I’m late in looking at this OpenClaw thing. Maybe it’s because I’ve been in IT for 40 years or I’ve seen War Games, but who on earth gives an AI access to their personal life?
Am I the only one that finds this mind bogglingly dumb?
By the way, was that that movie a boy plays a game with an A.I. and the same A.I. starts a thermonuclear war or something like that? I think I watched the start when I was a kid but never really finished it.
The buy vs build discussion has dramatically changed with GenAI. Some enterprise systems need to remain vendor based, but there’s a ton of space for mid-size and smaller companies to build and maintain their own systems and tons of software that were excel apps could be fully realized departmental systems.
That's a short term view. Any system you build inhouse has to be maintained until you replace it, and often the longer it remains in place the harder it is to do that. You might save a small amount of cash (which might be important at the time tbf) but you're creating a major headache for later. Legacy code is debt, and that includes all your code. It's also a huge problem if the maintainer leaves because typically those small systems are owned by an individual dev who set it up in the first place.
Everyone who founds a company needs to remember that they're building a system of systems that all interact and influence each other, and you have to balance short term cash flow against long term strategy.
> It's also a huge problem if the maintainer leaves because typically those small systems are owned by an individual dev who set it up in the first place.
It's not uncommon that this maintainer actually wants to get away from maintaining this code, and would actually be quite willing to teach some successor how everything works.
The problem is that it is often hard to find someone who is similarly passionate about this system (often the system only keeps working because the original maintainer invests a lot of energy into keeping it alive), and is thus brutally willing to learn this system inside out. You can't force this mentality from above: either a suitable programmer has this mentality or he is typically not suitable.
I don't understand why you appear to be downvoted for this (your comment is faded at the time I'm reading this). It sounds like a perfectly reasonable take.
I've certainly inherited and also caused these problems in my younger years.
Sorry, this take just shows that you probably are not running a business. Having someone dedicate their whole business to a solution to one of your problems will most likely get a better result than you doing a hackjob you can't even maintain. Let alone the maintenance, logistics, complexity, time etc. The economics just aren't there to vibe code even more than 30% of the software you use.
People running businesses want to focus on their core business and are happy to pay for pain points to go away, for money to come in or less money to come out. It's that simple.
I’ve been a consultant to fortune 100 companies throughout my career and the amount of pain they willingly endure supporting Excel, Access, and .NET/Java applications is astounding. The desire to eliminate these things is high, but there’s no political will over cost and appeasing departmental management.
I think GenAI opens Pandora’s box and all of these decisions change.
Yeah, and we'll see them fail trying to roll their own excel. It's such a stupid economic decision to even think of that ... I can't even. So I heavily disagree, still. Software doens't need to be perfect, it needs to be good enough and the economics need to work.
You sound like a salesman. Small business will always choose 1 hour free "hack" fix, over $50k solution with "complexity, maintenance..". Shitty python script with DuckDB running locally on laptop, can get you long long way.
If someone chooses the 1h free hack, sorry, you're doing business wrong and focus on the wrong things. A mindset that keeps you small. You gotta invest in stuff that makes you money and solves your problems. If that's what makes me sound like a salesman, again, I don't think you own a business as well or are struggling to make a living with that.
Theres a whole lot between "I waste my time and do non-scalable things" and "I need an enterprise contract as a SMB".
> Shitty python script with DuckDB running locally on laptop, can get you long long way.
Yeah ... no. You do you, but if you want to get your business to a good size you need proper tools. Like a chef needs a good knive, your business needs good tools as well. That's not to say that a quick DIY integration is off the table, but the one thing you don't get back is time, not money. So when you waste time by doing shit that can go away with minimal investment, you're preventing your business from getting traction.
Sorry but that's a coder mindset. "I can do this myself". That's what's keeping you stuck. You need to think about every decision as an investment. Time vs money. What's the ROI for all alternatives? Then you decide on what moves the needle. It's that easy.
The calculation is simple: every minute you do stupid stuff like coding shit, you can't sell to someone paying you to make things. So you lose twice by doing something yourself: a) you can't sell your services or time in the mean time and b) you add complexity and maintenance to your very complex business life as well. For me, the biggest problem is too much to do and not enough time. So to scale my business I need to reduce complexity. If I can throw reasonable money for that to go away: good, I'll do it. Most business owners I know think like that. That's business, not sales.
