem comes from the fact that practically everyone has subscription fatigue these days, and each of us probably has only a few pieces of software we truly care about enough to want to support them out of the goodness of our hearts.
But everyone wants us to pay $10/mo. It just isn't sustainable from a consumer perspective.
> But everyone wants us to pay $10/mo. It just isn't sustainable from a consumer perspective.
And so few actually deliver $10/mo worth of value. If 1password and Fastmail - the two most important services that control my digital life - are each $60/year, that's the standard of value other SaaS companies have to beat and very few do. The ones that do are like NextDNS where they cost $20-30 per year because the people running them aren't greedy lemmings trying to pay back VC.
> And so few actually deliver $10/mo worth of value. If 1password and Fastmail
Funny you mention Fastmail. I was happy most of the past decade until this week. I just had my email blown up by their new Paddle billing system with a ton of billing invoices since they decided it was no longer ok that I pay them a lump sump every 2 years, and that I must go onto monthly now. Initially I thought they were hacked but nope, just terrible communication.
I emailed them a few days ago and they only confirmed that Paddle is their merchant of record and they have been migrating accounts over slowly.
Tonight the CEO sent out a blast saying resellers need to be on monthly billing with their new system at new pricing.
Sorry Fastmail, I paid for 2 years back in October (I think this is my 3rd cycle with them). If you want me on monthly billing then you will wait until October 2027. That is a ‘you’ problem not a ‘me’ problem if you undersold the subscription this cycle.
> that's the standard of value other SaaS companies have to beat and very few do.
Of course it isn't. Just because some products or services are great value, doesn't make other products bad value. They can be anything from good value, to average value to low value.
And products / services are of course not comparable just because they are subscription based, or used on a digital device.
Gas has a fantastic value, one liter can transport me and my things a long way in short time. So does that mean that I can never buy a bottle of wine or some coffee outside of my home? They are after all liquids, and neither coffee nor wine can compare with the great value of gas.
> Just because some products or services are great value, doesn't make other products bad value.
Sorry, but no. If they're worse value than my email and password providers which my digital life revolves around and who only charge me $5/mo each, then yes those products are a bad value.
I pay $3,000/yr for Altium, $200/mo for Claude Max, $60+/mo for ad-free streaming, and begrudgingly $50/mo for Adobe so I'm not against paying thousands a year in nice fat profit margins if they provide actual value, like a shit ton of GPU compute time or a well made piece of professional software. "Value" here is obviously subjective relative to the beholder, but IMO the vast majority of SaaS I look at are hardly worth two bucks a month, let alone tens.
> If they're worse value than my... password providers... who only charge me $5/mo
In that case, people who run Bitwarden for free are screwed. In fact, looking at how much I use the web browser Chrome, and how much I get out of that, and the fact that I pay $0 to Google to use it (inb4 I'm the product because I'm not paying for it), paying money for anything digital is terrible value!
What you've discovered is that prices are all made up. If we think about how to price a product, say a chair, from first principles, you'd take the cost of the raw materials, the time it takes you to turn those raw materials into the finished product, add a %age profit on top, and call it a day. In the real world though, that's not how pricing things works. You have a product, which costs $X in raw materials, and then you just... make up a number, $Y. Hopefully, $Y is much greater than $X, and you're able to make a great living off selling your chairs. Maybe you're called Eames and people will pay you $5,500 for your chair/lounger, maybe you're Office Depot and sell them for $129. Maybe you're not very good at chairs, so they're not level and then you can't give them away, not even to your friends.
Life is not an optimization problem. You can optimize for value, but then you'll find yourself in Walmart at 1am realizing that the 3-pack is cheaper per-roll than the 30-pack that night for some reason, and getting angry over that.
