5 ms·

One big question I have, in the era of Claude Code (and advancements yet to come) — is why should a hacker submit to using tools behind a SaaS offering … when o

by mccoyb 1y ago

One big question I have, in the era of Claude Code (and advancements yet to come) — is why should a hacker submit to using tools behind a SaaS offering … when one can just roll their own tools? I may be mistaken, but I don’t think there is any sort of moat here. Truly — this is an excellent and accessible idea (bravo!), but if I can whittle away at a free and open source version, why should I ever consider paying for this?

zackify 1y ago
Yeah exactly. I’ve been using Tailscale ssh to a raspberry pi. With Termix on iOS. I can do all the same stuff on my own. Termix is awesome (I’m not affiliated)
- smithclay 1y ago
  similar: blink + tailscale + zellij + devcontainers
  - TheTaytay 1y ago
    smithclay is being polite because this is someone else’s thread, but he wrote this (which I’m literally playing with right now): https://clay.fyi/blog/iphone-claude-code-context-coding/ https://clay.fyi/blog/iphone-claude-code-context-coding/
  - coyotespike 1y ago
    this chain of replies reminds me of the famous HN comment about Dropbox - a good sign for Omnara!
- _1tem 1y ago
  Also see solutions which don’t require a central server like Vibetunnel.
  - itsalotoffun 1y ago
    +1 for vibetunnel
  - cygn 1y ago
    what's the advantage of vibetunnel? And which central server is required? Vibe tunnel still sounds like "ssh into your machine from your phone", or is there something I'm missing?
kmansm27 1y ago
Thanks! I think the main reason to pay right now would be for convenience. A user wouldn't have to worry about hosting their own frontend/backend and building their own mobile app. And eventually, we want to have different agent providers host their agents for use on our platform, but that's further out.
- svieira 1y ago
  Correct - but if this is such a game changer in development speed and the market is already validated that this kind of platform is useful then step 1 is build enough of a clone of the platform to start iterating with it and then ... TO THE MOON! It's entirely a having-the-best-vision moat, which is a moat, but one that's principally protected by trademark lawsuits.
mccoyb 1y ago
The answer here might be: "you're not our market" (which is totally fine! but slightly confusing, because presumably people _using agents like Claude Code_ are ... more advanced than the uninitiated)
- kmansm27 1y ago
  Yeah, I would say that most Claude Code users are pretty technical, but I was surprised to see that there's a decent number of non-technical users using Claude Code to completely vibe code applications for their personal use. Those users seem to love tools like Codex (the openai cloud UI one, not the CLI) and things like Omnara, where there's no setup
  - mccoyb 1y ago
    Makes sense! Thanks for discussing.
  - jmvldz 1y ago
    Ah interesting. I wonder if it's similar with Devin users.
bobbylarrybobby 1y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
- mccoyb 1y ago
  This doesn't contribute to the conversation ... without further elaboration on what your point is, I'm assuming that you're pointing out that my question is analogous to previous (good to ask!) questions about market and user model for an "eventually very big" application. Not very enlightening: just because Dropbox became big in one environment, doesn't mean the same questions aren't important in new spaces.
  - arendtio 1y ago
    Well, this is a classic here at HN. So every time someone comes around with a sentence like 'but if I can whittle away at a free and open source version, why should I ever consider paying for this?', the answer will be that Dropbox thread ;-)
    - herval 1y ago
      Following on this offtopic - I wonder if there was ever another case of the Dropbox thread effect on HN? I don’t recall any other cases…
sailfast 1y ago
Because then you don’t have to whittle away, and you’re free to blame someone else if anything goes wrong. Maybe that is more for a general engineer than a Hacker though - hacker to me implies some sort of joy in doing it yourself rather than optimizing.
- mccoyb 1y ago
  I like to be able to tweak things to my liking, and this typically leads me to make my own versions of things. Probably a bad habit.
  - sailfast 1y ago
    Hard disagree. It’s a great habit. Keep going! You’re doing it right.
jama211 1y ago
I mean, you could say this about almost literally any software product ever to be honest. Feel free I guess? People like to pay for convenience and support so they don’t have to build everything themselves.
_1tem 1y ago
This is exactly what I thought when picking a customer support software last month. After hiring my first support person and being unable to decide between Intercom/Front/HelpScout/Zendesk I finally just vibe coded my own helpdesk in a few days with the just the features I needed - perfectly integrated into my SaaS, and best of all, free.
- cpursley 1y ago
  I’d love to hear more about how this works. It’s whatever you built, integrated with your email stack? Because I’m super sassed out.
  - _1tem 1y ago
    Yes it's just a wrapper on top of Gmail with Inbox Zero philosophy (each email is a support ticket). I only needed 3 features for my helpdesk: 1. an AI email drafter which used my product docs and email templates as context (eventually I plan to add "tools" where the AI can lookup info in our database) 2. a simple email client with a sidebar with customer contextual info (their billing plan, etc.) and a few simple buttons for the operator to take actions on their account 3. A few basic team collaboration features, notes, assigning tickets to operators, escalating tickets... It took about 2 days to build the initial version, and about 2 weeks to iron out a number of annoying AI slop bugs in the beginning. But after a month of use it's now pretty stable, my customer support hire is using it and she's happy.
    - cpursley 1y ago
      Very cool, thanks. Somewhat related I vibed up a simple docs/support chat bot that uses the markdown files for an astro starlight docs (all of these similar chat bot tools are like $50 a month): https://star-support-demo.vercel.app/en/getting-started https://star-support-demo.vercel.app/en/getting-started repo: https://github.com/agoodway/star-support-demo https://github.com/agoodway/star-support-demo
- bravesoul2 1y ago
  Doesn't the vibe coded solution just mean you need to spend time maintaining that code that isn't your core business? Unless a bespoke customer support is crucial to it?
ericb 1y ago
Not the op, but I think about that. Here's what I came to, for the moment: * LLM's are lousy at bugs * Apps are a bit like making a baby. Fun in the moment, but a lifetime support commitment * Supporting software isn't fun, even with an LLM. Burnout is common in open source. * At the end of the day, it is still a lot of work, even guiding an LLM * Anything hosted is a chore. Uptime, monitoring, patching, backing up, upgrading, security, legal, compliance, vulnerabilities I think we'll see github littered with buggy, unsupported, vibe coded one-offs for every conceivable purpose. Now, though, you literally have no idea what you're looking at or if it is decent. Claude made four different message passing implementations in my vibe coded app. I realized this once it was trying to modify the wrong one during a fix. In other words, claude was falling over trying to support what it made, and only a dev could bail it out. I am perfectly capable of coding this myself, but you have two choices at the moment--invest the labor, or get crap. But, then we come to "maybe I should just pay for this instead of burning my time and tokens."
- mccoyb 1y ago
  In regards to the duplication of code — yes I’ve found this to be a tremendous problem. One technique which appears to combat this is to do “red team / blue team Claude” Red team Claude is hypercritical, and tries to find weaknesses in the code. Blue team Claude is your partner, who you collaborate with to setup PRs. While this has definitely been helpful for me finding “issues” that blue team Claude will lie to you about — hallucinations are still a bit of an issue. I mostly put red team Claude into ultrathink + task mode to improve the veracity of its critiques.
stpedgwdgfhgdd 1y ago
And relying on (another) 3rd party provider that indirectly has access to your code…. I do not how it is implemented, but if I can press ‘continue’ from my phone, someone else could enter other commands… Like export database…

