Posted by brandur 2 days ago
I got a few weeks in to each and then stalled on all of them because the effort and motivation required to extend beyond the crazed early days _is_ still more than the utility I get.
In a professional context, paying someone for software to do something outside my core domain is still the practical option compared to the motivation and effort needed to maintain another dependency.
Certainly, I still have those tendencies, but it's easier than ever to push through and build a throwaway version with code that might not be what I end up shipping, but is enough to help me understand the final shape of the solution. Once that happens, I'm unblocked and away I go again.
The mental cost of building throwaway code has essentially dropped to zero for me. Of course, I keep working now until light mode comes on automatically on my Mac, but that's a whole other problem.
Your customers are more irrational than you are, and your appeal to them will likely need to resonate with them on an emotional level rather than logical one. I would argue that marketing is the hardest part of entrepreneurship, by far.
The circumstances that led to me trying to push River for the next few months were somewhat accidental, and it felt like a good moment to at least make a go of trying to make it work. I'm not committing the rest of my career/life to any particular decision one way or the other.
I'll reiterate too that I believe we're still quite early in the LLM age and are still waiting for the other shoe to drop. All LLM-generated software feels free at the moment because it's still novel and the exhilaration of accomplishment when you build something complex inside of a few hours is addictive beyond words. However, within a year or two I think we're going to have a lot more software, all of which needs maintaining to some degree, and we're going to become a little more reluctant to generate new projects to add to the heap. This'll cause an adjustment back to a more compromise position.
(Also, could be completely wrong about all of that, so take it for what it is.)
These are the obvious first targets to point AI at when onboarding. And it plows through a ton of the low hanging fruit. Then where are you after that? Suddenly productivity falls off a cliff and you are left in reality: good ideas are hard to come by and theres more to business than software.
The future is going to see an uptick in overall productivity for sure. And AI will tighten feedback loops enormously, in really positive ways. But current trajectories are already starting to come down to reality, and businesses are slowly realizing they still need to put in the hard work.
Unrelated: love your stuff. Ive gotten a lot out of your articles and I really appreciate you posting such well written content.
"one of those stingy programmers" might be clearer wrt this use of "cheap" meaning "tightwad" not "inexpensive"
That said, I think the path Brandur is describing is well-trodden and proven out by projects like Sidekiq.
This feature almost always went away as the company grew and the abuse became too much to ignore. I thought it would be safe to trust developers and to deal with isolated abuse when it came up, but the number of people who see any spending perk and treat it like a target they need to maximize is way higher than I ever thought.
There are a lot of examples of this, like companies that offer to pay for dinner if people have to stay late. This seemingly always turns into a game where people hang out in the office and scroll on their phones until the allowed time arrives, then they take their dinner and leave. This doesn’t happen at small companies where you can witness what people are doing, but cross the threshold to big company and many people start doing whatever they can get away with.
There was a big story a few years ago about how employees at a big company were even caught using this perk to order their home groceries because the DoorDash like service they used had launched a section where they could get those things delivered with their food. It was crazy that employees making mid six figure salaries were still brazenly breaking the rules for personal gain of a couple hundreds of dollars per month.
This creates so many weird inefficiencies that I have seen an entire billion dollar companies analytics run on free google sheets + compute because they couldn't figure out what to use for five years.
Build a good product and they will come.
Acquiring new software is a major commitment beyond just the price tag. It means integration, continuous maintenance, dealing with forced UI updates, supply chain exposure, and so on.
Every seasoned dev (unless very lucky) has dealt with bad software acquisitions, almost all of which seemed to be great deals at the time of purchase.
Not to mention enshittification, predatory prices increases, the supplier getting bought out, etc. The list goes on...
And some bureaucracy is often necessary to evaluate security, data protection agreements, etc.
Some companies are not efficiently allocating resources and so projects sit in legal/security review for longer than is reasonable, but it makes sense that individual developers don't have unilateral authority to use 3rd party vendors.
Packed full of insightful comments that cut against the grain and are logical even if unpleasant to hear, delivered with kindness and a thoughtful, caring tone, and backed up with strong justification.
Did I mention delivered with kindness?