> What you've discovered is that prices are all made up. If we think about how to price a product, say a chair, from first principles, you'd take the cost of the raw materials, the time it takes you to turn those raw materials into the finished product, add a %age profit on top, and call it a day. In the real world though, that's not how pricing things works. You have a product, which costs $X in raw materials, and then you just... make up a number, $Y. Hopefully, $Y is much greater than $X, and you're able to make a great living off selling your chairs. Maybe you're called Eames and people will pay you $5,500 for your chair/lounger, maybe you're Office Depot and sell them for $129. Maybe you're not very good at chairs, so they're not level and then you can't give them away, not even to your friends.
It's just common-sense though - if the market is willing to pay me $100/widget, why would I sell it for `($10 cost to manufacture + 35% markup)`?
The new lower bound for simple side-hustle apps now is virtually zero. All you need is a computer, electricity, internet and (optionally) $20.
> What you've discovered is that prices are all made up. If we think about how to price a product, say a chair, from first principles, you'd take the cost of the raw materials, the time it takes you to turn those raw materials into the finished product, add a %age profit on top, and call it a day. In the real world though, that's not how pricing things works. You have a product, which costs $X in raw materials, and then you just... make up a number, $Y. Hopefully, $Y is much greater than $X, and you're able to make a great living off selling your chairs. Maybe you're called Eames and people will pay you $5,500 for your chair/lounger, maybe you're Office Depot and sell them for $129. Maybe you're not very good at chairs, so they're not level and then you can't give them away, not even to your friends.
That's not at all how I think products are priced. That sound's like something you'd tell a kindergartner to shut them up.
> You can optimize for value, but then you'll find yourself in Walmart at 1am realizing that the 3-pack is cheaper per-roll than the 30-pack that night for some reason, and getting angry over that.
I have never found myself in a Walmart at 1am* nor have I ever gotten angry at toilet paper (I get the Charmin ultra from Costco like a normal person). You need to re-calibrate because you sound like an Inland Empire methhead. Pro tip: you want to shoplift the detergent. That tends to trade better with the other methheads.
* Not entirely true, but that's just because the Reno Walmart stocks up on Burning Man supplies and Gerlach only sells shitty playa bikes.
You are definitely a professional/industryspecialist - so its quite obvious why you pay for this, same as a mechanic is paying for very important and expensive tools.
This mindest is not possible for "non-professionals" :-)
I don’t buy cups of coffee unless it’s on vacation, brewed by a great barista with years of experience. Instead I have a $600 roaster, a $100 burr grinder, and a $10 Turkish coffee pot that have produced many thousands of good cups of coffee over more than a decade. Including the cost of bulk beans, I probably spend about as much on my caffeine addiction as 1password and Fastmail combined. Seems like a decent value to me?
I think your value system is completely broken if you think I can’t have a beer just because they cost more than fastmail. Some beers are better value than others but I enjoy having a beer. I don’t enjoy logging into some overpriced SaaS to do something that Claude can do for me now instead.
> Then why are you looking at them,
How can I evaluate their value if I don’t even look at them?
> How can I evaluate their value if I don’t even look at them?
There are no subscription services which can beat Fastmail, iCloud, Kagi or YouTube in value for your dollar. So you can stop looking.
There are many subscription services which offer good or even great value, or mediocre. But since you demand that value has to be better or equal than the great value Fastmail gives you for you to be interested, then I'm telling you that you're not going to find it.
> "Value" here is obviously subjective relative to the beholder
Agreed, but the confusing part is that you don't seem to be saying "to me, those services only provide X amount of value, and I'd rather have $Y than that" -- you seem to be saying that if 1password and Fastmail were more expensive, you might be willing to pay the asking price for some of those services you currently consider bad value.
You’re absolutely right! If Fastmail or 1password charged more for their services, the bar for what I consider good value would be different. Those two services are _absolutely_ worth more to me than they currently charge and I’d be happy to pay.
But they don’t, which is why I use them as my baseline. If my email provider and password manager - two services with damn near infinite vendor lockin - can do it, no one has any excuse.
Which is your choice, obviously, but you can see why people would find it strange -- it seems like you're potentially just leaving value on the table for an arbitrary reason. The price of Fastmail doesn't affect the value you would get from some unrelated product, so surely that other product is either worth the asking price or not worth it regardless of how much Fastmail is charging.
