> The B&H example is ridiculous and I definitely would churn if I ran into that
B&H is so good that I don't care when their online store is closed, I just come back later. That they are still in business (and flourishing, from what I can see) is proof that their service is so good that people are loyal.
Chick-fil-A is famously closed every Sunday, yet is one of the most successful restaurants.
One thing to note here is that the closure is a costly, credible, verifiable signal of commitment to their principles. Unusual or questionable principles, perhaps - few other Christians feel the need to close on Sunday - but principles nevertheless.
Suppose B&H or Chick-Fil-A suddenly changed their policy to be open, which is easy to verify (just see if you can buy something on that day). What do you think the reaction of their customers would be to this greater convenience and no loss of quality? Would they celebrate? I think the reaction would be highly negative - everyone would panic that they had sold out and the beancounters were now in charge and the quality was going to go downhill while the prices go up.
Precisely because the policy is so economically foolish and is not a marketing stunt (notice no one is clamoring to imitate them even though it's trivial: just close on some day) and would be one of the first things to go under new (ie. normal) management, it proves that they don't care that much about maximizing their profits but other things.
I honestly don’t know much about B&H as a business but I’m a frequent customer. I have bought several expensive camera bodies and lenses from them, countless camera accessories, and it’s often the first place I look for all electronics. NAS, hard drives, cables, that sort of thing. I like buying from B&H because I trust them, they have fast shipping, and I’ve never had a bad experience.
It’s a high quality store. I value high quality and I like that they value high quality over maximizing profit. That makes me a loyal customer, and unless something changes about the quality of B&H, I probably will be for a long time. I don’t care that their online store is occasionally closed; it’s never been an inconvenience to me. And if it ever is, the quality of the store more than makes up for the minor convenience of waiting a couple days to buy something. When it comes to my gear and equipment, I’m rarely in such a rush that I’m willing to compromise quality for speed. I imagine a lot of other B&H customers feel the same way.
I have nuthatches that peck and bore large holes in my cedar siding in the spring to nest. They showed up about two weeks ago and they’ll be here through summer.
The sound is obnoxious and they’ve basically destroyed my house. I’ve tried everything to keep them away but they are tenacious. We’re currently saving up to reside the house with Hardie Board; I think that’s the only solution.
But you said "I can now whip up a serious contender to any SaaS business in a week".
Any SaaS business. In a week. And to be a "serious contender", you have to have feature parity. Yet now you're shifting the goalposts.
What's stopping you? There are 38 weeks left in 2025. Please build "serious contenders" for each of the top 38 most popular SaaS products before the end of the year. Surely you will be the most successful programmer to have ever lived.
The rest of the business is the issue. I can whitelabel a Spotify clone but licensing rights and all that business stuff is outside my wheelhouse. An app that serves mp3s and has a bunch of other buttons? yeah, done. "shifting goalposts?" no, we're having a conversation, I'm not being deposed under a subpoena.
My claim is that in a week you could build a thing that people want to use, as long as you can sell it, that's competitive with existing options for a given client. Salesforce is a CRM with walled gardens after walled garden. access to each of which costs extra, of course. they happened to be in the right place at the right time, with the right bunch of assholes.
A serious contender doesn’t have to start with everything. It starts by doing the core thing better—cleaner UX, clearer value, easier to extend. That’s enough to matter. That’s enough to grow.
I’m not claiming to replace decades overnight. But momentum, clarity, and intent go a long way. Especially when you’re not trying to be everything to everyone—just the right thing for the right people.
Salesforce is and pretty much always has been a set of code generation platforms. If you can produce a decent code generation platform, do it. It's one of the most sure ways to making money from software since it allows you to deploy systems and outsource a large portion of design to your customers.
Spotify is not the audio player widget in some user interface. It started off as a Torrent-like P2P system for file distribution on top of a very large search index and file storage. That's the minimum you'd build for a "whitelabel [...] Spotify clone". Since then they've added massive, sophisticated systems for user monitoring and prediction, ad distribution, abuse and fraud detection, and so on.
Use that code generation platform to build a product off any combination of two of the larger subsystems at Spotify and you're set for retirement if you only grab a reasonable salesperson and an accountant off the street. Robust file distribution with robust abuse detection or robust ad distribution or robust user prediction would be that valuable in many business sectors.
If building and maintaining actually is that effortless for you, show some evidence.
> Since then they've added massive, sophisticated systems for user monitoring and prediction, ad distribution, abuse and fraud detection, and so on.
Use that code generation platform to build a product off any combination of two of the larger subsystems at Spotify
I'm listening. I fully admit that I was looking at Spotify as a user and thus only as a music playing widget so I'd love to hear more about this side of things. What is user prediction?
> I fully admit that I was looking at Spotify as a user and thus only as a music playing widget
This is the key insight here. Software is not the interface you see. There a whole lot more you don't know about (and probably no one knew before building it), and asking an LLM to find some JS front end patterns that abound in its training data won't come close to giving you.
That is why so many developers are skeptical of the amount of hype around LLMs generating code.
