You would be surprised to see how much the japanese IT industry is behind the times (a decade at least IMO). There is only a very limited startup culture here (both in size and talentpool and business ideas), there is no real risk taking venture capital market here (maybe Masayoshi Son is the exception here, but again he tends to invest in the US mostly) and most software companies use very very very outdated management practices. On top of that most software development had been/has been outsourced to India, Vietnam, China, etc, so management see no value in software talent... SW engineers' social recognition here are mostly on the level of accountants. Under such circumstances japan will never have a chance to contribute to AI meaningfully (other than niche academic research)
Seems like the Japanese have had this major blind spot in software engineering since the 90's. Even Sony didn't bother to use what they learned from the PlayStations to produce their own TV OS, outsourcing it to Google. It's as if the 5th generation stuff not working out just burned out that circuit in Japan entirely.
1. The US and China are two biggest economies by GDP.
2. The US is the default destination for worldwide investors (because of historically good returns). China has huge state economy and the state can direct investments into this area.
Which is my point: it seems easy to clone something that seems conceptually simple, but is the result of all kinds of UI, UX, performance, etc optimizations. The reason someone might choose Obsidian over these so called clones is not just marketing, I assure you. The reason people attempt Obsidian clones is that they think creating todo-list management tools, etc is all it takes to implement a PKM, and that that is easy. It is not.
Right now there are kinds of tools I wished existed, that I would pay for, but AI does not automatically provide the insight, good taste, technical excellence, and grit needed to create these products. I could do them, with AI assisting, but do not have the time. It is not a simple matter of saying: Claude, create or clone X, Y, Z.
There are so many of them, aren't there? There's Roam Research (might be the OG one), Logseq (FOSS Obsidian basically), Notion, Emacs' Org-Roam, Anytype, etc. Neovim has like 5 extensions implementing the same idea (such as Neorg), Bram's Vim probably has its own plugins in Vim9script.
> Just on HN alone, throughout 2023 - 2025 we were seing like one new TODO app show up on HN weekly!
This response shows you missed my point entirely. I am saying a todo app does not a PKM make! I'm not interested in a vibe-coded todo app, it is useless to me.
> Because money is the moat, and they have it!
You're sidestepping issue and contradicting yourself. I asked: if cloning is so easy, why has no one cloned the JetBrains IDEs, for example?
Remember, I'm not talking about what happens after the cloning. Are you saying no one has cloned Jetbrains because it takes a lot of money to do so? That would contradict your claim that AI makes it easy.
What's the point you are trying to make here? That it is not possible to trivially clone good ideas?
Let's start with my actual claim - "It is now trivially possible for someone to clone your good idea".
I want to clarify your position: Do you think that the bar for cloning someone else's good idea is now:
1. Harder to do with AI,
2. Easier to do with AI,
3. Exactly the same level of difficulty it always was.
Because if you are arguing that #2 is an incorrect answer, there's no real point in continuing the argument, is there? I'm taking #2 as a given, and you appear to be arguing that it is a baseless assumption.
My point is that "easier" is not the same as "trivial".
Yes, for a skilled and determined hacker, judicious use of AI can enable them do more. That is a far cry from "AI makes cloning complex flagship apps trivial".
Furthermore, the value of software is not primarily in the arrangement of bits. It is about the technical, domain, and contextual knowledge you gain as you develop the software, the understanding you gain about your customers, etc. AI cannot give you that on a whim.
> That is a far cry from "AI makes cloning complex flagship apps trivial".
That is not what I claimed, though.
I said "Cloning your good idea", and context in this thread and this story is not, nor was it ever, about producing Windows 11 or a similarly large and non-trivial product.
It was, IIRC, about small teams (the actual story is about a solo founder) executing a good idea, and then seeing someone with a $20 CC account cloning that product in a week.
One thing that my use of the latest and greatest models (Opus, etc) have made clear: No matter how advanced the model, it is not beyond making very silly mistakes regularly. Opus was even working worse with tool calls than Sonnet and Haiku for a while for me.
At this point I am convinced that only proper use of LLMs for development is to assist coding (not take it over), using pair development, with them on a tight leash, approving most edits manually. At this point there is probably nothing anyone can say to convince me otherwise.
Any attempt to automate beyond that has never worked for me and is very unlikely to be productive any time soon. I have a lot of experience with them, and various approaches to using them.
You have conflicting requirements there - expressive type systems are not direct and simple. And elegant is subjective.
But seriously though: have you tried to see how far you can get with the design right now? You can start iterating on it already, even if the implementation will lag.
I do not have conflicting requirements. Expressive type system ARE direct and simple.
Expressive power is the ratio how strongly/clearly you can encode invariants to how complex and ceremonious the syntax of it needs to be.
