gk1

Props to the team not only for changing their minds from a strongly-held belief but making it very public and not hiding the fact that it's a reversal.

The linked post from Armin is gold:

"... whenever you are confronted with a very strong opinion about a topic, reasonable discussions about the topic often involve arguments that have long become outdated or are no longer strictly relevant to the conversation."

(https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2016/11/5/be-careful-about-what-you...)

And that's from 2016! These days if you're arguing from a position you took even a week ago, you already might be out of sync.

“Agent” is the type of product, like “car.” “Dot” is the name of the product, like “Helix.”

Some important work is fun to do, some isn’t.

Of course they are. Why wouldn’t they?

- non-developer

Just so you know, your comment was automatically hidden (“dead”) until I vouched for it now. Same for most of your recent submissions. Actually it’s probably because of your (exclusively self-promotional) submissions that your comments and submissions get hidden.

It doesn’t take a marketing person to submit a link.

Folks, in your launch posts remember to describe what you're launching and what it's for. Ideally in the opening paragraph.

- Intro: Explains problem but not what is Neki or what it's for.

- Why Neki: Explains alternatives and why they suck but not what is Neki or what it's for.

- How does Neki work: Describes the technical components but not what is Neki or what it's for.

- What you get beyond sharding: Explains how to run/deploy but not what is Neki or what it's for.

- What is a platform preview + Try Neki today: 140 words on the definition of "preview" and links to get started... but not what is Neki or what it's for.

Edit: The landing page has 100x more useful information up front -> https://neki.dev/

Edit #2: They've since added a "What is Neki" section. Good reaction time.

I meant the first attempt in 2024, which fell apart: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/23/technology/google-wiz-dea...

Unfortunately not all deals go through. Like Wiz + Google, or Figma + Adobe. A lot can go wrong between “in talks to acquire” and “acquired.” The official announcement is less surprising but still newsworthy.

Happy for the hugging face team. Many great folks there who’ve waited patiently for HF to find a business model, and finally they get something even better.

What makes you think that?

Slack wants to be primary place people do their work. And they're almost there... It's certainly where you "work" (communicate) with people, it's where many engage with and/or control other platform like project trackers, and it's increasingly the place you interact with whatever AI agents your company uses. It makes perfect send they want to bring the coding agent into the fold (into their UI) as well. And, given Anthropic's release of Claude Tag, they're probably not wrong about that.

Stripe isn’t exactly a dumb company. When someone smart does something seemingly super dumb, more likely than not you’re the one missing something, not them. It’s an opportunity to ask, “what am I missing?”, and learn from it.

This is from Peter McCrory, Head of Economics at Anthropic. Calling that out since it wasn't obvious to me at first.

Not exactly. See: https://www.runlayer.com/watch

There's also Bluerock, as yet another example. I've worked with both companies though I get nothing from mentioning them here. My point is this is a (suddenly) crowded market - perhaps more so than you realized - so you should consider what exactly is different about your product and why that matters, and then make that obvious to prospective buyers.

+1

You're facing competition from both the incumbents who can ship these capabilites to their massive userbase, and emerging startups like Runlayer who are running away with the AI-native segment.

What are you offering that people want yet neither of those classes of solutions offer?

I highly recommend you read this classic post from Patrick McKenzie: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pr...

> You are not defined by your chosen software stack: I recently asked via Twitter what young engineers wanted to know about careers. Many asked how to know what programming language or stack to study. It doesn’t matter. There you go.

This is especially true now, since coding agents make it possible to work with any stack.

Exactly right. Co’s like Runlayer are growing like wild exactly for this reason. Without a central control plane MCP is a minefield.

It’s not enough to have unique ideas. You need capital, compute, people, distribution, customers… There’s huge appeal to joining a place that has all those things and lets you pursue your unique ideas without worrying about all that.

If true...

On the one hand: they fooled me.

On the other hand: hey, if the comments are that good, keep going?

Such a good comment from a new account. Please post here more often :)

Was commenting on the quote in particular. It’s just a version of “the future is in your hands” which you can find in one form or another in many graduation speeches. Just seems odd to me to read a cliche line as something cynical.

Ali G’s version of it in his 2004 Harvard commencement speech:

> “You lot will become powerful people who can change de future — and you need to, coz de world at de moment iz totally f—ed up.”

Come to think of it… very appropriate today!

That quote reads totally differently to me.

It seems if you already have negative feelings about AI or the speaker, you’re going to interpret their comments as something that reinforces your negative feelings.

> AI tools make great team members even better

This is the predominant (public) talking point. And it’s true.

But along with that: when you have effective people becoming even more effective with AI, it becomes glaringly obvious who the INeffective people are. At which point it becomes hard to justify keeping those people around.

(That often includes people who are otherwise effective but aren’t utilizing agents and are therefore losing their edge.)

Seen from another angle: this encourages you to make new friends locally.

And yes, also one more excuse to visit faraway friends.

Interesting that Fin (the spinoff from Intercom) is promoting a different approach on the same day: one agent, one job: https://x.com/eoghan/status/2046974515859595568

> On the one hand, I get that it's a Sunday, and the CEO can't just write a mass email without approval from legal or other comms teams

This is not how things work. In a crisis like this there is a war room with all stakeholders present. Doesn’t matter if it’s Sunday or 3am or Christmas.

And for this company specifically, Guillermo is not one to defer to comms or legal.

Shaming like this doesn’t change people’s minds, it just makes them hide their feelings and introduces new or even greater feelings of guilt. The opposite of what you (hopefully) intended.

Why not contribute, then?

Think of some 100x folks you know of. Are they working more or less than before?