I'm not sure what you are trying to say here - that this website is comparable to Spotify? Even if you are talking about just the "core experience", this example supports the opposite argument that you are trying to make.
The way I see it, the core user experience is that the user listens to music. There's playlist management on top of that and some other bits, sure, but I really don't see it as being that difficult to build those pieces. This is a no code widget I had lying around with a track that was produced last night because I kept asking the producer about a new release. I linked it because it was top of mind. It allows the user to listen to music, which I see as the core of what Spotify offers its users.
Spotify has the licensing rights to songs and I don't have the business acumen to go about getting those rights, so I guess I could make Pirate Spotify and get sued by the labels for copyright infringement, but that would just be a bunch of grief for me which would be not very fun and why would I want to screw artists out of getting paid to begin with?
i think ive detected the root cause of your problem.
and, funnily enough, it goes a long way to explaining the experiences of some other commentators in this thread on “vibe coding competitive SaaS products”.
As much as I'd like to pretend otherwise, I'm just a programmer. Say I build,
I dunno, an Eventbrite clone. Okay, cool I've got some code running on Vercel. What do I do next? I'm not about to quit my day job to try and pay my mortgage on hopes and dreams, and while I'm working my day job and having a life outside of that. There's just not enough hours left in the day to also work on this hypothetical EventBrite clone. And there are already so many competitors of them out there, what's one more? What's my "in" to the events industry that would have me succeed over any of their numerous existing competitors? Sure, Thants to LLMs I can vibe code some CRUD app, but my point is there's so much I don't know that I don't even know what I don't know about business in order to be successful. So realistically it's just a fun hobby, like how some people sew sweaters.
I reckon you’re proving their point. You’re using a large language model for language-specific tasks. It ought to be good at that, but it doesn’t mean it is generic artificial intelligence.
generic artificial intelligence is a sufficiently large bag of tricks. that's what natural intelligence is. there's no evidence that it's not just tricks all the way down.
I'm not asking the model to translate from one language to another - I'm asking it to explain to me why a certain word combination means something specific.
it can also solve/explain a lot of things that aren't language. bag of tricks.
Official Git docs say commit messages should be in present tense and imperative mood:
> Describe your changes in imperative mood, e.g. "make xyzzy do frotz" instead of "[This patch] makes xyzzy do frotz" or "[I] changed xyzzy to do frotz", as if you are giving orders to the codebase to change its behavior.
• GOOD: “Fix app sending unnecessary requests"
• BAD: “Fixes app sending unnecessary requests”
> Another best practice to help you write good Git commit messages is to use imperative verb form. Using imperative verb form ensures that potential verbs used in your commit messages, like “fixed” or “updated” are written in the correct tense to “fix” and “updated”.
I insist on present tense, imperative mood in every codebase I work on. The Git log makes a whole lot more sense when it can be read this way.
> Please note that this information is only relevant to you if you plan on contributing to the Git project itself. It is in no shape or form required reading for regular Git users.
In spite of that qualifier, I think that the directions offered do apply extremely well as general guide, too.
> Your code may be clearly written with in-code comment to sufficiently explain how it works with the surrounding code, but those who need to fix or enhance your code in the future will need to know why your code does what it does. [...] You do not have to say "Currently"---the status quo in the problem statement is about the code without your change ...
I can spill all the juicy details as the main author and instigator.
Cyanview reached out to me to help find a dev a while back. Hearing about their customers I knew it would be a decently big splash for Elixir. I was surprised that they were unknown and had this succcess with big household name clients.
I like them. I like their whole deal. Small team, punching above their weight. Hardware, software, FPGAs and live broadcasts. The story has so much to it. David and team have been great sports in sharing their story.
Fundamentally I care more about Elixir adoption though, I reached out to the Elixir team and offered to interview them and write something up.
A case study about successful Elixir production deployments is definitely content marketing. But for Elixir. It is a very common question when mentioning a less common language. "Who uses this?" I thought it was a very interesting case. Glad to have it documented. The style of a case study won't suit everyone.
I suppose "without any marketing, before _this_" would have been funny.
“Rare” fish is always a bad idea, but perhaps you meant “raw”, which is different.
Raw fish like used in sushi/sashimi is generally safe because the fish is flash frozen, which is as effective as thorough cooking for killing parasites.
Not to distract from the article, but I'm pretty sure that photo of the guard tower is from Manzanar, one of the concentration camps in California that interned Japanese Americans during WWII. Probably not in great taste to use that photo to represent the idea of "guard duty" in software.
People that have been interned in this or one of the other camps, or their descendants. It’s one generation ago, people born and raised in camps are still alive. George Takeo for example was born in one of the segregation camps.
It’s a low stakes change.
Nobody assumes harmful intentions from the author - I would not have recognized the picture either. But now that it’s been pointed out that it’s from a site where people were held illegally against their will, the reaction is a tell-tale. Knowing this, and insisting on keeping the images is now willfully associating with harmful behavior.
