> "the future is changed now, so you can't change it again"
that's not what I said.
As technologists, we repeatedly change the future - that's what makes all the pain, sweat and tears worth it. 35 years ago, when I was getting serious about computers, buying them and encouraging others to use them, people would shake their fingers at me, saying how these bulky TVs that you can press buttons at were a passing fad, that it was an absolute waste of everyone's time even thinking one would sit in front of a TV and press at buttons for more than an hour a day, that there was no reasonable way it would translate into anything but extremely niche entertainment. They would lecture me on how I was a kid who didn't know any better, that I was wasting my time out of ignorance and that I should listen to the adults who had decades of life experience and focus my time and continue studying organic chemistry and become a doctor because who didn't need a doctor?
> most vibe coded stuff doesn't seem to get maintained
even if this was true, cost of code consumption and generation has fallen so much, that anyone in a developed country can point their favorite agent to the
"unmaintained vibe coded stuff" and then maintain it to their liking or rewrite it from scratch the way they wanted it to.
> most token usage doesn't produce any artifacts to begin with
Your previous statement contradicts "doesn't produce any artifacts" directly. Given what you have told me, the shallowest but congruent argument that can be made is "most token usage produces unmaintained vibe coded stuff".
It looks like you don't necessarily like what LLMs are providing to society and I can see why one would like to hold that opinion. I don't agree with that at all, because it's literally untrue given the insane demand - both from an everyday Joe and from corps the world over. No one's burning $20+/mo every month of their own money in this economy just because they are not getting anything of value.
My personal AI spend is $350/mo and it has been that for the last year. My blockers are gone. Projects that had been a distant thought, only cosidered during a flight, a wait at an airport or for a bus or Uber is finished in a weekend. My QoL and those of my family has improved so much, that I am really grateful about the times I live in.
My 100 year old grandfather struggles to communicate and remember things. I cannot expect to give him a tablet and have him use it. We have spent years looking for apps that we could use to make his life better. None of us are mobile app devs. Solved in a week.
I had random headaches when I woke up really early, ever since I was a teenager. Tens of thousands of dollars spent chasing lab tests and doctors, no solution. Resolved in a month.
The most I can do is encourage you to set aside your current stance, and just for one day, consider what if you could use LLMs to improve your life. What would you do?
There are different ways to answer this. One person gave a literal answer - Vacuum Tubes. My, alternate answer is, humans. Computers are machines that automate human processes. If we didn't have a digital domain, we would just be doing what we were doing before it, printing and writing.
> I'd bet 99% of overall token usage has nothing lasting to show for it, and of the 1% that actually compound into anything 99% are nothing like this
What you're betting with?
LLMs have changed to game on velocity of knowledge work. The future has changed and "nothing lasting to show for it" is a very limited take on the matter.
> What do people use uncensored Grok for (like, real use cases) that they can't or won't use other LLMs for? Literally the only thing I can think of is generating bad porn of unconsenting people
untrue. There's a full thread about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48837162 - but as much as I love Claude products, nothing's more aggravating than it refusing to help me diagnose a stack trace because it "violates Anthopic policy".
> anyone who is willing to build on stolen property just so that we can accelerate enshittification and damage the environment
Others have made solid arguments(Stackoverflow, open weight models, and fully open source models) - but I encourage you to study the ecosystem post War II and the 1970's Silicon Valley, especially how the semiconductor companies "innovated".
The tiny little MOSFETs you're employing to read this are all built on stolen IP.
As someone famous said, good artists copy; great artists steal.
> A diverse market full of choices keeps it from becoming the browser wars all over again.
This is a great analogy but I worry you might be implying something I don't agree with but you didn't explicitly say what I'm worried about, so let me call it out:
Microsoft played a dirty game with I.E, but they are in the dirty game business. It wasn't only I.E, it was their OS, Office suite and everything else they do business in.
