johnj-hn

Then maybe you don't need them. Only you can answer that for yourself. That's kind of the point of my post. It seems like you're looking for an argument here, and I don't want to argue. I have no idea whether or not you need a team. Maybe you'd be better off spending money on tokens. I don't know.

Because agents alone cannot create good software. You are paying for people who understand how to use the agents. LLMs are a tool, and software engineering as a discipline ain't dead yet.

Sure but if it's open-source then anyone is free to fork it to keep it going, if they want to. That's the beauty of open-source.

Ok, I see where we diverge now. My project is free and open-source so there's no money at play here. It's a labor of love. I agree with you if you're talking about a for-profit product that you'll probably do better with a team.

I imagine that this will happen organically if Luxury Yacht ever grows to the point that I can't maintain it alone anymore. Although given that it's such a niche thing, with a relatively limited scope (relative to your Linux comparison) I don't really see this happening.

The more likely outcome is that something happens to me and I can't maintain it anymore. But if there's sufficient interest in keeping it going, anyone can fork it and pick up where I left off.

Can you talk a little about what "further" means to you?

Yeah I understand what you're saying here. Some of that is just me dealing with imposter syndrome. I pretty much know what a good app looks like, and I have definitely been through a lot of iterations to get Luxury Yacht to where it is today. Thanks.

Perhaps. I think AI changes the equation here. Honestly, AI changes what "solo developer" even means.

I don't want to add telemetry. And I think this is where the solo vs team thing matters. I can just say "no telemetry" and I don't need to argue with anyone about it. I make the decision and live with the consequence.

I don't really need to know how many people use the app. It would be cool to know, but not necessary.

If someone wants a feature, or a fix, they can open an issue.

I'm doing exactly this. I started out only intending to create something for myself. As it got better, I thought that other people might want to use it. I briefly considered trying to sell it, and pretty quickly realized that I didn't want to ruin something I was having fun with by turning it into a business.

Now, instead of worrying about sales, I get to feel good about giving something back to the FOSS community that has given me so much.

I recognize that it is a position of privilege to be able to dedicate so much of my time to a project that gives me nothing financially... and in fact costs me money to produce. No shade at all to people who are not so lucky and need to sell what they make.

Anyway, if you're interested, here's what I'm working on. Feature-wise it's come a long way since the last HN post about it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46619391

And if you're not interested, that's OK, because I'm not trying to sell you anything!

I use orbstack but I wouldn’t say it was any inspiration for Luxury Yacht. I was inspired by https://infra.app which was my favorite app for managing k8s resources before it got abandoned.

Author here. I know not everybody loves the name. If I was trying to sell it I might be concerned about that. But it's open-source, and I'm not trying to make any money off of it, just trying to give something back to the community.

I was originally trying to name it something serious-sounding and I quickly found out that pretty much everything decent is taken. And even if you can come up with a good name that's not already in use by three other projects, good luck getting a decent domain for it.

I'm also a musician, and I've been through the drama of trying to come up with band names many times in the past. Here's what I've learned: the name matters, but only so much. If people like a band, they're gonna listen no matter how dumb the name is. Do you think Metallica is actually a good name? How about Def Leppard? Lynyrd Skynyrd? The Beatles? Those names are kinda stupid and nobody cares, lol.

Same thing with software. If the product is good, people will use it, and they are not going to care much about the name. I think Luxury Yacht is better than some made-up word that doesn't mean anything but maybe has some vague connection with kubernetes if you squint at it just right, like a magic eye puzzle.

Just my opinion, though. I'm not wrong, and you're not wrong, we just think about things differently, and that's OK!

I'm not sure what an enterprise version would look like. I don't have any plans to ever charge for the app, so it'll never be "enterprise" in that regard.

I also like k9s! That team created a really great product for people who want to TUI.

Thanks for the compliment on the name. It's been literally the most polarizing thing about the app. More people comment on the name than on anything to do with how the app actually works, lol. I don't know whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. Probably both. :)

Can you elaborate on what you mean by "manage kubeconfig files"? Do you mean how to create them? How to switch between them? Something else?

Oh hey, no worries! I didn't take your post in a bad way. Headlamp is a great project and I honestly can't believe I hadn't heard about it until very recently. I'm glad you're spreading the word about it.

I never really felt great about Lens. The interface and workflow just never resonated with me. No shade to the crew behind Lens, it’s purely subjective opinion, and I’m sure a lot of people would say I’m wrong.

I like Headlamp. It’s much closer to how I think these kinds of apps should work. Prior to starting work on Luxury Yacht, my favorite app in this category was https://infra.app/ but unfortunately that has seemingly been abandoned.

As far as how they compare… I think they’re all pretty comparable in terms of features. It’s just a question of finding the one that has the UI you like.

I did try to build some stuff into Luxury Yacht that I haven’t seen in other apps, though. There’s an object diff panel, where you can compare two objects (even in different clusters) and it will diff the YAML. I also have a json log parser, that will render json logs as a table so it’s much easier to read. Just small things like that.

Ah thanks, I’ll figure out why that’s happening because it should be using my git global defaults.

edit: weird, it’s just the one latest commit, all the others are fine.

Author of the app here. That’s one of the reasons I picked the name. When I was trying to come up with a name for this thing, I didn’t want another “k” name, but I did want something that tied in with the nautical theme of kubernetes. Luxury Yacht ticked that box and the Monty Python connection was a sweet bonus.

Hey there. I didn’t submit this post but I am the author of the app. I didn’t know about Headlamp when I started working on Luxury Yacht. I only discovered it a few weeks ago. Headlamp is great, and of course having CNCF’s backing means a lot.

I’m not trying to sell Luxury Yacht. It’s free to use. I’m not going to try to convince anyone to choose it over Headlamp, or any other tool. Of course I’m flattered if people like what I built, but that’s the extent of my investment.

I like Luxury Yacht better than Headlamp, but of course I do, because I built it to work exactly the way I want it to.