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This is pretty fascinating and comes with some complicated AI-world incentives that I've been ruminating on lately. The better you document your work, the stron
by switz 7mo ago
This is pretty fascinating and comes with some complicated AI-world incentives that I've been ruminating on lately. The better you document your work, the stronger contracts you define, the easier it is for someone to clone your work. I wouldn't be surprised if we end up seeing open source commercial work bend towards the SQLite model (open core, private tests). There's no way Cloudflare could have pulled this off without next's very own tests.
Speaking more about the framework itself, the only real conclusion I have here is that I feel server components are a misunderstood and under-utilized pattern and anyone attempting to simplify their DX is a win in my book.
Next is very complex, largely because it has incrementally grown and kept somewhat backwards compatible. A framework that starts from the current API surface and grows can be more malleable and make some tough decisions here at the outset.
Crazy to see it's already being run on a .gov domain[0]. TTFGOV as a new adoption metric?
[0] https://www.cio.gov/ https://www.cio.gov/
- anematode 7mo ago> The better you document your work, the stronger contracts you define, the easier it is for someone to clone your work. Well said; this is my thinking as well. One person or organization can do the hard work of testing multiple approaches to the API, establishing and revising best practices, and developing an ecosystem. Then once things are fairly stable and well-understood, another person can just yoink it. I have little empathy for Vercel, and here they're kind of being hoist by their own petard of inducing frustration in people who don't use their hosting; but I'm concerned about how smaller-scale projects (including copyleft ones) will be laundered and extinguished.
- judahmeek 7mo ago> Then once things are fairly stable and well-understood, another person can just yoink it. That transparency & availability for community contributions or forks is the point of open-source. If you're only using open-source as marketing because you're bad at marketing, then you should probably go closed source & find a non-technical business partner. Whoever "yoinks" the package runs into the same problem because they now have to build credibility somehow to actually profit from it.
- atrocious 7mo agoEstablished corporations will be doing yoinking, with a pre-existing credibility. There's a huge incentive to offer these copied services for cents on the dollar, as a way to kill the competition.
- judahmeek 7mo agoCredibility doesn't transfer easily. Anyone who yoinks an open-source package still has to present an argument about why their offering is better than the original maintainer's.
- remus 7mo agoIt'll be interesting to see if this happens at a service level too. Like how lots of companies offer an S3 compatible API, will companies start offering similar services and building a compatibility layer over the top as an easy way to for customers to transition? You could use the existing service as a test suite to check your compatibility API behaves the same as the original product.
- falcor84 7mo ago> There's no way Cloudflare could have pulled this off without next's very own tests. I'm very uncovinced. History showed us very complex systems reverse engineered without access to the source code. With access to the source code, coupled with the rapid iteration of AI, I don't see any real moat here; at best a slight delay.
- anematode 7mo agoSource code is one thing; tests covering the codebase are another. And if you just copy the source code or translate it one-to-one into a new language, rather than make a behavioral copy, there will be copyright issues.
- root_axis 7mo agoThe tests are absolutely essential, otherwise there's no signal to guide the LLM towards correct behavior and hallucinations accumulate until any hope of forward progress collapses.
- falcor84 7mo agoObviously the signal is comparison against the behavior of the original.
- seddonm1 7mo agoI have tried to post this here but it has not got traction. I have a demonstrated process here on my blog (all hand written without AI). This bit about how to brute force decompilation: https://reorchestrate.com/posts/your-binary-is-no-longer-safe-decompilation/ https://reorchestrate.com/posts/your-binary-is-no-longer-saf... And this about how to do the conversion and address the LLM hallucination problem: https://reorchestrate.com/posts/your-binary-is-no-longer-safe-conversion/ https://reorchestrate.com/posts/your-binary-is-no-longer-saf... Yes, it is absolutely possible.
- snowhale 7mo ago[dead]
- ctoth 7mo ago> I wouldn't be surprised if we end up seeing open source commercial work bend towards the SQLite model (open core, private tests). Wouldn't this just mean that actual open source is the tests? or spec? or ... The artifact which acts as seed for the program, what ever that ends up being?
- dboreham 7mo agoThe point is that artifact is not open.
- dboreham 7mo agoI'm not sure about this. LLMs can extract both documentation and tests from bare source code. That said I think you're correct that having an existing quality test suite to run against is a huge help.