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Comment by swyx | Hacker News Reader

yeah guys look i wish you well and respect for launching and all but this is just not going to ever be a venture scale startup and you should calibrate your expectations. you could be wasting the best years of your life being a wrapper of a wrapper of a wrapper and competing on developer experience in open source for no money, or you could be building agents.

build agents. please.

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Our business model is not to compete in open-source; we are just providing this to the community since its the right thing to do and as a signal to enterprises to reduce risk.

Our goal is to target large enterprises with services and support, leveraging deep channel partnerships. We do ship agents as a part of the project and it will be a critical part of the services model in the future.

Appreciate the pep talk, but let’s not pretend infra and developer experience plays can’t scale. GitLab, HashiCorp, and Vercel all "just built better DX for open source" and somehow ended up billion-dollar companies.

Agents will come and go (and probably run into the same orchestration headaches), but someone still has to build the reliable, open foundation they’ll stand on.

more context - https://x.com/swyx/status/1904256213661192405 i really mean it in as non mean spirited a way as possible

I do really appreciate you taking the time to drop by and leave a comment. But I'm curious...why do you think building agents is so important vs. building more of the "AI infrastructure" (which is really what LlamaFarm is trying to do) that will enable the devs that are building integrated AI systems (including agents).

both are important, but one will make more money and have higher changes of survival. incidentally i have found that agent companies have better infra than the horizontal ai infra as a service companies anyway, and you can intuit why that is. so: you will struggle to get the good customers because the good customers are increasingly finding it affordable to build rather than buy.

This whole comment is predicated on the idea that something is only worthwhile if it will lead to a "venture scale startup" and that to do anything else is to "waste the best years of your life".

I, for one, am glad that not everyone shares your ethos. Conversely, I'm also glad that there are people out there "building agents". Diversity is a good thing. Encouraging everyone to only do one thing is a bad thing.

bros identify as YC W22, this is a reasonable expectation

Yeah, we are in it to win it.

respect for that. i hope you know my criticism is merely well intentioned tough love. go prove me wrong

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