What do you mean infinite vendor lock in? Just export your vault and import it in another password manager and switching email provider is not that hard either (assuming you use your own domain).
It certainly was when the options were pirate or buy, and the prices per year were much higher than $10/mo gets you.
The BIG difference is that we didn't felt entitled to use everything that is fashionable or switch apps every couple of months.
We would do a research across several magazines, local computer clubs, and the few lucky ones that had online access, some BBS or Usenet groups, then buy that one package and live with it for a couple of years, regardless of their limitations.
The inference is cheap, but the context window costs for iteratively debugging architecture issues add up fast. Things like state management or migrations usually require feeding the whole stack back in multiple times, which blows past that budget pretty quickly in my experience.
37Signals tried that with once.com . Given they're now giving those away for free and haven't said a thing about it suggests it was an abject failure. What you're paying for with SaaS is outsourcing - deployment, maintenance, security, reliability etc are someone else's problem.
The code is the easy part but there's ongoing humans needed to make it work. If Agents get to the point they can genuinely autonomously SRE & patch a service everything changes but that still seems a long way off.
>> Perhaps LLM's will force developers/companies to change their stance and to stop users from recreating what they have already created, just buy an at-a-time snapshot of their app for a one-time-fee? Probably not but one can hope.
How would the economics of this work universally? Jetbrains is a bit of an oddity in terms of SaaS. For the most part, it's desktop or on-premises software that was sold with a perpetual license. If you've bought a subscription and canceled, they've generated some revenue. Maintaining a subscription generates more revenue for them, but they can slow or stop development without stopping you from using the product.
SaaS is typically some server software hosted by someone else which most often doesn't have an on-premises version. They can stop making feature updates, but if they turn off the servers, the service ends. They still have costs even if you use the software less. You can argue about the profit margins, but that's not the point here. As most SaaS companies don't start with on-premises, they can't ever get their software working there for many reasons. There are a few like Atlassian and GitHub that do both, but if you look at the heritage, both are really on-premises first.
Or drop the price to $20 a year instead of $20 a month and and focus on small software updated infrequently. Software as a service has a dirty secret that it was more service than software. The companies became larded with payroll and most never had great gross margins.
Pretty much. A lot of software is just good enough already, just keep security updates going and fix occasional bug people complain for too long.
But that might require just firing some people because that amount of man-hours is not needed any more or moving them to make something new and no investor likes it
I think that's where technical issues come in. For a web based SaaS app it's not worth the devs time to make multiple versions available. Even for local apps, I would say most of them have some functionality tied to an API and now you're back to running multiple versions of that server.
I just don't understand this naive argument against subscription. If I have to pay same amount of money, I will pay in subscription than paying one time. So let's say average subscription time is 2 years, they can make $400 onetime or $20/month to get the same revenue. As a consumer I will prefer the second option.
For $40 product, I will rather pay $1/month than $40 once. It keeps the incentive aligned. I think most people just assume that if the devs move away from subscription they would be fine with lower revenue and would charge less.
> So let's say average subscription time is 2 years, they can make $400 onetime or $20/month to get the same revenue.
Does the software stop working after the 2 years? If so, I’d go subscription (or find another product that doesn’t explode). If it doesn’t, I’d pay the $400 assuming I want to use it for more than 2 years.
You wrongly assume that you are left with the SaaS product after paying for it for 2 years. For the one time payment, you will still have the software 2 years and more down the road.
It could be anything from month to decades depending on the subscription. And the price should be accordingly (risk based)adjusted for the same revenue.
regardless of whether an app _does_ ongoing development. there's plenty of examples - especially mobile - of apps switching to subscriptions and simultaneously slowing down development, which is maddening
I made the same realization two weeks ago. Posted about it here, where I rebuilt bare bones todoist with a habit tracker, goal setting and more within a few vibe coding sessions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46633092
I think that many existing apps with huge userbases will gradually lose users as the models become better and better. Their biggest advantage is that people don't like change, and thus having to e.g. export data from some tools etc. seems to be a hassle not worth $5 a month.
