67
points
nichochar
Joined 1,766 karma
https://nicholascharriere.com
- I'm building an app builder (getmocha.com) and one of my favorite use cases I have seen is "small private social network":
some people are building custom, tailored social networks only available to their family, church, community, sports team, school, etc...
This was previously impossible but now AI changes that. I don't know if it will materialize, but a more federally distributed web with tons of small private social networks could be a future of healthy social
- Elixir and Phoenix are very underrated.
It combines the "opinionated" aspects of ruby and rails and the power of erlang. The BEAM is like no other runtime and is incredibly fun to work with and powerful once you get how to use genservers and supervision trees.
We use Elixir for Mocha, and my one issue with it (I disagree with OP on this) is that live-view is not better than React for writing consumer grade frontends. I wish Phoenix took a much stronger integration with React approach, that would finalize it as the top choice for a web stack.
- disclaimer: building a competitor (https://getmocha.com)
Lovable and bolt took a massive shortcut: they outsourced the backend to a third party (supabase).
This makes their ceiling to build "useful" software incredibly low.
The right approach takes a lot more time: pick an opinionated framework (think ror) and build up a full stack app builder from the ground up.
Took us months and months of work to get it working, but now people _can_ build "useful" software (thats our bar)
- This analysis is very much on point. I'm building a product in this space (https://getmocha.com), and can share a few more insider insights:
- The churn from companies like lovable is indeed very high, and user frustration is high also.
- There are sub-niches available. Building internal tools is not the same as landing pages is not the same as saas. In the previous website builder market, different players (webflow, squarespace, wix) found and dominated a sub-niche
- The market is way bigger than anyone realizes. Today hundreds of millions for basically early adopters and highly tech-savvy users. This tech can and will go mainstream
- A huge issue with lovable, solved by others like mocha and replit, is the app backend. Lovable took a shortcut and partnered with supabase but that deal will not last. Supabase is losing big on their free tier (had to raise 200M to support it) and both want to capture the margin from the customer. There will be a reckoning.
- Even if what you said was true, it will be false within months or years.
What then?
This is the whole premise of the article. Just extrapolate and imagine that it can think and write poetry better than you (it will, and likely soon), what then?
It's a very important question. A cultural one.
- Reasoning:
.com is the best TLD by a long shot but it's really saturated, so as a startup you have no chance.
As you say, the hope is to make it and be able to buy the X in getX.com where hopefully you've checked that X belongs to a squatter and not an existing company (they're both bad the latter is worse).
- Yeah I don't agree. I'm building a product in the space, and the number one problem is correctness, not latency.
People are very happy to sit there for minutes if the correctness is high and the quality is high. It's still 100x or 1000x faster than finding 3rd party developers to work for you.
I wish the models were getting better but recently they've felt very stuck and this is it, so agent architectures will be the answer in the short term. That's what's working for us at srcbook rn.
- try the thing i'm building, it will build a website for you from a simple prompt: https://srcbook.com
- I am building https://srcbook.com which is in this category but focused on webapps.
It's unreal what the AI can do tbh.
- I have a masters degree in math/physics, and 10+ years of being a SWE in strong tech companies. I have come to rely on these models (Claude > oai tho) daily.
It is insane how helpful it is, it can answer some questions at phd level, most questions at a basic level. It can write code better than most devs I know when prompted correctly...
I'm not saying its AGI, but diminishing it to a simple "chat bot" seems foolish to me. It's at least worth studying, and we should be happy they care rather than just ship it?
- As someone building a client which needs to sync with a local filesystem (repo) and database, I cannot emphasize how wonderful it is that there is a push to standardize. We're going to implement this for https://srcbook.com
- Notebooks are hot these days! We also shipped our own version of a TypeScript notebook[1] but it takes quite different sides of the tradeoff: we want to run backend node code, so unlike this or observable we're not looking to run in the browser environment. Still, for many applications, this idea is a better take!
Kudos to the author.
- We built an open-source and local tool that allows you to take these even further. Highly recommend plugging in the latest model, but you can keep iterating on the apps.
Currently also on the front page https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=41926067
- Would love to hear your thoughts on our own product in the space:
- Imports is the thing that makes it useless. You cannot import stuff normally in the kernel..
Yes, my current project is https://github.com/srcbookdev/srcbook
- 16 points
I understand the "enjoy doing anyway" part and it resonates, but not using AI is simply less productive.