Google Chrome took advantage of that dirty game and now you have the Chromium engine that powers a lot of browserlike frameworks.
No one born in the LLM age even knows what I.E means or stands for, as it should be - a horribly designed, poorly working product foisted upon users via the Windows distribution system - a dishonorable product from an ethically corrupt company forever lost in history, right alongside Clippy and DCOM.
OTOH, I am glad that Microsoft played a dirty game with I.E and didn't just stop playing dirty there - they jacked up the price of Windows if an OEM even dared to bundle in Netscape Navigator instead - who knows, if they hadn't done that, there wouldn't have been a Google or Apple. We would all be using Windows and Windows Search and Windows Phone.
And without Google, we might not have had the modern LLM as we know it. We would have had some trashy Windows Autocomplete Copilot Clippy. Ugh!
My hypothesis is that all the top providers realize that, lacking vendor lock in, all SOTA models in a year or so's time will be similar in capability. Also, open weights models are continuing to catch up in a year's time, sometimes less.
So they are trying to lure you in with differentiating, superior capabilities into their proprietary, non-open, non-standard agent harness.
It's the Hotel California playbook: These amazing capabilities are to attract you like moths to a flame and keep you warm and alive around the flame but waterboard and shock you if you attempt to move away from it. Like AWS Egress charges.
What would have been fantastic is if Cursor offered Grok 4.5 in the same usage tier as "Auto + Composer", than provide it as "double usage until July 12" under the API tier (which is what they're doing right now).
EDIT: After looking at my own usage stats - I stand corrected! It is under the "Auto + Composer" tier - brilliant!
I think we need to be explicit about the domains we're applying Composer 2.5 to in these discussions.
I mentioned here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48766275) how poorly it handles my specific use cases. My coworkers in DevOps and frontend UI swear by its cost-effectiveness, whereas I strongly prefer the reasoning capabilities of Opus 4.8 and Fable 5.
Composer 2.5 seems to be SOTA for Helm charts and React/Vue, but, for my usecases it absolutely struggles spectacularly when tasked with rigid body dynamics or kinematic logic.
The details are interesting! How did you find all of this out? Did you download the tool in a VM and disasm it?
I assumed the OP was literally making throttled, batched, parallel IMAP FETCH calls with the BODYSTRUCTURE parameter to the mailbox, inspecting the `Content-Type` and/or `Content-Disposition` for image fingerprints and then grabbing the real payload.
However, from what you said here, it's a bit less sophisticated than that?
Watching this thread unfold over 24h was illuminating.
The biggest pushback seemed to be the price: people are upset it's priced at $30. Some suggested $3. A few suggested open sourcing it under MIT and moving on.
The primary argument was that there are already existing, free tools that can be chained together to do exactly what Mail Memories does. The secondary argument was that LLMs can already code this up, implying the OP was rentseeking.
IMHO, this comment (now dead) from the OP was on point and ironic:
> My target audience isn't engineers who know how to parse maildirs, it's everyday people (and busy devs) who just want a secure, 1-click interface that downloads their family photos into a folder on their computer (without touching a terminal).
This is entirely true - this thread is strong indication that this tool wasn't appreciated by the HN crowd (lots of engineers and technical people)! I noticed most of OP's comment went gray and then dead in a matter of minutes. The OP must have had a real hard time even responding to comments before HN throttled them from responding, asking them to "slow down".
But this raises a question - what if I one-shot something that my non-technical parents and family members would find incredibly valuable and so I'm hoping yours does as well? If an LLM could absolutely one shot it, perfectly, should I never post it on HN at all, in fear of the wrath that would be unleashed?
Anyone here can slap together a breakfast sandwich for ~$3 in ingredients. Is it blasphemy that you can't buy the same from a McDonald's or your neighborhood Deli for less than $15?