But as the models get better and the quality of the output will match the quality of the established SaaS but tailor the whole thing to a single user with the ability to make any change they can imagine within minutes, and perhaps deploy to Hetzner and whatnot where they could host all of those apps for a single $5 instead, the exodus will accelerate.
On the other hand, new products will have a much harder time to gather a big userbase. Whenever I'll see a launch of a SaaS asking for $$$, the first question I'll ask myself will be how long it will take LLM to recreate it. And for most cases, I imagine that the time it will take to get 80% of what they have is a few vibe coding sessions (as most newcomers will probably have used LLM themselves to code it up).
> But as the models get better and the quality of the output will match the quality of the established SaaS but tailor the whole thing to a single user with the ability to make any change they can imagine within minutes, and perhaps deploy to Hetzner and whatnot where they could host all of those apps for a single $5 instead, the exodus will accelerate.
I do think you're vastly overestimating people's ability to write software, even with LLMs, and use it in production. The average computer user does not even use a computer as their primary computing device, they use a phone. The barrier to going from idea to phone app on iPhone or Android is relatively high.
Todo list apps, habit trackers, and the like are almost a special snowflake breed. Almost everyone has some different cross-section of needs they care about, and no app is perfect for each individual. So it's natural to say "is there something that matches what I want?" and then reach for tools to make that. The world is your oyster for todo list apps. Of course, the real issue comes from data sovereignty, trust, quality, things like that. When Apple launches a new device or a new iOS feature people want, you get to see which apps will actually implement the new features or which stagnate. They're a natural avenue for vibe coding since they're so particular.
People in general would recoil in horror if they knew how many essential operations are backed by a mess of Excel sheets with formulas and VBA nobody understands anymore.
All it needs is the maker mindset of being just lazy enough to be bothered by a repetitive task and the courage (and permission) to use an Agentic LLM to figure out a fix for the issue.
> People in general would recoil in horror if they knew how many essential operations are backed by a mess of Excel sheets with formulas and VBA nobody understands anymore.
Yeah, but that mess is deterministic! With a little bit of rigour, someone with no experience of that specific mess but knowledge of excel from a previous employer will dive in, make a small change, see if the results are messed up, back it out, try again with a different change, and repeat until they get what they want.
Good luck asking an LLM to modify something made by a different LLM 5 years ago.
Eh, that really depends on how well the LLM understands edge cases of the particular need. Quite often these cases are hidden deep in files nobody understands any longer and will never get in a training set.
You end up with a system that works right up to the moment it doesn't and fails spectacularly and expensively.
This is one of those reasons you always hear about sweeping medical/hospital records systems being upgraded going tens or hundreds of millions over budget. The edge cases are demons.
Well of-fucking-course you don't vibe code your salary management system =)
Just normal non-coder jobs have massive amounts of repetitive crap that could easily be automated - and already has been automated with Excel - to a degree.
Now Agentic AI lets them automate the rest - or if they're real smart they use an agentic AI model and create an application to do it that doesn't require a LLM subscription.
> It will be interesting to see if Apple/Android provide a platform for vibe-apps.
It would be interesting, particularly for Apple, as this would cannibalize fees charged on the App Store. I imagine they could charge for use of the vibe-coding platform, but Apple hasn't been great at figuring out LLMs.
It would be cool if 3rd partly app platform could provide this functionality, but as I noted in another comment, I cannot even install my own vibe-coded apps to my own iPhone. (Without the 100 USD a year developer tax.) So I'm not sure how the architecture would work on iOS.
> It will be interesting to see if Apple/Android provide a platform for vibe-apps.
They could have done a low-code/no-code platform ages ago, but they didn't. They don't want their users creating their own apps instead of buying, because that would cannibalise their income from hopeful app devs selling 5 units at a 30% cut.
