I’ve been working on my own to build in this same direction, and recently started writing about what I’ve built so far (HN link below). If you agreed with this article, give it a read.
Problem/Truth is that writing toy software is not profitable - that's not to say one must always work on profitable things; what i mean is that it's being kept unprofitable, because in a hyper-saturated monopolized attention economy, every piece of "toy" software that isn't a video game or a plugin to some proprietary app ecosystem is essentially an act of subversion, an attempted "theft" or piracy of what the Company considers its rightful property: the sum of all disposable human attention.
Chromium, Electron and VSCode are all the rage to fork as an LLM application base. In truth it doesn't really matter which you start from, they all lead to the One Local LLM App. There's already a fairly deterministic path of development, we're just waiting to see who wins the race in execution and marketing.
In the meantime, the bigger opportunity with relatively little competition at the moment is the Web itself, not which application to browse it with. The Web absolutely sucks, and that's most of the reason we even feel the need for an "elevated browser experience" in the first place (i.e. lifted trucks on the information highway).
The Web sucks, because it was built naively, then optimized for profitable friction. But all of it stood on the assumption that the cost of production on the web involves highly skilled human labor. LLMs have shattered that assumption, but the effects have not manifested. Which is to say that the entire existing Web is probably going to become a marginal, legacy corner of a much bigger base of LLM-driven hypermedia contents that is yet to come.
the obsessive narrative against redundancy has been the blight of our times. people are copies of each other, they eat the same food, work the same job, have the same needs. if you follow the Big Wheel propaganda to its logical conclusion, you’ll have as your ideal a very specialized person who serves a very specific needs of some (probably) rich people, but knows or enjoys absolutely nothing else: never cooks, grows, loves anything, because those things are redundant.
It's been going downhill for a while, even before AI. The VC-funded React SaaS craze took the "put something barely functional on the web, make some subscription cash" model and scaled it to what is essentially a scam/spam industry.
So if the UX feels increasingly framed in terms of what the "developers" see/want/believe to be profitable, and less from the actual user's perspective, that's because the UX was sketched by hustlers who see software development explicitly as a "React grind to increase MRR/ARR."
I appreciate your curiosity. The premise is simple: the Web of 2025 is still a primitive sketch that leaves 99% of the medium’s potential unrealized. Why? Because the technical 1% writes all the code, while the rest spend all their time merely navigating that code, generating user data. This rigid division between creator and user is built into every level of the software industry, yet it’s what limits the development of much more complex, massively collaborative, personalized applications based on an abundance of ideas and free exchange of code.
I started the work by recognizing that, in a world of LLM coding assistants, there is no longer a minimum bar for code literacy; it is now a spectrum, along which everyone is capable of unique creation, no matter their sophistication. The winning platforms of this age will be ones built from scratch to accommodate and leverage this new massive creative potential, by dismantling the professional class’ monopoly on software production.
yeah, tough times, taking home 6 figures with good benefits year after year, stock prices at historic highs, taking their picks from the housing bubble, voting for idiots while the world burns... I don't quite get why you're complaining to me about these things, but obviously I'm not talking about people who are struggling to "feed and clothe" their families?
> you’re in for a rude awakening
I've seen how techies spend their time, I'm not the one in for a rude awakening.
I think people are ready (if not yearning) for a much larger, personal web, built with a different set of incentives. The problem appears to be that the technical class currently lacks the imagination (or more specifically, a kind of epistemological hunger, a craving to deepen the mystery of their craft) to synthesize the new reality of the web with the freedom of the old. I see what the designers are working on, and there's clearly a very large gap of communication between what people want to see in the Web, and what the people in charge of the Web can be bothered to make.
I've been working to build a company on my own hoping to fill that gap - I tell the career SWEs in my social circle "I want to give people the true freedom of creating whatever you want on the web," and I just get blank looks, ha :p
By which point, Russia was already in the hands of a dictator. Too late and too little, as they say. But yes, obviously, every country deserves a large share of blame for its own situation.
Either way - even if I concede this, my point stands that starving nations and denying them development isn't a great long term strategy for peace.
Have you been to China? Know anyone from there? Or is your opinion on what they deserve based entirely on TV headlines? Do you relate to them as humans? That’s what I need to see before I take anyone’s condemnation of any group of people seriously.
I’m disputing none of the facts you raise, I just don’t think it’s reason enough to label the entire country as an enemy state and shut the door like a petulant child. Especially in light of the horrifying atrocities that we ourselves are funding.
Well, to a large extent, the reason Russia and North Korea are hopeless backwaters ruled by petty dictators and filled with suffering… is precisely because nobody would trade with or invest in them. And when they predictably fall into dysfunction and despair, they end up threatening everyone’s peace. You reap what you sow. We need to do better.
I do not dispute it (in fact if you have good sources on the latest goings-on about this issue I’d appreciate it). But to say that it’s cause enough to excommunicate the CCP and go to war… is hypocrisy of the highest order, when we ourselves clearly fund and condone massive atrocities as long as it’s someone else’s hands. Road to peace is not paved with blood, do not be confused. Peace comes from boring communication work: talking, arguing, hashing the problems out, day in and day out. Shutting the door is the first step to a tragedy, always.
bro literally citing chinese facebook comments ;) if you started taking pissed off internet comments seriously we'd have to go to war with every country in the world
look man, i'm not saying china is some heavenly force of justice. but the thing about peace is that it's bigger than both sides, and it's maintained by the grace of those who understand that often the real threat isn't the enemy, it's your fear of the enemy.
