As software engineers, we work with “pure thought-stuff”. We build puzzle like objects. It’s satisfying to make useful tools. It’s an ever-renewing stimulating task.
That wasn’t because of the dark design of Fortnite itself, it was mostly because their shop allowed users (including children) to make purchases with only a single click, without any confirmation, leading to a lot of accidental purchases. Definitely not a good thing, but also not indicative of some fundamental issue with the game’s overall design. They added confirmation and the ability to undo purchases over 5 years ago.
To build great AI products you need to be a fluent, deeply engaged user AND understand how they work and how to bend them to your use case beyond simple prompting.
We’re in a funny moment. Right now, AI tech is so powerful and capable that people are categorically underestimating their value and systematically underusing them — whatever the hype is signalling. If the tech froze right now, there’s decades of applications to mine.
Lots of great products being built on that thesis. The strategy is: unlock more of their present capability, harness that for a wider audience’s use case.
In that way you do both — leverage the tools, and in becoming an expert user, you can find yourself a vendor of very valuable guidance — and a builder of desperately sought-after products.
If that's so, then why is Codex such an inferior product to Claude Code? And why haven't they already built an code editor or at least VS Code extension yet?
JetBrains has been making IDE for a decade. They were the only company that actually made money by selling IDE. So I assume they have the best programmers who understand IDE.
However they fail to make a Cursor competitor so far. This alone suggests it's a harder task than meets the eye.
It is, but you are assuming that only a well known IDE team would do it. To me JetBrains is the least likely to be an innovator here because they depend on their reputation for being a mature technology.
Someone like me isn't known at all but it means I have been able to experiment for a long time without pressure, which is how you do real innovation.
JetBrains as a company probably owns 10 million lines of code and it's just really hard to move fast when you're tugging that kind of ball and chain
As software engineers, we work with “pure thought-stuff”. We build puzzle like objects. It’s satisfying to make useful tools. It’s an ever-renewing stimulating task.
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