And it mirrors my experience. The struggle has me convinced that to sell anyone anything your offer has to be so overwhelmingly good they’d not just win from having it but lose from not having it. It’s why the slick salespeople of old would talk for minutes at you just to get you to buy a thing once - non stop talking attacking your objections from every angle before finally moving on to the price. Sure, as the person offering the thing you see the value - but your prospect just showed up to your site, they’ve got an Amazon purchase to finish on another tab, the baby is crying in the other room, and there’s an outage. Sorry - your thing does what again?
It’s a bit funny because I felt this way before coding agents as well, like you could clone something in just a few weeks. But in practice my expectations are rarely accurate.
Why? Because you have to actually use the product to discover what is wrong, or sub-optimal, with it.
I was building a transaction classifier recently and I initially thought it would be a trivial “solved” problem. Throw transactions into a tiny local LLM, let it classify. But that approach was too slow, and not accurate enough. I didn’t know that though until I tried and then needed to change the spec.
> But does that always hold true? Let’s take the other side for a second by examining a much higher-priced SaaS product. Gemini reports that the price of a fully loaded Salesforce seat is ~$500/mo. Say you need 50 seats, that’s $25k/mo!
> For that price you could have 1.5x engineering resources (25 / 16.7) working on your clone full time. Once again, a CRM’s a reasonably complex piece of software and a rebuild wouldn’t be trivial, but no matter how you construe it, this is closer to a “build” decision, even for a smaller company. (And with Salesforce down 30% YTD, the markets seem to believe it too.)
If $25k for salesforce is too much, my view is that your first thought should be to look for a cheaper competitor, not build a thing?
Ok, you vibed your own. Great! Now you need custom integrations for everything, you can't hire out of the market, you have to re-train everyone and all new starters, you have an extra thing to HA, monitor, back up etc. People can't google for answers about it anymore. This is before we can talk about what it actually costs in terms of bikeshedding, roadmap creation, project management, product management etc etc. Plus compliance, security, your org policies and relevant regulations if you're storing personal information. Think of how many meetings it would take to get this done, the political costs, and how much it costs to get consensus in big companies.
There is also RISK. Nobody is gonna get fired for choosing SalesForce, but there are many different angles by which building an in-house solution for something considered commodity (tho an expensive one) can go horribly wrong.
The more subtle cost is _brain space_. Human engineers have context limits too; switching projects has costs, and you can't put ONE engineer on the thing and expect it to be sustainable. You need about a minimum of four people to understand anything you expect to maintain and operate long term.
Your org's capacity for engineering focus is precious and IMHO you should try really hard not to use it on non-core stuff unless you have to.
There is a range of information quality to sort out, but frontier coding models are learning a great deal from interacting with effective developers that the models can then model their agents on.
But they’ll never YOLO. Life goes on outside us and all around us ;)
In their eyes, community moderation is an inverted pendulum that eventually falls over. Either one niche and unprofitable direction dominates, or the community turns it into an incoherent junk drawer of features. You're also opening yourself up to competitors poisoning the whole thing. To investors, it signals a lack of vision.
Feedback isn't inherently good or bad, but it can be unnecessary risk if you already know you have a solid product that meets the most common use cases with the strongest demand.
This is why successful products tend to be very mediocre. They're the average of all insights considered. Doing anything else is leaving money on the table.
To answer your question, nobody wants their product to become the platform that launches your directly competing product. That's suicide. You're asking to ride someone else's coattails.
the features that affect the long tail can come from vocal complaints, but the best usually are ones you have to go asking around to find out about.
the really important people to ask have seemed to be the ones who don’t know how to ask or assumed they aren’t allowed to ask or something.
YMMV
The author hints at this in a footnote: > It does, however, pencil out to use a different product instead. In this particular case, it’s easy: use Linear instead of Jira.
If you are looking to replicate the exact same feature set of an existing product - buying would almost always be a better choice.
But it's rare for avg customer needs to perfectly match product features. Most often they need 20-40% of the product + some custom, business specific logic that's missing and is later fixed with spreadsheets/integrations. In that case it depends on how mission critical this software is.
I'd say investing into the core software that runs your business might very well be worth the effort, even if it's 10x between build vs buy.
think twice about this lol
So many things I am completely capable of doing on my own I simply don’t want to. I have better things to do. More valuable things.
Yes, build versus buy. The eternal question!
This right here is the key difference! Yes anyone can vibe code a replacement for many apps - but will it still run 2 years later (assuming they get it 'running' in an prod environment at all
That's funny, the first thing every LLM I use generally does is install a bunch of third party packages...