Posted by jnord 2 days ago
It's not the hackernews i knew even 3 years ago anymore and i'm seriously close to just ditching the site after 15+ years of use.
I use AI heavily but everyday there's crazy optimistic almost manic posts about how AI is going to take over various sectors that are completely ludicrous - and they are all filled with comments from bizarrely optimistic people that have seemingly no knowledge of how software is actually run or built, ie. it's the human organisational, research and management elements that are the hard parts, something AI can't do in any shape or form at the moment for any complex or even small company.
> But my key takeaway would be that if your product is just a SQL wrapper on a billing system, you now have thousands of competitors: engineers at your customers with a spare Friday afternoon with an agent.
I think it’s pertinent to point out that a lot of SaaS products are aimed at businesses and individuals who don’t have engineers at all.
AI agents aren’t going to disrupt the SaaS market for software intended for businesses like small business retail where the owners and staff have minimal technical knowledge and zero extra time.
I also think that some SaaS products are so cheap that about an hour of effort is too much. Is it worth a month of effort to vibecode a Dropbox alternative? Even some pretty complicated software that is untouchable by agents and engineers’ side projects like the Microsoft 365 suite and Jira are priced at under $20/month/user.
On the other hand, some entrenched solutions that aren’t all that complicated could be finding themselves with new, smaller competitors.
All you've done is swapped a SaaS built for your problem domain with another, more expensive SaaS that has no support at all for your actual problem. Why would anyone want that? People buy SaaS products because they don't want to solve the problem, they just want it fixed. AI changes nothing about that.
SaaS are swiss-army knife tools and you don't need all of this.
do you want to have a contact form on your site? Don't but the whole WP plugin for forms, ask AI for tiny, well-aligned plugin which will display form fields and process the input.
Do you need to A/B test your landing page? Just ask for another plugin which will switch page versions and track impressions.
No need for Hubspot when you have google sheets + AI-made plugin for this.
Summary is that for agents to work well they need clear vision into all things, and putting the data behind a gui or not well maintained CLI is a hinderance. Combined with how structured crud apps are an how the agents can for sure write good crud apps, no reason to not have your own. Wins all around with not paying for it, having a better understanding of processes, and letting agents handle workflows.
1. I had two text documents containing plain text to compare. One with minor edits (done by AI).
2. I wanted to see what AI changed in my text.
3. I tried the usual diff tools. They diffed line by line and result was terrible. I searched google for "text comparison tool but not line-based"
4. As second search result it found me https://www.diffchecker.com/ (It's a SaaS, right?)
5. Initially it did equally bad job but I noticed it had a switch "Real-time diff" which did exactly what I wanted.
6. I got curious what is this algorithm. So I asked Gemini with "Deep Research" mode: "The website https://www.diffchecker.com/ uses a diff algorithm they call real-time diff. It works really good for reformatted and corrected text documents. I'd like to know what is this algorithm and if there's any other software, preferably open-source that uses it."
7. As a first suggestion it listed diff-match-patch from Google. It had Python package.
8. I started Antigravity in a new folder, ran uv init. Then I prompted the following:
"Write a commandline tool that uses https://github.com/google/diff-match-patch/wiki/Language:-Py... to generate diff of two files and presents it as side by side comparison in generated html file."
[...]
"I installed the missing dependance for you. Please continue." - I noticed it doesn't use uv for installing dependencies so I interrupted and did it myself.
[...]
"This project uses uv. To run python code use
uv run python test_diff.py" - I noticed it still doesn't use uv for running the code so its testing fails.
[...]
"Semantic cleanup is important, please use it." - Things started to show up but it looked like linear diff. I noticed it had a call to semantic cleanup method commented out so I thought it might help if I push it in that direction.
[...]
"also display the complete, raw diff object below the table" - the display of the diff still didn't seem good so I got curious if it's the problem with the diffing code or the display code
[...]
"I don't see the contents of the object, just text {diffs}" - it made a silly mistake by outputting template variable instead of actual object.
[...]
"While comparing larger files 1.txt and 2.txt I notice that the diff is not very granular. Text changed just slightly but the diff looks like deleting nearly all the lines of the document, and inserting completely fresh ones. Can you force diff library to be more granular?
You seem to be doing the right thing https://github.com/google/diff-match-patch/wiki/Line-or-Word... but the outcome is not good.
Maybe there's some better matching algoritm in the library?" - it seemed that while on small tests that Antigravity made itself it worked decently but on the texts that I actually wanted to compare was still terrible although I've seen glimpses of hope because some spots were diffed more granularly. I inspected the code and it seemed to be doing character level diffing as per diff-match-patch example. While it processed this prompt I was searching for solution myself by clicking around diff-match-patch repo and demos. I found a potential solution by adjusting cleanup, but it actually solved the problem by itself by ditching the character level diffing (which I'm not sure I would have come up with at this point). Diffed object looked great but as I compared the result to https://www.diffchecker.com/ output it seemed that they did one minor thing about formatting better.
[...]
"Could you use rowspan so that rows on one side that are equivalent to multiple rows on the other side would have same height as the rows on the other side they are equivalent to?" - I felt very clumsily trying to phrase it and I wasn't sure if Antigravity will understand. But it did and executed perfectly.
I didn't have to revert a single prompt and interrupted just two times at the beginning.
After a while I added watch functionality with a single prompt:
"I'd like to add a -w (--watch) flag that will cause the program to keep running and monitor source files to diff and update the output diff file whenever they change."
[...]
So I basically went from having two very similar text files and knowing very little about diffing to knowing a bit more and having my own local tool that let's me compare texts in satisfying manner, with beautiful highlighting and formatting, that I can extend or modify however I like, that mirrors interesting part of the functionality of the best tool I found online. And all of that in the time span shorter than it took me to write this comment (at least the coding part was, I followed few wrong paths during my search for a bit).
My experience tells me that even if I could replicate what I did today (keeping motivated is an issue for me), it would most likely be multi-day project full of frustration and hunting small errors and venturing into wrong paths. Python isn't even my strongest language. Instead it was a pleasant and fun evening with occasional jaw drops and feeling so blessed that I live in SciFi times I read about as a kid (and adult).
Um. I don't want to be That Guy (shouting at clouds, or at kids to get off my lawn or whatever) but ... what "usual diff" tools did you use? Because comparing two text files with minor edits is exactly what diff-related tools have excelled at for decades.
There is word-level diff, for example. Was that not good enough? Or delta [0] perhaps?
All weren't remotely close to what I wanted.
On first glance delta is also doing completely standard thing. But I can't rule out that there are some flags to coerce it to do the thing I wanted. But searching for tools and flag combinations is not that fun and success is not guaranteed. Also I found a (SaaS) tool and a flag there that did exactly what I wanted. Just decided to make my own local tool afterwards for better control. With an agent.
> Because comparing two text files with minor edits is exactly what diff-related tools have excelled at for decades.
True. And I ended up using this excellent Google diff-match-patch library for diffing. AI didn't write me a diffing algorithm. Just everything around it to make a convenient tool for me. Most tools are for source code and treat end lines as a very strong structural feature of compared texts. I needed something that doesn't care about end lines all that much and can show me which characters changed between one line of one file and five lines it was split into in the second file.