There are so many good SaaS for cheap or even with a good free tier that get you started that it's just incredibly junior to just build it yourself.
A really good example of this is NotebookLM. Feed it anything complex and it will surface a few important points, but it will also spend half the time on the third sentence in the eigth paragraph of section five.
I tried to point it at my Sharpee repo and it wanted to focus on createRoom() as some technical marvel.
I eventually gave up though I was never super serious about using the results anyway.
If you want a summary, do it yourself. If you try to summarize someone else’s work, understand you will miss important points.
I actually think GenAI will create MORE open source code and as long as devs use quality controls like TDD and SonarQube the code will evolve into reusable works.
I've never heard of sonarqube ... this looks very enterprisey ... isn't this just prompt engineering over the source with a harness? Why am I clicking through all this signup flow?
I'd buy the put this in your ".git/hooks" workflow ... but I don't know what's going on with this thing.
The strongest opensource contributors tend to be kinda weird - like they don't have a google account and use some kind of libre phone os that you've never heard of.
What a "real" solution would look like is some kind of "guardrails" format where they can use an lsp or treesitter to give dos and donts and then have a secondary auditing llm punt the code back.
There may be tools (coderabbit?) that do this ... but that's realistically what the solution will be - local llms, self-orchestrated.
eh, it sounds like you're hawking your own product. It doesn't look like you are and this looks to be a mass adopted fortune-100 product without large brand name awareness, but that's the risk with hn.
There's a lot of people trying to hustle their stuff on here. Strongly frowned upon unless it's genuinely free and even then...
Maybe something like "at work we use something called sonarqube and I've been using it on my own stuff. it's works really nice" might have been better
I was mostly pointing out that you can still create reusable open source software with GenAI. I could care less what tools you use but I do think strong engineering principles are the common denominator.
SonarQube is pretty useless for quality control unless your process is already broken, in which case you should probably fix your process.
I once worked at a company where the powers-that-be decided to add SonarQube with max settings to the pipeline for a large C++ code base. It produced no output so IT thought the install was broken. They eventually figured out that it was actually working perfectly but that it never found any issues across the entire code base ever. We got that for free with sensible build configurations long before it got to SonarQube.
TDD and tools are not a substitute for competent process. I’ve seen plenty of TDD produce objectively poor quality code bases.
I noticed this too, but I think there's a much bigger problem.
The way Claude does research has dramatically changed for the worse. Instead of piping through code logically, it's now spawning dozens of completely unrelated research threads to look at simple problems. I let it spin for over 30 minutes last night before realizing it was just "lost".
I have since been looking for these moments and killing it immediately. I tell Claude "just look at the related code" and it says, "sorry I'll look at this directly".
I don't think the elite think all voters are dumb more like they think they're easy to manipulate to vote for something (which is largely true). Anecdotally I easily get manipulated by the type of information I consume. I occassionally catch it after the fact or a conversation with others but there's no telling how much I've just accepted that's manipulated.
From that angle it's a game of who has the money, power, and diatribution to enact this manipulation.
Twitter being a prime example. Is Elon "right"? Maybe but the main point is it doesn't matter as he has the distribution.
If you have money but low to no distribution -> you do what gary is doing. Maybe he'd be interested in removing rights to vote but someone like Zuck would NOT because he has outsized ability to influence as he sees fit.
First time hearing about ifMud despite being someone who spent a lot of time on MUDs and MUSHs in the past, hacking on various ones. Seems like a neat community and would love to hear more about it.
Create a user, login, find the Adventurer's Lounge and hang out. We don't actually build or play in the mud anymore. We use the channel system to talk about "stuff and things" and really not a ton about IF anymore. A lot of politics these days.
many muds have/had those. there is intermud too. i guess ifmud just had the critical mass to keep people interested in communicating even though they stopped playing.
Chatting in the "Lounge" was always the starting point. The mud-building was what a few people did for kicks. ifMUD never had any systemic game play. The IF community has always had a strong core of people that interact daily. Some are on intfiction.org, some are elsewhere.
Am I the only one that finds this mind bogglingly dumb?
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