by mccoyb 1y ago

zackify 1y ago

Yeah exactly. I’ve been using Tailscale ssh to a raspberry pi. With Termix on iOS. I can do all the same stuff on my own. Termix is awesome (I’m not affiliated)

smithclay 1y ago
similar: blink + tailscale + zellij + devcontainers
- TheTaytay 1y ago
  smithclay is being polite because this is someone else’s thread, but he wrote this (which I’m literally playing with right now): https://clay.fyi/blog/iphone-claude-code-context-coding/ https://clay.fyi/blog/iphone-claude-code-context-coding/
- coyotespike 1y ago
  this chain of replies reminds me of the famous HN comment about Dropbox - a good sign for Omnara!
_1tem 1y ago
Also see solutions which don’t require a central server like Vibetunnel.
- itsalotoffun 1y ago
  +1 for vibetunnel
- cygn 1y ago
  what's the advantage of vibetunnel? And which central server is required? Vibe tunnel still sounds like "ssh into your machine from your phone", or is there something I'm missing?

kmansm27 1y ago

Thanks! I think the main reason to pay right now would be for convenience. A user wouldn't have to worry about hosting their own frontend/backend and building their own mobile app. And eventually, we want to have different agent providers host their agents for use on our platform, but that's further out.

svieira 1y ago
Correct - but if this is such a game changer in development speed and the market is already validated that this kind of platform is useful then step 1 is build enough of a clone of the platform to start iterating with it and then ... TO THE MOON! It's entirely a having-the-best-vision moat, which is a moat, but one that's principally protected by trademark lawsuits.

mccoyb 1y ago

The answer here might be: "you're not our market" (which is totally fine! but slightly confusing, because presumably people _using agents like Claude Code_ are ... more advanced than the uninitiated)

kmansm27 1y ago
Yeah, I would say that most Claude Code users are pretty technical, but I was surprised to see that there's a decent number of non-technical users using Claude Code to completely vibe code applications for their personal use. Those users seem to love tools like Codex (the openai cloud UI one, not the CLI) and things like Omnara, where there's no setup
- mccoyb 1y ago
  Makes sense! Thanks for discussing.
- jmvldz 1y ago
  Ah interesting. I wonder if it's similar with Devin users.

