Exactly. The LLM primitives will remain - we were careful to never compromise the modular, lego-like design of the system. But now we have clarity on the primary use case.
Thanks for giving us another chance! Come say hi on our discord, if you ever want to ask questions or discuss your use case. We have a friendly group of CI nerds who love to help.
Well said to that person. I think about this a lot, and have wondered if it's the advent of code school? Which itself was a result of the insane FAANG hiring sprees + salaries (where was a result of 0% interest rates among other things).
A developer going through code school in the last ~decade was taught React, GraphQL, Redux, or whatever the cool framework was at that moment with the goal of getting hired (not learning how to build well).
I'm fortunate to have entered the market in the early 2000's juuuust before that wave started. I'm only now getting a few gray hairs in my beard and am glad I was taught to understand _all_ parts of a system. I don't know if that'd be the case if I started in the mid-2010's.
Nobody disagrees with that. The clear subtext to that comment is "if you plan to raise money". You can bootstrap a successful firm without raising a dollar.
Trouble is that there isn't much the consumer is willing to pay for anymore. They've become accustomed to devices like their phone where a single purchase fulfills an endless number of functions. The thought of buying much more is becoming a foreign concept. To complicate matters: For what they are not buying, they aren't saving up the money ready to deploy when something compelling does come around. They've decided to redirect that money into paying more for things like housing instead. Good luck chipping that away.
There is still plenty of opportunity to build a business that sells to customers who are collecting those angel checks (directly or indirectly). But that is dependent on at least some businesses being funded by angels.
I respectfully disagree that there’s no business opportunity that people are willing to pay for.
If your only target are developers or the tech industry, maybe, but there’s a whole world of non technical business people with problems that have extremely easy (and boring) technical solutions.
I’ve recently signed up my third customer paying $49/mo with a simple CRUD app. No targeted ads or landing pages. I literally walked into offices in my town and asked what the most annoying part of their job is and I made a prototype. They signed a 6 month commitment.
They’re amazed at my “computer skills” only because they don’t know any better.
Not saying I’ll become insanely rich, but my goal is a reasonable living ($200-$300k) within 5 years.
All this to say I think the opportunities in this market are there, but they look different.
> I literally walked into offices in my town and asked what the most annoying part of their job is and I made a prototype.
Consumers don't have offices. You are looking at a business-to-business transaction, which is where we said there is still opportunity, in large part thanks to those collecting angel money.
If you are going to disagree, surely you can provide an example of where you have sold to the consumer? Affirming that you could only find opportunity selling to other businesses too makes it seem like you do agree.
My broader point is that if you want to build a business there's a ton of opportunity if you're not overly picky on what that opportunity looks like. B2B, B2C, mobile, web, node, Python, PHP. None of it really matters.
> You are looking at a business-to-business.. which is where we said there is still opportunity, in large part thanks to those collecting angel money.
You might be mixing up opportunities within the tech industry with using tech to build a business within other industries. Angel money isn't really a "thing" for the latter, and that's where I'm pointing to opportunity.
But by all means keep on pushing B2C if that's your passion
> My broader point is that if you want to build a business there's a ton of opportunity if you're not overly picky on what that opportunity looks like.
That point was already firmly established before you arrived. What were you hoping to add?
> You might be mixing up opportunities within the tech industry with using tech to build a business within other industries.
Industry doesn't matter. An economy is all connected. What does matter is that at some point your sale needs a "final destination". If you sell to another business, they are going to need to pass the need on to the next hop. If they fail to do that, they will go out of business, and soon you will too.
That means either a consumer, someone with angel money to burn, or government (which is, as it pertains to this discussion, basically the same as angel money). Angel money keeps a lot of these B2B businesses alive. You might not need to accept the angel money directly, but someone needs to in order to support the system we have.
No. I remain unsure about what you were trying to add. You must have had some kind of astute observation that warranted your time to formulate a response – more than once. But, I'm afraid it went over my head. Perhaps you can frame it in another light?
The only real tech "freelancing", if we are to call it that, opportunities as it pertains to consumers is possibly in fixing someone's home computer/phone, and that is within the small set of things consumers are still willing to pay for. In fact, one's phone was explicitly mentioned. But it is unlikely that most "freelancers", within the tech sphere, are making a business out of that.
Maybe we all have a grandmother tossing a few bucks out here and there when she needs help. Is that what you mean?
But that's ignoring that freelancing itself is normally a business-to-business transaction by definition, so your assertion is a bit strange if we are to stick to general understandings. What is the pet definition you are trying to use here that should change our understanding?