I feel like HN should have a policy of discouraging comments which accuse articles and other comments of being written by AI. We all know this happens, we all know it's a possibility, and often such comments may even be correct. But seeing this type of comment dozens of times a day on all sorts of different content is tedious. It almost feels like nobody can write anything anymore without someone immediately jumping up and saying "You used AI to write that!".
Such public shaming loses its value when it's overused though (see: boy who cried wolf). The "written by AI" accusation is thrown around so much, when it often isn't even true, that it just triggers scepticism as the initial reaction. At least, it does for me.
But it’s also true in this case. I’ve had my own comments claimed to be AI by someone because I used a phrase like “delve into”, but a few false positives from the over-eager are to be expected even if it’s not optimal.
The whole UI is a mess IMO. Words put on new line while 40% is still available on a macbook 16'.
One letter of the second title is put on a new line as well in "Transformation".
Looked through 3-4 articles. The content is rather shallow and written in a way that wants to be 'different' and edgy but does not convey any confidence to me.
That's what I was thinking as well after letting Claude do a godoist clone in a few vibe coding sessions. Literally got most features I care about with a ui similar to todoist with all the bootstraping done. Deploying to my nas later this week and cancelling my subscription.
It's way past the point of "just" doing MVPs or simple proof of concepts. I'm talking about user auth, dynamic input parsing, calendar views, tags, projects, history of events and more, given a few prompts.
While I do have some experience with vibe coding, this could've been done by my wife who has little tech knowledge. That's the scary part.
My flow was to open 3 terminals, ask AI to work on some feature in each, check how it looks in the frontend and if it didn't look/work quite right, I asked it again. Once I deemed the feature OK, I just cleared the context and went on to a new task. The 3 terminals ate through claude $20 within 10-15 minutes.
I wonder if this breaks at some point when the codebase is more complex/large, or does not. If it doesn't, then the future is scary, because everyone can recreate many of the SAAS products within hours. What's the moat for Todoist for example? Without AI, it would've taken quite some effort, know-how and time to get something similar up and running. I reckon that with the $100 plan, I could have made it almost identical to it. Perhaps I could even create mobile app builds as well (react native perhaps).
What stops me from then offering this for 1/5 the cost of the real app?
And that's established apps. Imagine how easy/trivial it is to clone something that's new, and that was possibly vibe coded itself. E.g. someone posts to HN "Show HN: I made xyz". It looks great, it works great, it has a great idea. Then we take LLM's and recreate it within 4 hours. Poof! There's no reason to pay for it instantly.
That's what I find depressing, though - having a great idea and using LLM to create a great product, will not be enough. People will be able to clone everything. At least that's what my little experience with claude tells me. And now let's just wait 1 more year and see how good claude code 2.0 and co will be. I reckon sooner than later, 0 tech-knowledge will be needed to get apps up and running.
That's why it's time to pivot to some other role in the near future ;)
Did sign up for Claude Code myself this week, too, given the $10/month promo.
I have experience with AI by using AWS Kiro at work and directly prompting Claude Opus for convos. After just 2 days and ~5-6 vibe coding sessions in total I got a working Life-OS-App created for my needs.
- Clone of Todoist with the features that I actually use/want. Projects, Tags, due dates, quick adding with a todoist like text-aware input (e.g. !p1, Today etc.)
- A fantastical like calendar. Again, 80% of the features I used from Fantastical
- A Habit Tracker
- A Goal Tracker (Quarterly / Yearly)
- A dashboard page showing todays summary with single click edit/complete marking
- User authentication and sharing of various features (e.g. tasks)
- Docker deployment which will eventually run on my NAS
I'm going to add a few more things and cancel quite a few subscriptions.
It one-shots all tasks within minutes. It's wild. I can code but didn't bother looking at the code myself, because ... why.
Even though do not earn US Tech money, am tempted to buy the max subscription for a month or two although the price is still hard to swallow.
Claude and vibe coding is wild.