> it tends to leave big, dangerous holes hiding inside implementations unless babied
it's fascinating that I used these same exact words to express my distaste for Composer and my preference for Opus. I suspect, the domains and problems we are trying to solve need to be shared. I wrote about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48766275
Would love to reach out to discuss more, if you're ok with it, or absolutely feel free to do the same as my email's in the profile like yours!
I'm not disputing what you're saying. The slowness of Opus in particular is pretty accurate but you should have been getting little popups in Cursor saying Opus is under load and to try switching to other models?
I mentioned my frustration with Composer in another thread and why I rely on Opus, but Opus, atleast via Cursor is practically unusable for me M-F 9-5 EST. As a result, I have modified my working schedule outside those hours when I use Opus. On weekends and nights, Opus via Cursor is at the same speed as Composer but vastly superior quality where it's not even comparable.
Composer is not 20% worse than Opus for me. Composer hands me a quickly put together college project that was started the night before it was due. Opus hands me a actual production ready deliverable that I can defend if I was sued in court.
> Cursor's benchmark finds that Cursor's model (Composer 2.5) is basically as good as Opus 4.8 max and GPT-5.5 xhigh, but at a fraction of the price.
Your skepticism is well-founded IMHO. I have found that if you are one-shotting a Django/Next CRUD app, a typical React/Vue UI, shell scripts or GitHub Actions, Composer 2.5 is fantastic!
But for anything outside the median of the last decade's web development - like free-body physics, kinematics, or optimization - Composer is horriblyunpredictable.
That's what makes it _dangerous_ IMHO.
It isn't universally trash! Rather, it confidently makes subtle, incorrect assumptions. It will hallucinate formulas that don't appear in your specification and design docs. Then write tests that pass it.
It inserts tiny footguns that require you to scrutinize every single token it generates. At that point, I would rather be coding by hand.
Opus 4.8 max, on the other hand, refuses to guess, atleast the way I have set it up. If there's any ambiguity about the implementation or how tests should be written, it stops and asks me for clarification. I actually trust the output without worrying about hidden disasters and ticking timebombs. I can confidently review the test suite, add a few edge cases on my own, spot check the code and be comfortable knowing there are no disastrous footguns lurking in the shadows only to come out in the darkness of production deployments.
Let me repeat - Opus 4.8 max stops and asks me for clarification. It writes the tests I would have written. It writes tests that fail, exposing gaps and errors, that then allows me to iterate.
Composer 2.5 OTOH will run with whatever it decides I meant and write something that steals productivity, not add to it.
Same harness (Cursor), same rules, same prompts, vastly different outcomes!
Yes, Opus is far more expensive, but it's worth it for the time saved on review and refactors, which are our current blockers.
The real friction is that Cursor's marketing is so aggressive that the people paying the bills look at my Opus usage and demand to know why I'm not using the cheaper alternative!
It's an impossible argument to win when the rest of the company's devs are happily building standard web apps on Composer without issue, blissfully unaware of how the model not only falls apart but is just unreliable on harder engineering problems.
Fable 5 is on a league on its own. If history in the LLM space is any predictor of the future, in ~6 months (Q1 2027) we should have open weight models that are competitive with Fable 5. Without considering what it will take to run such a thing, I would be extremely excited to have open access to such a capability. Great times ahead!
I have not used Windows for decades. With that context:
> For $30 you should sign your binary so you don't have a UAC popup.
How much does it cost to be able to sign a binary so you can deploy it on Windows without a UAC popup? How arduous is it?
> Also is it not doable with Google takeout ( with Gmail )?
It sure is. You do a takeout and iterate over the compressed mbox looking for media attachments. Then you write them out. The edge cases, and the actual value is ensuring you properly grab all the media dispositions.
I also have emails from people who like to zip up a bunch of pictures and then email them to me - my own script takes care of this detail but I wonder if most other tools, including this one does.
Feel free to reach out: my handle at gmail.com
Feel free to connect with me: https://www.quora.com/profile/Subhobroto-Sinha-1