Are we just talking past each other here? Are you saying that it's hard to bootstrap a pure B2C business using only B2C revenue sources? Because that's not what I'd do; I'd consult to other businesses. That's what 37signals did.
> Are you saying that it's hard to bootstrap a pure B2C business using only B2C revenue sources?
I said that consumers don't like to buy much these days, so business opportunities are effectively limited to selling to other businesses.
But businesses can't absorb buying your wares if they can't sell to someone else in kind – eventually meaning the consumer. That is, unless they have angel money to burn. So what was also said is that even within the B2B space, you are bound to be dependent on angel money even if you don't receive it directly. Meaning, as it pertained to the comment that came before it, that someone needs to accept the angel money to keep the house of cards standing.
> That's what 37signals did.
37signals doesn't strike me as trying to tackle B2C in any meaningful capacity either. 'Hey' plays that angle a little bit, which is maybe what you are thinking of, but it is clear that selling to business is still the bread and butter even there.
"Yes" doesn't explain your perspective, though. Obviously you can make money selling to other businesses. Nobody would think otherwise and the discussion that was taking place fundamentally wouldn't have been possible if that weren't the case. But what is it that you want to add to the discussion? That is what is not clear.
You put in time to tell us something. It is no doubt interesting. But, unfortunately, it got lost along the way. I am still interested in whatever it may be.
> businesses and governments pay for a ton of stuff.
Yes, that was addressed in the second half of the comment. But ultimately business must serve consumers – unless angel money is paying for. If you sell to a business, who sells to a business, who sells to a business, who sells to a business collecting angel checks you are still dependent on angel money.
Government too is effectively the angel model. The money will be there even if the consumer isn't being served anything they want to pay for.
Can you tell me more about your Portainer setup? Does it just update your app from an image or is it checking out code from a git repo on deploy? This approach sounds very interesting
> Axiom 2: You’re optimizing over a business, not over a codebase.
Well said. Ultimately I think this is where much of the communication breakdown occurs when discussing Framework A vs Framework B online.
If you’re optimizing for _code_, sure. Stress about the ms it takes to load this or that thing. Client vs server. All of it is valid discussion from an engineering standpoint. Go nuts!
If you’re optimizing for _business_, then choose something that gets the job done. Fewer moving parts - and fewer resources needed to maintain it - the better.
Often this goes in the “other direction”; many corporate software projects start with a large team and, based on success or shifting business priorities, can go between Modernize —> Invest —> Maintain —> Goodbye in unexpected time frames. It is very difficult to optimize for those future states, especially with go-live time pressure across many teams - abstraction is a strong tool for managing Conway, and those big frameworks do it well. Nobody wants to think their team won’t grow, we’re all building The Next Big Thing in our minds.
If you are optimizing for business optimize for something that you can easily hire people for that want to work on it.
That internal Angular based tool might work fine and doesn’t need much maintenance, but hiring someone for it that’s not an expensive consultant might be hard.
Same for htmx, it might get the job done but in 5 years maybe it’s hard to find people to work on your niche framework code base.
Hiring is one part of a business, but I don't know if I agree with this, mainly because learning HTMX is so darn easy. You are essentially offloading much of the business logic to other parts of the stack.
So, in my case, if I'm lucky enough to be hiring employees to work on this project, I'd likely be looking for backend django experts or true "front-end" devs with expertise in styling and limited client-side JS.
> Same for htmx, it might get the job done but in 5 years maybe it’s hard to find people to work on your niche framework code base.
At least based on the article's description of the app, I don't think 5 years down the road is really the concern. They're building an LLM tool that leans heavily on real-time natural language processing. The last concern they'd likely have over the next 5 years is whether they can hire frontend or fullstack devs for the current codebase.
Between the odds that frontend development changes in the next 5 years and the odds that this service fundamentally changes either at the product or architecture level, hiring devs in 5 years really should be the last of their concerns.
100% - React has won the FrontEnd wars. Anything else is great to love and to use in a hobby project, but if it's for a business, React is the one FrontEnd tech you can be confident people will still be using heavily in ten years.
Just compare the npm trends of react and $coolthing, then look at the number or active committers and the maintainer succession planning.
That's what they said about the original Angular framework and Backbone before it. In another 10 years React will just be another legacy front-end framework that some poor asshole will get stuck maintaining.
There are still a lot of companies using Angular and Vue. Especially some big institutions that started using AngularJS (pre-"Angular") years before React was really popular.
You know that won't last forever though, right? React will be replaced by another technology eventually, and in the web development world 5 years from now is 2-3 tech generations down the road.
Focusing on CI would still enable the AI stuff too! But my use case is CI, no AI.