As far as i can tell, the Chinese care mostly about building and investing. They're aware that the US sees them as their "number one enemy" (what a childish, irresponsible way to refer to a nation of a billion, mostly innocent, people), and that the US has maintained its global domination since WWII by political assassinations, bombings, proxy wars, and half-assed failed invasions.
My advice? Stop using words like "geopolitical adversary" to mask what you really want to say. This is life, not a chessboard.
That’s what the China hawks want you to believe, it’s not just a lie but a shameful, war mongering lie. And they will increasingly use that lie to shut people up, shut apps down, until we have no choice but to believe that the Chinese want us dead and we them. It’s textbook propaganda and you’re spreading it.
China and the US have been in a massively successful, mutually beneficial global economic partnership for decades. Zero sum my ass. Take a peace pipe, make friends not war.
The point of LLMs is they are able to make sense of the web the same way humans can (roughly speaking); so why do they get the special treatment of having direct, ad-free, plain text version of the actual info they’re looking for, while humans aren’t allowed to scroll through a salad recipe without being bombarded with 20 ads?
In which Pierre Schaeffer admits that Musique Concrete is not music, and that he has never been a real musician. Ouch… I wonder if he knows there are internet music genres that have not only kept the ideas of Musique Concrete alive, but made them culturally relevant and musically valuable in a way that he and other 20th century “serious” musical thinkers never managed to. Some of the more obscure vaporwave subgenres are basically turntable pieces.
yes, but aren't we the creative gardeners/pollinators? Not to mention that software is naturally more dynamic and cross-compatible than real plants, given to all manners of chaotic mutations and grafting.
I tend to think of it as plants/trees. It starts from a single point, the main routine, and branches out its behavior over time. Branches get pruned, abandoned, merged, coopted to optimize for the nutrient gradient. I especially like the “roots” analogy i.e. it draws its strength from the parts that are hidden and difficult to assess by typical observation.
A happy, independent employee is a creative employee, and if your business is such a heavy monopoly that it’s in your interest (if not your primary market strategy) to arrest and interrupt the development of competitive alternatives, keeping your employees in cycles of misery (long commutes, oral culture heavy on tribal knowledge and who-you-know) is no longer a “tradeoff” to be balanced, it’s how you keep competition from cropping up.
Yes, 22 years ago. And while they’ve expanded some plugin features, astonishingly little has changed/improved about the base Live since then. Even minor quality-of-life features like setting a default audio interface is not even on the roadmap for 22 years.
I think part of that is probably the clientele, musicians aren’t exactly famous for asking for more from their tools. Maybe I’m a grump for not thinking that “session view vs arrangement view” (which is really a bare minimum digital mimicry of the popular music making interfaces of the 20th century: the magnetic tape and a vinyl loop) is enough as the dominant paradigm for music making in a world now driven by global, recursive, abstract navigation of/ negotiation with interconnected, automated logic processes…
But I don't wanna be sarcastic.
It’s an ideal, and like any ideal we manage to capture in a six-letter word, 99% will get it completely backwards.
For example, everyone knows and agrees with the value of the phrase “think outside the box,” but only a minority ever recognizes “the box” they should be thinking outside of, and even fewer bother to fully apply the wisdom by making a habit out of finding the box that’s currently holding them at any given moment.
I appreciate the insider perspective; my faith in YC was exactly why I was so dumbfounded. Me and my cofounder spent quite a bit of time speculating, and wrote a substantial, thoughtful response. Ignored and rejected.
I wanna make clear again that I’m not bitter about this, it was just odd. And counterproductive.
Just because I had little expectation of hearing back doesn’t mean my application was unserious. It was a full length application, written over multiple days, about the future direction of my business, which already has revenue.
I applied for summer 24, and got a less-than-thoughtful response bordering on personally insulting (“TL;DR - why don’t you go back to your day job?”). I won’t be applying anymore.
Funny thing is, I didn’t even want to hear back - I just like to fill out the application as a writing exercise, to help me get a snapshot of my own thinking around what I’m building.
I guess it’s stressful reading all those applications, but why respond if all you have to say is “I don’t believe you”? Silence will do just fine; I’m aware that people don’t believe me - it’s called a startup, right?
(Anyways, nbd, apologies for the tangential rant, love the website)
Thanks for the clarification - I do not claim that artists don’t want to make a living. My point is that, too often, the “artists need to make a living too” narrative is used by the system that exploits artists.
Arguably, but imho the difference between search engines and GPTs is akin to punch card coding vs modern IDE - theoretically the same activity, vastly different in practice.
The “artists need to make a living” narrative against piracy is pure deception. Truth is that most artists want nothing more than for their messages to spread as widely as possible, as that is also the most naturally profitable path for them in the long term. It’s only when managerial types get involved the need to turn a quick buck by denying the natural flow of information becomes a primary concern. So pirate away, knowing that nothing of value is lost.