Apart from that, I cannot associate with the picture either - as an on-call engineer for some widely used infrastructure, I am not a guard on duty keeping people in a camp. I am an emergency responder. I fix things when they go haywire or an accident happens. A firefighter, paramedics, civil emergency responder would IMO be a much better metaphor for what I do.
>Nobody assumes harmful intentions from the author
Then what's the issue or purpose? Other than satisfying or inflating some own moral selfimage?
That kind of social dynamic appears to be what this kind of things is about most of the time as opposed to preventing mental harm or stopping such issues from (re)occurring.
>Knowing this, and insisting on keeping the images is now willfully associating with harmful behavior.
Do you not associate with harmfull behavior in far far more direct ways? Perhaps something that's considered ridiculous for most people to avoid like paying taxes that get spent on bombs or the like?
If i want to make an article showing a prison and i pick one from google does it matter if that prison happened to be used in the past to house civil rights activists?
Is the implication that that somehow normalises, advocates for or otherwise inches towards oppressing civil rights movements in any meaningfull way?
To not use a thing that symbolizes the indiscriminate incarceration of innocent people as some clipart for an article about oncall. It's in bad taste, and also the wrong metaphor, and it sends the wrong message, even if not done on purpose.
> Other than satisfying or inflating some own moral selfimage?
Morality has a subjective component and often works by seeing through other people's eyes: How would I feel if this happened to me? How will other people see me if I did this? There's no universal consensus for this, of course, thankfully.
So when people disagree about morality, I've found that it can be hard for the side that doesn't see a problem to understand what the other side is making such a fuss about. I also think there can be a performative aspect to moralizing. But I don't think it's fair or warranted to jump to the conclusion that just because one doesn't see the issue, that the other person must be posturing - because that's how you can make sense of their behavior from within your own point of view.
People see things that rub them wrong, they speak up, as did you. How would you know you're not just inflating your self-image by putting down their comment like this? If you aren't, maybe they aren't, either.
So you're essentially saying: "I don't believe people should try to be nice to each other even in places where it essentially comes for free." I get it, it's impossible to do the right thing all of the time. It's a chore. But very often, it comes for essentially free. Help carry the baby prom down the stairs if the elevator is broken. Tell people their shoelace is open. Change a picture that symbolizes hurt to people in places where the point is not talking about these places. Call people by their chosen name. It comes for almost free. It makes other peoples life better. What's the argument against it?
I think people should be nice to eachother even in places where it doesn't essentially come for free. Offer a helping hand. Take part in a cleanup event. Give to the needy. And if possible I'd say do it without broadcasting your moral status or don't do it just to broadcast.
If you truly wanted to do some microscopic good you could've just used this picture to quickly bring awareness to what happened and could happen again rather than try to relegate the story to the view of those interested in history for the benefit of....
(1) is the important point, (2) is irrelevant. On the important point, you seem to have assumed several things:
a) that it is harmful
b) that anyone to whom the assumed harm would occur would see it
c) that they would know what the camp looked like
(a) I see no evidence for this, in fact, research suggests the opposite[1]
> The strange paradox about triggers and PTSD – and this is true for all anxiety-related disorders – is that avoiding triggers makes the disorder worse, not better (Jones et al., 2020). Being exposed to small instances of one’s triggers, in a safe environment such as therapy where one can be helped to process the situation, is a way to gradually become less reactive to those triggers (APA, 2013). Many people have learned to reduce their reactivity to psychological triggers through this process, called exposure therapy.
and (b) really is a stretch, are we to believe there are people in the tech industry who are on-call and were interned in WW2 and will read this article and will have some kind of meltdown because of it? Why would their descendants react badly to it? Unless they have a pre-existing condition, that's untenable, and if they have a pre-existing condition then they should seek help for it.
And to (c), how would they even know what the camp looked like if they're so triggered by the thought of it? They have an aversion to it.
No, none of that makes sense, and cloaking it in "compassion" or trying to handwave scrutiny away because it would be a "low stakes" behavioural change won't hide it.
> Apart from that, I cannot associate with the picture either
We are intelligent people, the link is really simple to make. There being "better" choices does not make the picture a non-sequitur.
I'm sure I'm not alone in wishing this West coast American style of pop psychology being misapplied to real life would die a death.
By the way, George Takei (I believe that's who you meant) is 87, and he's not really in tech.
More important than that to me is the use of rational, sound, valid reasoning, and the avoidance of petty and facile straw man arguments.
But okay, I really want there to be a picture of a concentration camp guard tower, because the best way to deal with childishness and unreasonableness is, unsurprisingly, childishness and unreasonableness.
Perhaps to you, but anyone that’s ever worked with Ruby knows that there’s no such thing as fields/properties/members in Ruby. There are only methods. Parentheses are optional for method calls.
B&H is so good that I don't care when their online store is closed, I just come back later. That they are still in business (and flourishing, from what I can see) is proof that their service is so good that people are loyal.
Chick-fil-A is famously closed every Sunday, yet is one of the most successful restaurants.
reply