See how JS, a language usually seen as a middling/mediocre language, can distill the basic good parts of OOP into very direct and clear idioms? I can just create an object literal and embed simple methods on them that receive the "this" pointer and use it. The constructor would be just a regular function. None of the cruft of standard OOP.
See how you define an enumerable union in TypeScript? Very simple. And yet I can think of many major languages that do not have this, certainly not with a lot of ceremony and complexity.
Those result in a conflict because given expressive types, people will make them not simple. For example, you realise why Haskell continuously gets academic papers like "Functor is to Lens as Applicative is to Biplate; Introducing Multiplate"? There's no reason for something like that in Go for example, because it's less expensive and the signatures are trivial.
> JS (...) can distill the basic good parts of OOP into very direct and clear idioms?
Clear in that one specific project context that you need to know. Perl suffers from this. You can build your own OOP, so many people did and now there are hundreds of mostly-compatible-but-not-fully versions of OOP with different syntax and semantics all over the place.
> There's no reason for something like that in Go for example, because it's less expensive [sic] [1] and the signatures are trivial.
Whoah, Are you saying, for example, that generics are not useful? That's quite the claim. In that case, to make things even simpler, let's remove recursion, functions as data, even type systems altogether, because they lead to "complex" code. See where your reasoning leads?
Any language feature can be abused. In the same vein, you also say:
> Perl suffers from this. You can build your own OOP, so many people did and now there are hundreds of mostly-compatible-but-not-fully versions of OOP with different syntax and semantics all over the place.
One can create OOP in any most modern Turing-Complete languages, so this is not a strong argument.
That is your implied claim. If that is not it I'm not sure what your arguments is.
You mentioned that Go does not have certain advanced features and thus does not lend itself to tying oneself up in complexities. I'm asking you where you draw the line.
All of those things have been built before, you're even referencing existing languages that have those "features". Parent seemingly was asking for people to build something completely novel, that doesn't have any FOSS code available that done that thing before.
And yes, LLMs/agents can help you do it for sure, I'm currently building the lisp of my dreams in my freetime, and already have compiler, interpreter, UI framework and some other things already done in a way I'm happy with.
Yeah, the "novel" bit is about integrating all those aspects into one language.
And trust me, such a language that captures enough mindshare is absolutely needed. People thought Rust was going to be it, but it got taken over by the idea of it being the next C++.
IF LLMs are what you make them out to be, it shouldn't have been long before we saw serious attempts at such languages, but I suspect LLMs are of barely any help here beyond some basic implementation tasks.
> Yeah, the "novel" bit is about integrating all those aspects into one language.
But do you think GP, who I initially wrote that comment to, would agree with that? All those features and integrations have examples in the FOSS world already, wouldn't the LLM just use what it learned from that?
> but I suspect LLMs are of barely any help here beyond some basic implementation tasks.
Disagree, as mentioned I've already managed to get together my own language that works for my purposes, and they did more than just "basic implementation tasks" although of course I've been reviewing and deciding stuff, no vibe coding here.
It's amazing how much other agentic tools suck in comparison to Claude Code. I'd love to have a proper alternative. But they all suck. I keep trying them every few months and keep running back to Claude Code.
Just yesterday I installed Cursor and Codex, and removed both after a few hours.
Cursor disrespected my setting to ask before editing files. Codex renamed my tabs after I had named them. It also went ahead and edited a bunch of my files after a fresh install without asking me. The heck, the default behavior should have been to seek permission at least the first time.
OpenCode does not allow me to scrollback and edit a prior prompt for reuse. It also keeps throwing up all kinds of weird errors, especially when I'm trying to use free or lower cost models.
Gemini CLI reads strange Python files when I'm working on a Node.js project, what the heck. It also never fixed the diff display issues in the terminal; It's always so difficult for me to actually see what edits it is actually trying to make before it makes it. It also frequently throws random internal errors.
At this point, I'm not sure we'll be seeing a proper competitor to Claude Code anytime soon.
Same, I still use CC mainly due to it being so wildly better at compaction. The overall experience of using OpenCode was far superior - especially with the LSP configured.
I use Opencode as my main driver, and I don’t experience what you have experienced.
For instance, opencode has /undo command which allows you to scroll back and edit a prior prompt. It also support forking conversations based on any prior message.
I think it depends on the set up. I overwrote the default planning agent prompt of opencode to fit my own use cases and my own mcp servers. I’ve been using OpenAI’s gpt codex models and they have been performing very well and I am able to make it do exactly what I ask it to do.
Claude code may do stuff fast, but in terms of quality and the ability to edit only what I want it to do, I don’t think it’s the best. Claude code often take shortcuts or do extra stuff that I didn’t ask.
Not in my (limited) experience. I gave CC and codex detailed instructions for reworking a UI, and codex did a much worse job and took 5x as long to finish.
Each time a Chinese model makes the news, I wonder: How come no major models are coming from Japan or Europe?
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