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Posted by palashawas 1 day ago

Computer Use is 45x more expensive than structured APIs(reflex.dev)
455 points | 251 commentspage 8
lacymorrow 20 hours ago|
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rgilliotte 22 hours ago||
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jasomill 10 hours ago|
The nicest thing about this rush to find and build "agentic" endpoints for controlling everything is that there's no reason these same endpoints can't be consumed by deterministic, non-LLM software as well.

It feels like 1994 called, and it's giving me my AppleScript back.

volume_tech 23 hours ago||
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overlord1109 14 hours ago||
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BionicAI 8 hours ago||
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doctorpcgum 14 hours ago||
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faangguyindia 1 day ago||
I saw Codex was screenshotting, then clicking around. I just stopped it and never used that again.

Using CLI tools is much faster and token-efficient. I developed ten apps in the last two months. One reached 10,000+ monthly active users.

I ask Codex to generate SVG line by line and backtrack edit, ask it to use Inkscape to generate icons, etc...

I developed all this on $20 codex sub.

embedding-shape 1 day ago||
I think it's the third or forth time I see you bragging about HN how many apps you're able to develop with AI now. Care to link any of them, especially where we can see the actual code that you've produced here? Without being able to see actual results, I'm not sure what you want people to take away from your repeated comments.
faangguyindia 1 day ago|||
I only write here because people are spreading doomerism here with AI and I am excited about future.

Well I am competing with geoip provider like maxmind.

I developed custom traceroute and ping service to geolocate IPs with very high accuracy beating products like digital element, maxmind, ipinfo

These companies have huge teams. But my 3 people company already beat them.

Code doesn't matter much, it's not an opensource project.

My free app is http://macrocodex.app which I've developed along with a fitness coach.

I am currently beating companies with 20-30 developers and closing more deals while having 1/10th of the staff.

I am simply very excited about all this.

Nobody cares show you solve the problem, or if your code is ugly. As long as it's reliable and without downtime, you aren't breaking things and causing your customer headache, you are winning.

Even before AI, bad code existed. Not every company had 10x developer writing beautiful idiomatic rust code.

AI is just a tool, people who are trying to generate whole codebase with it are doing something very wrong. You can write code faster with AI provided you understand its strength and weakness

embedding-shape 23 hours ago||
> Code doesn't matter much, it's not an opensource project.

Heh, you're in for a rude awakening, sometime in the future :) But I won't spoil the surprise, you clearly have made up your mind about what to focus on.

> My free app is http://macrocodex.app which I've developed along with a fitness coach.

Crazy, this app you've run for ~1-2 months has 10K active users already, even though there is zero info about who runs it, zero reviews, and says "Download on the App Store" on the landing page even though you then ask people to use the web app, impressive.

I don't think anyone said using AI can't produce a ton of code really quickly, and no one is finding that difficult to manage either. But most of us software engineers are trying to build long-lasting codebases with AI too, then "less === better" typically, so it's not about being able to spit out features as fast as possible, but avoid the evergrowing codebase from collapsing on top of itself, and each prompt not getting slower and slower, but as fast as on a greenfield project.

Sounds like you've found the holy grail of being able to avoid that, kudos if so. Judging by you giving zero care to how the design and architecture actually is, I kind of find that hard to believe. But, if it works for you, it works for you, not up to me or others to dictate how you build stuff, hope you enjoy it, however you build stuff :)

faangguyindia 17 hours ago||
>Heh, you're in for a rude awakening, sometime in the future :) But I won't spoil the surprise; you clearly have made up your mind about what to focus on.

Already running for a decade+ in production, recently talked about my stack here: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=faangguyindia&next=4...

>Even though there is zero info about who runs it.

People in the community already know who runs it; most others don't care. You won't get 10K users without people getting results. It's a free app, so not like I am spending bucks to advertise it on social networks.

The app is completely free, doesn't upload data to any server (other than Sentrycrash reporting), doesn't ask for any email or phone number. When people get results, they share them with their friends. That's how it's growing.

>Says "Download on the App Store" on the landing page even though you then ask people to use the web app.

On iOS, we’ve a PWA app. I am well aware of it.

nonameiguess 23 hours ago|||
Why even bother asking a guy with the statistical acumen to think he can make a reliable estimate of a monthly average from some span of time shorter than two months? He's probably just going to say it doesn't matter and unfortunately he's probably right. If you sound excited enough, you can convince other people and close deals, so who gives a shit if there's really a there there? We'll see how he's doing in another decade. Reminds me of my sister always trying to get into real estate and mortage brokerage speculation, glowing whenever there's a market spike about people pulling in 200 grand a month, yet 25 years later she's still broke, doesn't own her own house, and her daughter is constantly asking me for money instead of her.
faangguyindia 17 hours ago||
> statistical acumen to think he can make a reliable estimate of a monthly average from some span of time shorter than two months

Perhaps because those numbers are provided on the Playstore dashboard? You should question Google's acumen in providing those statistics to developers?

And people have been estimating ARR through projections for a long time.

I already have services running for a decade+ in a product which I posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=faangguyindia&next=4...

In the end, simplicity wins.

ceejayoz 1 day ago||
Claude does this too, with the Chrome extension.

It breaks like 80% of the time for me, and it's incredibly slow. Having it use Playwright (bonus: can test in FF/Saf too) was a big improvement.

bottlepalm 19 hours ago||
There's no way this is true. I would argue in some cases computer use is less expensive. First for APIs that don't even exist, it's a non starter. Second most APIs are not designed for agents and are verbose as hell - returning the entire DTO and tons of unnecessary properties burns tokens. Second computer use is not as token hungry as you think it is - a single screenshot may be just 1000 tokens, it's actually competitive and beats API workflows in many cases.
0xWTF 19 hours ago|
So, to make this concrete, Akasa uses computer vision to read medical records to replace medical coders because there aren't enough medical coders to get all the billing right and medical systems leave like $1T a year on the table.

The EHRs could give companies like Akasa API access so Akasa could then just run NLP, but the EHR vendors don't grant various third parties API access for various reasons, so instead Akasa gets a seat license for each medical system they service and uses computer vision to read the screen (a cadre of Akasa medical coders review errors to stay up to date with unannounced changes from the EHR vendors) and then runs the NLP to figure out which CPT codes to assign to actually put in a bill and send the payer so the hospitals can stay afloat.

So this 45x delta is how much more the medical systems pay Akasa because Epic won't work with Akasa.

This is but one example of why US medical bills are outrageously high.