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Comment by nlh | Hacker News Reader

I am a HUGE herdr fan - discovered it a few months ago and it's exactly what I need for my workflow. Thousands of others have discovered it as well, which is awesome.

I have such mixed feelings about this - YC means VC means commercialization means enshitification. I really wish that weren't the case, but it so very often is.

Here's hoping this one's different...

(PS I am a big YC fan in general! I don't mean to sound anti-YC or anti-VC or anti-capitalism. But when it comes to low-level essential development tools, I'll never forget what happened to Warp, which started out as such a nice clean terminal project and turned into an absolute money-chasing mess.)

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Yeah, it’s great but with this, it’s probably the time to find an alternative, I probably can see where this will be in a year or so.

why “find” an alternative? if you’re a herdr user you’re perfectly capable of maintaining a fork just for yourself :)

I can't tell if this is sarcasm but in case its not, being capable of doing something and having the desire and resources to do it are not the same thing

It's a management tool for multiple superintelligent agents, right? Just tell one of them to fork herdr so VC can't make it worse on purpose.

Not sarcasm at all. I think you might overestimate the time and effort needed for this. When you maintain a _personal_ fork with no users except yourself, you only ever need to change something when you encounter a bug or need a new feature.

E.g. I have personal forks of mosh and cmux, each took maybe 1 hour of my time total?

I found this article https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49156111 resonating with me, except I obviously don't do stuff like "nightly cron to sync with main", I just never touch the code unless it breaks or I want a new feature.

Very curious about your cmux fork, any chance you could link the repo? (Maker of cmux here :))

Oh wow :) thank you for cmux, it's a great project!

The code is here: https://code.pecheny.me/pecheny/cmux or if you prefer github, https://github.com/alexander-pecheny/cmux

I think I only added two features, pasting images over mosh (ssh already worked but not mosh) and a compact version of sidebar.

The story behind the fork is: I had a bug with raycast, filed a PR that fixed it for me https://github.com/manaflow-ai/cmux/pull/2435, a different fix made it into next release that for me didn't work. Maybe the problem was on my side, but at this point it was easier to fork the working version than debug further.

> I am a big YC fan in general

Genuine question - why?

It’s literally the VC playbook, the whole point of the funding is to undermine competitors with subsidized/free products and then raise prices/enshittify. Anyone who thinks it’ll be different this time is fooling themselves.

> YC means VC means commercialization means enshitification

It doesn't have to be that way. YC partners are supportive if you just want to take the YC funding and nothing more, keeping the team small and just focusing on making the product better for customers. Indeed YC advises against taking VC if you don't need it.

Yes there are companies such as Streak. It's possible to pay back early funders so it's a win-win.

> Here's hoping this one's different...

It won't be.

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