How does this work? Do you have an agreement with Apple to connect to their iMessage service? If you do then kudos thats a real differentiator.
However if you're hosting your own mac mini farm and running bluebubbles or other such things that are not approved by Apple what is your plan to handle the case where you're sending enough traffic through Apple's services that they disable / ban / block you?
If its the former then awesome but if its the latter then Im not sure I'd want to depend on your service knowing that apple could ban you at any time.
What was the terminal app though and what was special about it that Ghostty didn't already provide?
edit: Found this one article (via google) that talks about the terminal. I guess it was a terminal that you could "prompt" to do things and it would figure out the shell commands.
I believe soon a day will come when the agents will chat with each other to get things done. Agents running on different machines, behind firewalls, on phones, laptops, servers etc will all want to chat with each other.
So there is going to be a need for Instant Messaging for AI Agents - Launching soon. https://agent-socket.ai
I noticed that too and did roll my eyes as well but I'm glad I kept reading - its actually quite a good article. Maybe the author used an LLM to help do some copy editing but should have probably given it less editorial agency.
Either way I'm glad I read it and waiting for the other parts of the series. Really curious how to get access to this airline booking data so I can write my own bot to book my flights and deal with all the permutations and combinations to find the best deal.
Interesting to note right at the start of the article that they sat on a plane next to each other in 1953 but the formal partnership between AA and IBM was not till 1959 - 6 years later! The article makes it look like all this happened magically fast but in reality a reminder that things take time!
>> is almost mythological. In 1953, C.R. Smith, president of American Airlines, was seated next to R. Blair Smith, an IBM salesman, on a cross-country flight. By the time they landed, the outline of a solution had been sketched. IBM and American Airlines entered a formal development partnership in 1959.
edit: oh and then the actual system didn't actually go live another 5 years later - in 1964. Over a decade after the two of them sat next to each other.
Reminder to myself when my potential customers don't sign the deal 5 minutes after my pitch!
I don't understand why claude code (and all CLI apps) isn't written in Rust. I started building CLI agents in Go and then moved to Typescript and finally settled on Rust and it was amazing!
I signed up and gave the product a spin and its clear that its not some vibe coded weekend project. Clearly a lot of effort has gone into it and OP also was clear that they've spent 10 months on this.
This looks really nice! Congratulations on building something awesome, especially in a space that's "crowded" with the big players.
I want to give kudos to two things:
1. It took you 10 months to build this. This is focused product development and craftsmanship which is very different from Vibe coding something. So let this be a reminder to all the "I can vibe code this or that in a weekend". Good products / experiences take time.
2. You've pursued building something in a space that anyone would normally dismiss right away: "Why would anyone use this? Google Docs/ Word etc already does this" or "MSFT / GOOG will destroy you". Good on you for picking something that is hard and building it well. I actually had this idea and almost built it but dismissed it myself for the same reasons as above. So reminder again for the builders in the back: Doesn't matter if there is a 800lb gorilla building this, if you can execute it better go for it.
It’s an approach that works and I’ve thought of implementing the same thing but stopped short because I feel it just pushes the underlying problem around. Now I have to share my creds with a black box that I know very little about and it’s not a real vault.
This should be solved by the vaults (hashi corp / AWS Secrets Manager).
The one thing that I did build was based on a service that AWS provides (AWS STS) which handles temporary time bound creds out of the box.
It took me a minute to recognize this as satire (thank you HN comments). However it does actually make sense - maybe this could be a way for OSS devs to get paid.
What if we did build a clean room as a service but the proceeds from that didn't go to the "Malus.sh" corporation, but to the owners / maintainers of the OSS being implemented. Maybe all OSS repos should switch to AGPL or some viral license with link to pay-me-to-implement.com. Companies that want to use that package go get their own custom implementation that is under a license strictly for that company and the OSS maintainer gets paid.
I wonder what the MVP for such a thing would look like.
There should be a "flag as AI" link in addition to "flag" and then a setting for people to show flagged as AI. Once the flagged as AI reaches a certain threshold then it disappears unless you enable "Show AI".
Maybe once enough posts have been flagged like that then that corpus could be used to train an AI to automatically detect content generated by AI.
That would be cool.
Maybe the HN site wouldn't add this feature but if someone wrote a client then maybe it could be added there.
Age Verification is very hard to do without exposing personal information (ask me how I know). I feel it should be solved by a platform company - someone like Apple (assuming we trust apple with our personal information but seems like we already do) - and the platform (ios) should be able to simply provide a boolean response to "is this person over 18" without giving away all the personal information behind the age verification.
Now the issue of which properties can "ask to verify your age" and "apple now knows what you're looking at" is still an unsolved problem, but maybe that solution can be delivered by something like a one time offline token etc.
But again, this is a very hard problem to solve and I would personally like to not have companies verify age etc.
I think item #2 in your list is the real kicker here. Given that AI can write code the threshold for "trivially replicable" is going down.
Unless your thing has strong network effects or a large capex requirement (ex: GPU infra) its easily replicated and I think that's really what makes things hard.
This is not new. When I started my first company in 2012 it was bootstrapped and getting anyone to pay attention to what I was building was almost impossible. I had to pound the pavement and meet people in person at coffee shops and pitch to get my first few users.
Then when I raised from a16z and had some money in the bank it didn't get any easier. The money didn't help (maybe it wasn't enough). Ad spend or content marketing or paid channels were all hard regardless of the free vs paid.
Maybe I just wasn't good at it.
That was before AI and you had to manually pound the bits into place.
Now with AI yes there are a lot of people shipping a lot of things but humans can tell when someone's put effort into something vs not and the time to traction is still as high as it always was.
Someone should do some analysis on number of things that go "viral" or gain adoption quickly today vs 5 / 10 years ago.
Getting traction has always been hard. Thats just business.
Maybe there should be some sort of filter for certain high volume posts types - for example: Github repos. A Github Repo (or OSS) project must have a certain number of stars / forks / watchers whatever before it will appear on Show HN.
If you can't get atleast 20 stars then its probably not ready for the wider world to see it.
I'm sure there's problems with that approach but the current situation doesn't seem to be working.
Disclaimer: I tried to do a Show HN today and it didn't make it (and to be fair I wouldn't have made it past the filter I proposed above so I guess its working).
I actually did this (around 2006) after reading this article by Joel and I was skeptical but I used excel and wrote down all the tasks that needed to be done and kept breaking it down till each task was in hours.
It took me a few hours to do and as Joel says in the article, it was not a fun thing to do (jumping right into code was more fun) but I stuck with it and did the whole thing.
Then I followed that list of tasks and kept track of when tasks started and ended and I was pleasantly surprised when after a few weeks the project was done right on schedule as predicted by the excel sheet. So my experience (data point of 1) was that it works if you do it exactly how he says to do it in the blog post.
I did it only that one time so take that for what it is.
However if you're hosting your own mac mini farm and running bluebubbles or other such things that are not approved by Apple what is your plan to handle the case where you're sending enough traffic through Apple's services that they disable / ban / block you?
If its the former then awesome but if its the latter then Im not sure I'd want to depend on your service knowing that apple could ban you at any time.