I think it's an interesting idea, and I would actually buy it, but there's one thing missing for me: a simple API. I use neither Stripe nor GA. All I would need is a simple REST URL that I can ping with the event type, data (amount or number) and my key. Create a small markdown description that my coding agent can read, and I could get it running far faster than by using any integration with third-party services.
Three more comments:
- My main concern with applications like that is memory and CPU consumption. I haven't registered it, but after starting, it consumes 85MB. That's tolerable these days, but more than other menu bar apps I am using, and they have far more functionality. I appreciate small applications being a small footprint.
- Maybe I am not the target group, but I really prefer the more 'family-friendly' sounds. I don't want to explain to my kids why my computer is moaning.
- There may be a market for notification tools that offer a bit more flexibility (like letting users configure the text that's displayed). Or even offering a widget. I am aware of free tools like Übersicht for that, but I don't want to waste 1 GB of RAM for a small 64x64 widget, just because it uses a full HTML+JS rendering engine.
I think the UBI experiments were one-sided. They may have proven that the receivers have profited. But did they show that the givers profited as well, or at least did not suffer enough to significantly reduce their economic output and therefore risk the financing of UBI?
You'd need to check something like take a group of high-earners, increase their tax rate by say 100%, increase their cost of living, and validate that they neither leave the experiment nor work significantly less.
The thing is, there is no hive mind called "society". Everybody works in their own interest. Always, and in every "society".
Individual workers work on failing initiatives as long as they get paid. The outcome of the initiative may be bad for "society". But was it good for the individuals working on it? Maybe they got paid well. Maybe they enjoyed the work? Maybe the work was easy because they knew that it would fail anyway, so they didn't have to put much effort into it?
Maybe it was also good for the management or politicians? Maybe it was a step up in their career. And maybe, if they could jump ship before the failure became obvious, they could climb up the ladder to get to an even better position? You can always blame your successors for ruining the project.
And maybe it was good for whoever ordered it? If it's a local project, maybe they got subsidies from federal government bodies, and they don't even care whether it succeeds, as long as it created employment and the illusion of progress? Or if it's a private project, maybe they just tried a moon shot that, if it fails, was useful as a tax write-off?
In real life, there are so many layers to a 'failed' project. It can be a failure for some and a success for others. And those for whom it is a success will defend it, maybe even deceive to keep it running.
The prosecutor's description of the "ICE protest" is "setting off fireworks, vandalizing property, and shooting at police officers who responded. One officer was struck in the neck with a bullet and survived.".
"Prosecutors said that the group launched a premeditated terror attack on the detention facility inspired by antifa ideology, by setting off fireworks, vandalizing property, and shooting at police officers who responded. One officer was struck in the neck with a bullet and survived."
1992-me hates the author. Coming from 68k assembly, x86 was a nightmare. And together with the ridiculous number of registers, segments made up a huge chunk of that horrible experience.
> If he wanted to get out and sell his stocks, why would he care if it collapses after he leaves?
"Selling the stock" is not a single transaction. The moment he leaves Tesla, or starts selling shares (which would take weeks or months), the stock collapses.
A Tesla without Musk isn't worth much. It's not that profitable. Tesla's P/E ratio is 350 or so - absolutely crazy. Ford's and Toyota's are about 10. The largest Chinese electric car maker's (BYD) PE/ratio is 20. People are buying Tesla shares because they believe in Musk. The moment he announces that he is out, his wealth is going down by 90% or more.
"Elon is currently sitting on 817,000 lifetimes worth of money."
I think that's a wrong perception, especially in this case. Elon Musk does not have nearly a trillion dollar in cash. He holds shares in companies that have a market worth of a trillion dollar. But as soon as he sells, and thus wouldn't be involved with them anymore, they would be only worth a fraction of that. Tesla, in particular, would probably be bankrupt.
I think it is too early to answer that question. If I really wanted to, I could 'vibe code' Photoshop. But my estimate is that it would take me 2 years, as a solo dev. And by 'vibe code' I mean not write a single line by hand - I would still define and specify an outline for important data structures and algorithms. And then work through the system feature by feature, with many prompts needed for each feature, until it is perfect. It is much faster than coding by hand, but still a lot of work.