bobbylarrybobby 1y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

mccoyb 1y ago
This doesn't contribute to the conversation ... without further elaboration on what your point is, I'm assuming that you're pointing out that my question is analogous to previous (good to ask!) questions about market and user model for an "eventually very big" application. Not very enlightening: just because Dropbox became big in one environment, doesn't mean the same questions aren't important in new spaces.
- arendtio 1y ago
  Well, this is a classic here at HN. So every time someone comes around with a sentence like 'but if I can whittle away at a free and open source version, why should I ever consider paying for this?', the answer will be that Dropbox thread ;-)
  - herval 1y ago
    Following on this offtopic - I wonder if there was ever another case of the Dropbox thread effect on HN? I don’t recall any other cases…

sailfast 1y ago

Because then you don’t have to whittle away, and you’re free to blame someone else if anything goes wrong. Maybe that is more for a general engineer than a Hacker though - hacker to me implies some sort of joy in doing it yourself rather than optimizing.

mccoyb 1y ago
I like to be able to tweak things to my liking, and this typically leads me to make my own versions of things. Probably a bad habit.
- sailfast 1y ago
  Hard disagree. It’s a great habit. Keep going! You’re doing it right.

jama211 1y ago

I mean, you could say this about almost literally any software product ever to be honest. Feel free I guess? People like to pay for convenience and support so they don’t have to build everything themselves.

_1tem 1y ago

This is exactly what I thought when picking a customer support software last month. After hiring my first support person and being unable to decide between Intercom/Front/HelpScout/Zendesk I finally just vibe coded my own helpdesk in a few days with the just the features I needed - perfectly integrated into my SaaS, and best of all, free.

cpursley 1y ago
I’d love to hear more about how this works. It’s whatever you built, integrated with your email stack? Because I’m super sassed out.
- _1tem 1y ago
  Yes it's just a wrapper on top of Gmail with Inbox Zero philosophy (each email is a support ticket). I only needed 3 features for my helpdesk: 1. an AI email drafter which used my product docs and email templates as context (eventually I plan to add "tools" where the AI can lookup info in our database) 2. a simple email client with a sidebar with customer contextual info (their billing plan, etc.) and a few simple buttons for the operator to take actions on their account 3. A few basic team collaboration features, notes, assigning tickets to operators, escalating tickets... It took about 2 days to build the initial version, and about 2 weeks to iron out a number of annoying AI slop bugs in the beginning. But after a month of use it's now pretty stable, my customer support hire is using it and she's happy.
  - cpursley 1y ago
    Very cool, thanks. Somewhat related I vibed up a simple docs/support chat bot that uses the markdown files for an astro starlight docs (all of these similar chat bot tools are like $50 a month): https://star-support-demo.vercel.app/en/getting-started https://star-support-demo.vercel.app/en/getting-started repo: https://github.com/agoodway/star-support-demo https://github.com/agoodway/star-support-demo
bravesoul2 1y ago
Doesn't the vibe coded solution just mean you need to spend time maintaining that code that isn't your core business? Unless a bespoke customer support is crucial to it?

ericb 1y ago

Not the op, but I think about that. Here's what I came to, for the moment: * LLM's are lousy at bugs * Apps are a bit like making a baby. Fun in the moment, but a lifetime support commitment * Supporting software isn't fun, even with an LLM. Burnout is common in open source. * At the end of the day, it is still a lot of work, even guiding an LLM * Anything hosted is a chore. Uptime, monitoring, patching, backing up, upgrading, security, legal, compliance, vulnerabilities I think we'll see github littered with buggy, unsupported, vibe coded one-offs for every conceivable purpose. Now, though, you literally have no idea what you're looking at or if it is decent. Claude made four different message passing implementations in my vibe coded app. I realized this once it was trying to modify the wrong one during a fix. In other words, claude was falling over trying to support what it made, and only a dev could bail it out. I am perfectly capable of coding this myself, but you have two choices at the moment--invest the labor, or get crap. But, then we come to "maybe I should just pay for this instead of burning my time and tokens."

mccoyb 1y ago
In regards to the duplication of code — yes I’ve found this to be a tremendous problem. One technique which appears to combat this is to do “red team / blue team Claude” Red team Claude is hypercritical, and tries to find weaknesses in the code. Blue team Claude is your partner, who you collaborate with to setup PRs. While this has definitely been helpful for me finding “issues” that blue team Claude will lie to you about — hallucinations are still a bit of an issue. I mostly put red team Claude into ultrathink + task mode to improve the veracity of its critiques.

stpedgwdgfhgdd 1y ago

And relying on (another) 3rd party provider that indirectly has access to your code…. I do not how it is implemented, but if I can press ‘continue’ from my phone, someone else could enter other commands… Like export database…