I should've been more clear, I feel like at 51 a better leverage of impact is no longer the startup but writing (essays, blogs, books) or other forms of influence (e.g. teaching)
At 51 you don't have the energy and time to compete on "grinding" which is often the "advantage" in the early days of a startup before a moat has solidified
You appear from your published CV to be much, much younger than 51. I'm not 51, but I'm much closer to it than you are, and at an age where many people in my social circle at past that. What on earth gives you the confidence to say something like "at 51 you don't have the energy to compete"?
Also, at 51, you probably have more time to compete than a 36 year old.
I certainly had much more time & energy for startup shenanigans in my mid 40s than I did in my mid 30s. But even with that experience I’d be very hesitant to extrapolate about any age because of how different everyone’s lives are.
I don't want to speculate too wildly, but I think it may be possible that everybody's life and energy levels and motivation and interests are not tracked on the same fixed linear path.
Though I guess it would be nice as somebody in my 20s to picture that my future is an established track to follow.
Or at the very least, to be able to say to yourself, “You’re doing fine. You’re beating yourself up because you haven’t started a company in your 20s, but that’s ok. Because you haven’t aged out of being a founder, and you can still do what drives you.”
I think it's a cool perspective, but the not-so-hidden assumption is that for any given domain, the efficiency asymptote peaks well above the alternative.
And that really is the entire question at this point: Which domains will AI win in by a sufficient margin to be worth it?
> the not-so-hidden assumption is that for any given domain, the efficiency asymptote peaks well above the alternative
This is an assumption for the best-case scenario, but I think you could also just take the marginal case. Steady progress builds until you get past the state of the art system, and then the switch becomes easy to justify.
I think you're assuming a pattern existed in 1996 that didn't actually exist until the 2010s.
In 1996 JavaScript was extremely limited; even server side processing was often limited to CGI scripts. There was nothing like React that was in common use at the time. The Space Jam website was almost certainly not dynamically compiled as HTML - it existed and was served as a static set of files.
Even a decade later, React and the frontend-framework sort of thinking wasn't really a big thing. People had started to make lots of things with "DHTML" in the early 2000s where JavaScript was used to make things spicier (pretty animations, some server side loading with AJAX) and still often worked without JS enabled in a pattern called graceful degradation.
What you'd get from "View Source", or "Inspect Element", and what was literally saved on disk of spacejam.com, was almost certainly the same content.
I'm not trying to dispute this though. Although I appreciate the clarity, I am aware of the web's past.
The only point I was trying to make was that this project could be better achieved by an LLM if spacejam.com's HTML is supplied.
For why you'd want to do this rather than simply use the original code is up to the developer, but I'd expect a common reason to be the ease of modern frameworks. Some justifications for making Claude create the same code again in a different framework include:
- Using <script> tags is bad practice in a lot of modern frameworks, and it's better to just translate to React and run your logic directly within components.
- Perhaps you're using TailwindCSS, in which case it's a good idea to port over all the original CSS so you can have unified codebase.
- Hosting on modern frameworks is often conveinent.
- Sometimes (although maybe not for a website this small) the source code with a framework is less verbose.
You probably misunderstood me because I paraphrased "raw" HTML several times throughout my comments in this thread before I actually read the page source and realized it was the original source code.
I think that the reason why everyone is acting surprised about your suggestion is that the target wasn’t to obtain the page in some higher level framework or anything. The HTML of the page was what the author wanted Claude to output. Would he used source HTML as an input, there would be nothing for Claude to do. Different exercise.
Do you guys find Django includes enough batteries? Why or why not?
I find myself using Cookiecutter Django [^1] more often than not, better auth, a bunch of boilerplate configs, S3 and email setups if you want, and other stuff rather than have to jiggle with "Django infra" myself
The problem is I don't think every answer needs a mini-app. I'd argue there are very few answers that do.
For example, it feels like Google's featured snippet (quick answer box) but expanded. But the thing is, many people don't like the feature snippet, and there's a reason it doesn't appear for many queries - it doesn't contribute meaningfully to those.