Currently, I am working on a smaller-than-Photoshop solo side-project that would have taken years, but now I am close to a beta after 6 months. If the main work is coding, I am easily 10x as productive. But those productivity gains don't hold up when teams are larger, because communication and processes are not really accelerated. So be a bit more patient. It's too early to expect vibecoded Photoshops.
I watched it last week, and I loved every moment of it. It's really the Muppet Show, not one of those boring remakes and spin-offs that never worked.
Even my 9 year old daughter who would usually roll her eyes when I would even suggest watching Muppets, watched it till the end. Probably mostly because of Sabrina Carpenter, but whatever.
I can understand why you want an AI to use a desktop. But it's still absurd to use the least efficient interface possible for interactions with the outer world.
Having said that, fun project, good luck :) I am sure quite a few people would want to try it.
As much as I like the Claude models, they are expensive. I wouldn't use them to process large volumes of data.
Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite is $0.10 per million tokens. Grok 4.1 Fast is really good and only $0.20. They will work just as well for most simple tasks.
I understand your argument. But I have worked at two companies that worked pretty much like you described. They call it 'project-oriented'. They threw lots of engineers at projects, hired freelancers, and got it working as fast as possible. Once it was done, they only left a maintainer or two.
That model works fine for a few years. Then you need a bigger change. Often, the system is built on top of some enterprise project, heavily customized, and you stay at your outdated version until it becomes unsupported. The maintainers don't care, and often don't have the capability to upgrade, so they just leave it as long as it keeps working. Or maybe some law has been introduced and requires a bigger change. Or the market just changes, and you need to support new APIs, new payment methods, new integrations...
The maintainers tend to quit every 1-2 years and are replaced with someone only trained by the previous generation. With every generation, the maintainers get worse. After 3 generations, all product knowledge is gone. To make things worse, the maintainers do stupid things in the code because they don't fully understand it, and it begins to rot. In the worst case I know, no one even knew what branch was deployed on production and what the last changes were.
Then, after 5-10 years of decay, some requirement comes along that would require a major refactoring. Everybody is overwhelmed, no one understands the internals, and eventually they decide that it the project is now so outdated that the only solution is to replace it. Management doesn't care because they can blame their predecessors.
In my experience, that's how it always works. I know at least 5 major projects that took over a year to develop, and costing millions, in at least one case tens of millions, that died like that.
Great idea. Whether brainstorm mode is actually useful is hard to say without trying it out, but it sounds like an interesting approach. Maybe it would be a good idea to try running a SWE benchmark with it.
Personally, I wouldn't use the personas. Some people like to try out different modes and slash commands and whatnot - but I am quite happy using the defaults and would rather (let it) write more code than tinker with settings or personas.
I understand it. For example, with AI you don't need to remember stuff. Like there is a command in MacOS (two actually) to flush the DNS cache. I used to memorize it because I needed it like twice a week. These days, I can't remember it. I just tell Copilot to flush the cache for me. It knows what to do.
And it's like that for many things. Complicated Git commands that I rarely need. I used to remember them at least 50% of the time, and if not, I looked them up. Now I just describe what I need to Copilot. But also APIs that I don't need daily. All that stuff that I used to know is gone, because I don't need to look it up anymore, I just tell Copilot or Claude what to do.
I recently had the same realization and moved all my functions to a simple stand-alone server. Besides the normal AWS costs, what scares me most about AWS is the possibility that someone could try to DOS me, leaving me with a huge AWS bill, because there is no real way to limit AWS spending.
The main reason why I keep coming back to cloud providers is databases. I don't feel comfortable setting up a high-availability db setup, and I don't want the responsibility of managing backups. But if you go to, say, Hetzner, you won't be able to use a cloud database in the same network.
Three more comments:
- My main concern with applications like that is memory and CPU consumption. I haven't registered it, but after starting, it consumes 85MB. That's tolerable these days, but more than other menu bar apps I am using, and they have far more functionality. I appreciate small applications being a small footprint.
- Maybe I am not the target group, but I really prefer the more 'family-friendly' sounds. I don't want to explain to my kids why my computer is moaning.
- There may be a market for notification tools that offer a bit more flexibility (like letting users configure the text that's displayed). Or even offering a widget. I am aware of free tools like Übersicht for that, but I don't want to waste 1 GB of RAM for a small 64x64 widget, just because it uses a full HTML+JS rendering engine.