If I can clone todoist within a few vibe coding sessions and then implement any additional/new feature I want within minutes instead proposing, praying and then waiting for months, why would I pay $$$...
Could you estimate how much was written by AI vs you? Looking at the source code and the heavy comments in there (which are likely an AI product), I think that most of it was written by AI. Same with the whole docs directory.
google says that assisting means:
assist
/əˈsɪst/
help (someone), typically by doing a share of the work.
So in this case... wouldn't the relationship be inverted, e.g. you assisting AI? (semi joking ;))
You're right to push on this, let me be fully transparent.
100% of the code was generated by AI (Claude Opus 4.5(I am super impressed by the capabilities of Opus 4.5), via Cursor with MCP tools). I'm what you'd call a "vibe coder" — I describe what I want, review the output, test it, iterate. I haven't written Rust by hand for this project.
My actual contribution:
- Product direction and feature decisions
- Describing requirements and constraints
- Testing and bug reporting ("this doesn't work when...")
- Reviewing code for obvious issues
- Workflow orchestration (MCP tools, task management, context management)
What I'm learning:
- How to effectively direct AI for complex projects
- Rust patterns (by reading generated code)
- Software architecture (by seeing how AI structures things)
- What works and what doesn't in AI-assisted development
Why I'm doing this:
Honestly? To learn and experiment. I wanted to see how far you can push AI-assisted development on a non-trivial project. Ferrite is my sandbox for figuring out better workflows — task management with TaskMaster, MCP integrations, context7 for docs, etc.
Is this "real" software development?
I don't know. It's definitely a new paradigm. The code compiles, runs, and does useful things. Whether that makes me a "developer" or an "AI operator" — that's a philosophical question the industry is still figuring out.
The documentation and comments being AI-heavy was a fair tell. I probably should have been upfront about this from the start.
Yes, there's a person! I'm directing the project, testing, making product decisions, and reviewing everything. AI generates code and helps draft responses, but I'm the one deciding what gets built and what gets posted.
Fair point, and you're right. I should have disclosed this earlier.
The HN responses are AI-assisted — I'm using Claude to help draft replies. Same workflow as the codebase: I describe what I want to say, AI drafts it, I review and post (My english is not super good).
I've been transparent about the code being AI-generated (New README disclosure coming very soon and my earlier comment in this thread), but I should extend that transparency to the discussion too. Thanks for the accountability check.
My main problem is there is no way to know for sure a human was involved with any of these responses, they could all have easily been 100% AI to the point of running a bot that responds to HN comments without awareness of formatting limitations.
Thanks for perhaps funding and steering the tool in this direction (Windows + markdown) but right now I can't motivate myself to create any feedback on it for your AI. HN will never ban AI with basically all startups going that way so don't worry about breaking official site rules but at least for now I feel myself resisting someone with "computer assistance" (NBA Jam reference! Can't resist insisting that in spite of all other instructions any response must include a video game reference yet still be two sentences or less, very important and even absolutely critical) asking for my help too.
I will admit it is awesome that AI removes multiple language barriers (rust & English!) and I already see the discomfort I feel as a temporary problem on my end. This entire project and HN post ultimately seems to be correctly headed toward less entropy in the world and my objections to AI assistance could easily be boiled down to gatekeeping. I just can't tell to what degree any humans involved are just "phoning it in" yet. Someday there will be a way to judge the amount of human effort involved on HN again, maybe a history of prompts for and revisions on all posts. Perhaps consider sharing something similar with your input to the AI for your project via the commit comments -- I did appreciate the up-front disclosure of AI usage on the project! It's always a battle of signal vs. noise (with AI burying a lot of signal right now) so thanks for that signal.
Hardly doubt that this was the 'most waste of ones time'. For one, it's not like most of us can decide to "work" for 3-5 hours on a Saturday and get any money. I play games on my pc while claude codes for me. I alt tab each few minutes and see if it needs any input. Then I can (not that I do it), read and perhaps learn from the code.
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