This functionality is doing exactly the opposite of the process of building good web apps: Rather than "unpacking functionality" and making it specific for an audience, it "packs" all functionality into a generalized use case, at the cost of becoming extremely mediocre for each use case, which makes it precisely worse than any other tool you'd use for that job.
As a specific example, I clicked your apartments in LES search (https://www.phind.com/search/find-me-options-for-a-72e019ce-...) and it shows us just 4 listings...? It shows some arbitrary subset of all things I could find on StreetEasy, and then provides a subset of the search functionality, losing things such as days on market, neighborhood, etc.
It's a cool demo, but "on-demand software" is exactly "Solution-In-Search-of-a-Problem".
The difficult part you need to ask is, like feature snippet, what are the questions worth solving with this, and is the pain point big enough that it's worth solving?
I tend to agree: I don’t understand what the “one-off app” is trying to achieve. In the example of the rental apartment—the user specified the parameters in the query. Just apply them, right?
I offer this in the spirit of feeling like I’m missing something, not out of negativity—I just genuinely don't understand the proposition.
What’s the advantage of trying to extract and normalize features from already-messy data sources, then provide controls that duplicate the query, rather than just applying the query and returning the results? Isn’t the user turning to a natural-language LLM specifically to avoid operating idiosyncratic UI controls?
For that matter, it takes time to learn to use an interface effectively. To understand how what it says it’s doing connects to what it’s actually doing. I know I can always trust McMaster Carr’s filter controls, and I know I can never trust Amazon’s wacky random ones.
It seems to me that it’s much harder to pick the right controls and make them work correctly than it is to throw some controls in an interface. Maybe that’s what I’m missing: that just wiring in controls in the first place is the hard part for most people who don’t work in this space.
Is the idea here that I’d need to learn a brand new interface, and figure out whether I can trust it, with every query?
A hypothesis here is that well-crafted UI helps you understand/see options for what you don't yet know.
For example, here's an example for a "day trip plan in Bristol" that contains a canonical example (directly based on the query), but also a customization widget that presents some options that you might not have already thought about if you were just doing a text-based followup.
> I don’t understand what the “one-off app” is trying to achieve.
Many years ago in college I worked on building Java applets that let kids visualize math related concepts. Sliders make things like sine/cosine and all sorts of other cool stuff way way more intuitive. We had a applet that, let you do ridiculous comparisons, to visualize how many empire state buildings a marathon is in length, etc. We had an primitive 'engine' simulator that let you adjust inputs on a steam engine. stuff like that
Thanks for the feedback, and I agree that it is very much early days for this product category. To be clear, our goal is to make the software specific for an audience: you. What's exciting, though, is that models are rapidly improving at building on-demand software and this will directly benefit Phind. There are still many edge cases, but I think it will get better quickly.
Hmm this answer seems to have ignored everything I said, provided a generic answer ("you") which is exactly the problem, and doubled down on models/technology portion (and edge cases?) which is neither built by Phind nor did I question.
I would like to see a detection of when I want a one sentence answer and when I want a full interactive explanation with flowcharts and tables and diagrams.
My most common usecase now is "give me a quick answer because I don't want to wade through the search engine results page and then wade through the blog to get my one liner. Eg: "what's the command line to untar an xz over ssh?"
I hear you, but why not use something like Google AI Mode or AI Overviews for that? That's pretty hard to beat for simple questions in terms of speed, especially for one-liners.
Because it violates GitHub’s trademark. I expect them to send the author a cease and desist notice; and if the author is unresponsive or challenges the notice, GitHub will almost certainly initiate the dispute (UDRP) process, which will inevitably cede control of it to them.
> I think you’re putting too much weight on cost (time, money), and not enough weight on “quality of life”, in your analysis.
"Quality of life" is a hugely privileged topic to be zooming in on. For the vast majority of people both inside and outside the US, Time and Money are by far the most important factors in their lives.
Setting aside time, is money not downstream from quality of life? Meaning, in a better world one might not need to care as much about money? I believe that time and quality of life are congruent - good quality of life means control over one’s own time.
I appreciate the feedback on the writing!
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