4 ms·

I think chatGPT itself is an epic product, Cursor has insane growth and usage. I also think they are both over-hyped, have too much a valuation.

by redorb 11mo ago

hollowturtle 11mo ago
ChatGPT is... a chat with some "augmentation" feature aka outputting rich html responses, nothing new except the generative side. Cursor is a VSCode fork with a custom model and a very good autocomplete integration. Again where are the products? Where the heck is Windows without the bloat that works reliably before becoming totally agentic? And therefore idiotic since it doesn't work reliably
layer8 11mo ago
Citing AI software as the only examples of how AI benefits developing software, has a bit of a touch of self-help books describing how to attain success and fulfillment by taking the example of writing self-help books. I don’t disagree that these are useful tools, by the way. I just haven’t seen any discernible uptick in general software quality and utility either, nor any economic uptick that should presumably follow from being able to develop software more efficiently.
- xwolfi 11mo ago
  I made 1500 USD speculating on NVidia earnings, that's economic uptick for me !
emp17344 11mo ago
It doesn’t matter what you think. Where’s all the data proving that AI is actually valuable? All we have are anecdotes and promises.
oblio 11mo ago
I agree with everyone else, where is the Microsoft Office competitor created by 2 geeks in a garage with Claude Code? Where is the Exchange replacement created by a company of 20 people? There are many really lucrative markets that need a fresh approach, and AI doesn't seem to have caused a huge explosion of new software created by upstarts. Or am I missing something? Where are the consumer facing software apps developed primarily with AI by smaller companies? I'm excluding big companies because in their case it's impossible to prove the productivity, the could be throwing more bodies at the problem and we'd never know.
- sfgvvxsfccdd 11mo ago
  > Office…Exchange The challenge in competing with these products is not code. The challenge competing in lucrative markets that need a fresh approach is also generally not code. So I’m not sure that is a good metric to evaluate LLMs for code generation.
  - alganet 11mo ago
    We had upstarts in the 80s, the 90s, the 2000s and the 2010s. Some game, some website, some social network, some mobile app that blew up. We had many. Not funded by billions. So, where is that in the 2020s? Yes, code is a detail (ideas too). It's a platform. It positions itself as the new thing. Does that platform allow upstarts? Or does it consolidate power?
  - ethanwillis 11mo ago
    It's not that they failed to compete on other metrics, it's that they don't even have a product to fail to sell.
  - tjr 11mo ago
    I think the point remains, if someone armed with Claude Code could whip out a feature complete clone of Microsoft Office over the weekend (and by all accounts, even a novice programmer could do this, because of the magnificent greatness of Claude), then why don't they just go ahead and do it? Maybe do a bunch of them: release one under GPL, one under MIT, one under BSD, and a few more sold as proprietary software. Wow, I mean, this should be trivial.
    - buu700 11mo ago
      It makes development faster, but not infinitely fast. Faithfully reproducing complex 42-year-old software in one weekend is a stretch no matter how you slice it. Also, AI is cheap, but not free. I could see it being doable by forking LibreOffice or Calligra Suite as a starting point, although even with AI assistance I'd imagine that it might take anyone not intimately familiar with both LibreOffice (or Calligra) and MS Office longer than a weekend to determine the full scope of the delta between them, much less implement that delta. But you'd still need someone with sufficient skill (not a novice), maybe several hundred or thousand dollars to burn, and nothing better to do for some amount of time that's probably longer than a weekend. And then that person would need some sort of motivation or incentive to go through with the project. It's plausible, but not a given that this will happen just because useful agentic coding tools exist.

I think chatGPT itself is an epic product, Cursor has insane growth and usage. I also think they are both over-hyped, have too much a valuation.

by redorb 11mo ago

I think chatGPT itself is an epic product, Cursor has insane growth and usage. I also think they are both over-hyped, have too much a valuation.

hollowturtle 11mo ago

ChatGPT is... a chat with some "augmentation" feature aka outputting rich html responses, nothing new except the generative side. Cursor is a VSCode fork with a custom model and a very good autocomplete integration. Again where are the products? Where the heck is Windows without the bloat that works reliably before becoming totally agentic? And therefore idiotic since it doesn't work reliably

layer8 11mo ago

Citing AI software as the only examples of how AI benefits developing software, has a bit of a touch of self-help books describing how to attain success and fulfillment by taking the example of writing self-help books. I don’t disagree that these are useful tools, by the way. I just haven’t seen any discernible uptick in general software quality and utility either, nor any economic uptick that should presumably follow from being able to develop software more efficiently.

xwolfi 11mo ago
I made 1500 USD speculating on NVidia earnings, that's economic uptick for me !

emp17344 11mo ago

It doesn’t matter what you think. Where’s all the data proving that AI is actually valuable? All we have are anecdotes and promises.

oblio 11mo ago

I agree with everyone else, where is the Microsoft Office competitor created by 2 geeks in a garage with Claude Code? Where is the Exchange replacement created by a company of 20 people? There are many really lucrative markets that need a fresh approach, and AI doesn't seem to have caused a huge explosion of new software created by upstarts. Or am I missing something? Where are the consumer facing software apps developed primarily with AI by smaller companies? I'm excluding big companies because in their case it's impossible to prove the productivity, the could be throwing more bodies at the problem and we'd never know.

sfgvvxsfccdd 11mo ago
> Office…Exchange The challenge in competing with these products is not code. The challenge competing in lucrative markets that need a fresh approach is also generally not code. So I’m not sure that is a good metric to evaluate LLMs for code generation.
- alganet 11mo ago
  We had upstarts in the 80s, the 90s, the 2000s and the 2010s. Some game, some website, some social network, some mobile app that blew up. We had many. Not funded by billions. So, where is that in the 2020s? Yes, code is a detail (ideas too). It's a platform. It positions itself as the new thing. Does that platform allow upstarts? Or does it consolidate power?
- ethanwillis 11mo ago
  It's not that they failed to compete on other metrics, it's that they don't even have a product to fail to sell.
- tjr 11mo ago
  I think the point remains, if someone armed with Claude Code could whip out a feature complete clone of Microsoft Office over the weekend (and by all accounts, even a novice programmer could do this, because of the magnificent greatness of Claude), then why don't they just go ahead and do it? Maybe do a bunch of them: release one under GPL, one under MIT, one under BSD, and a few more sold as proprietary software. Wow, I mean, this should be trivial.
  - buu700 11mo ago
    It makes development faster, but not infinitely fast. Faithfully reproducing complex 42-year-old software in one weekend is a stretch no matter how you slice it. Also, AI is cheap, but not free. I could see it being doable by forking LibreOffice or Calligra Suite as a starting point, although even with AI assistance I'd imagine that it might take anyone not intimately familiar with both LibreOffice (or Calligra) and MS Office longer than a weekend to determine the full scope of the delta between them, much less implement that delta. But you'd still need someone with sufficient skill (not a novice), maybe several hundred or thousand dollars to burn, and nothing better to do for some amount of time that's probably longer than a weekend. And then that person would need some sort of motivation or incentive to go through with the project. It's plausible, but not a given that this will happen just because useful agentic coding tools exist.