As an aside, I'm starting to get annoyed with the "we moved fast and broke things, we're smol indie hackers" defense that has been popping up more lately in various contexts. The whole incident started because they got venture capital for their fork and were in a startup accelerator for several months: that's not moving fast or being indie.
> PearAI evidently forked an OSS code editor, then later got funding from Y Combinator for it.
More specifically PearAI forked the OSS code editor Continue, which was itself funded by YC, and got YC funding for it. Also the editor they forked is itself a fork of VS Code, but is not to be confused with Void Editor, which is a third YC funded VS Code fork with AI features. It's YC funded VS Code forks with AI all the way down.
Due to YC's large batch sizes and the consolidation of industries such as AI, increasing numbers of YC startups are now directly competing with each other.
When 98% of your "product" is a thin wrapper around chatGPT, you will of course end up competing against every other product that is a thin wrapper around chatGPT.
Not really. The medical ChatGPT wrappers don't compete with the legal ChatGPT wrappers or the code editor ChatGPT wrappers. It has been argued (ad nauseam) that ChatGPT itself competes with all the wrappers, not that the wrappers compete with each other.
They don't compete right now, but surely the architecture of the system will be quite similar, or solve very similar types of challenges. So it should become easier to jump domains when these solutions mature.
A legal wrapper will use domain specific legal expertise to structure and develop their product and functionality. It will likely have many functions that are specifically optimized for the legal use case.
If a wrapper can easily move across many domains, then the wrapper likely adds little value to the base model.
I just forked the vs code repo and didn't screw up statements on a license for a business model. I'm clearly the superior hedge and I'll be waiting for my check.
you're obviously joking, but it'd be interesting if you actually tried :)
people seem so caught up in founders' particular ideas at the pre-seed stage and forget that YC is investing in people - specifically: people who try. you can jokingly quip that you'd be better at forking vs code, but at the end of the day they're doing it - not "waiting for their check" - and you're making fun of them on the internet ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
You're right, I am joking. I have my own ventures that carry some dignity. It's also premature for a claim that they are "people who try" as they have not produced anything except mistakes and apologies.
Also, maybe consider you're spending your time baselessly defending strangers on the internet. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> people seem so caught up in founders' particular ideas at the pre-seed stage and forget that YC is investing in people - specifically: people who try.
Are they? Seems like based on this YC alum [0], the reality these days is otherwise.
But seriously, this has got to feel pretty shite for continue. What is their impetus to roll out new features when they know that pear can focus on only the icing on top of that milestone, inherently making continue look like a less polished version of pear, when in fact they were the innovators?
I think what we have here is an antisynergy of the incentives baked into open-source and capital speculation. It’s a recursion bug that undermines the incentive structure, and YC was foolish to be so disloyal to their partners.
I don't see many AI companies reaching billion dollar valuations and I don't see any AI company retaining billion dollar valuations in the next five to ten years.
It does dispel the myth that YC is simply investing in founders. They are really investing in the ideas that the partners like and then finding teams who are capable of delivering on it.
Which is of course fine but you see Dalton's Request for Startups and I've not seen only a tiny handful in the last two batches.
My mistake, I haven't used Continue and was led to believe they have their own VS Code distro. PearAI forked VS Code and forked Continues VS Code extension and smushed them together then. They also just wired Continues code up to Claude/GPT4 so the models aren't novel either.
Which I suppose isn't necessarily a gotcha, it's totally possible to be a user of software and figure out ways it could be improved. But the way they pitched themselves was they're building an AI code editor, whereas it seems like they're just making some changes to a free, open-source project.
If I had any guess, the reason they got accepted is from their YouTube followings, and this was essentially a marketing experiment. These guys have audiences of young aspiring developers who could be potential customers if their favorite youtuber were to start claiming they "built" an AI code editor. Not a crazy idea but certainly doesn't smell of an attempt to make an honest and good product.
This is crazy. And then I hear about solid products/companies that don’t get any/very little funding at all because it has no “AI” and it baffles the mind.
Funders are betting on founders. They see somebody willing to take shortcuts and ride hype trains, turn good faith projects and pass them off as their own innovation, and the see the kind of sociopathic organization that has the potential to "become the next Uber."
They aren't funding the viability of the product, they are funding for a take of future earnings of the morally bankrupt or the righteous will of the hopelessly naive. In either case, it's all about how effectively they can affix a leash.
YC filters for companies for gorillion dollar missions / solve gorillion dollar problems.
A mission that is, "I have an AI, input is business plan, output is entire IT infrastructure" is what YC sees here. i.e. programming as a field (quite a cost center) is no longer needed, ironically. Because of that the bar is low. Honestly if anyone is reading this, if you find a very clever novel way to go after this, surely you would be funded
To that I say “fork yeah”, the old GitHub slogan. I haven’t seen Continue complaining about it. It’s far less toxic than Sentry or Hashicorp which are on the other side of the issue. Pear could have been a bit less blatant I guess, but I think it’s fine that they took advantage of the license.
Edit: I just realized the old t-shirt slogan of GitHub was “Fork you.” Even better.
It was open source for about 10 years. They built themselves a name by being open source. Then they went and changed their license to a non-OSI-approved license. https://blog.sentry.io/relicensing-sentry/ Not everyone went along with it, but a lot did.
This is an interesting business model. Continue building on top of YC-funded forks, and you basically end up with a product that was funded by billions, but your own contribution to it was minimal.
I wonder if it's possible to get funding for a fork of an already funded fork that you launched recently.
Might even be an easy money glitch: every couple of years or so you fork your YC funded code editor, get YC funding for the new fork, and cruise on that money for a while.
> ...an interesting business model. Continue building on top of YC-funded forks, and you basically end up with a product that was funded by billions, but your own contribution to it was minimal
Seems like YC should pair more of these smaller companies together, I honestly don’t know if that would help or not. Most YC funded projects aren’t really profitable to begin with.
It’s like somewhere in between getting grant funding for a university project and real corporate work.
I mean, this was precisely PG's genius - taking the right set of unwashed nerds, pairing them up appropriately and then mentoring the end result. That model gave birth to Reddit and Auctomatic.
I don't get it either - why spend $2m on 4 YC companies under different group partners, creating a hunger games of sorts, instead of convincing all of them to combine their talent for $500k. Sure, egos will be bruised and they might fight over who's boss, but the chances of the final product succeeding would be much higher.
imo, the way you first do something + your first responses to serious criticism are the most telling regarding character. because afterwards, you can just play the act of "we're sorry because the backlash was really big and we have to clean up".
They are experienced software developers coming from $300K jobs at Coinbase. As experienced developers they know the requirements in the Apache License 2.0. As former employees at highly regulated Fintech companies like Coinbase they know better than letting ChatGPT make up new legal texts.
They are cynical manipulators hiding behind a made up fictive "careless Gen Z tech bros" image.
I mean... crypto companies are well known for being chock full of decent and honest employees who aren’t zealots or bandwagon jumpers in any way, shape or form.
Just like a lot of recently created “AI” companies.
> As experienced developers they know the requirements in the Apache License 2.0.
I’ve worked at a company with hundreds of devs where I caught an obvious error (a reference to a section that did not exist) in the pre-employment agreement. To imply that most devs are carefully reading documentation in general, much less legalese, is laughable.
But when you're starting or running a business, carefully reading contracts is a critical activity for the success of the business. If the founders can't do this themselves, they should have their attorney do it for them. And if they don't have an attorney, that's a critical error as well and they need one ASAP.
Coinbase internally had the `oh anyone who wants to work on crypto would want to work at Coinbase, you are already at Coinbase, wow, look at you, such a good place you have for yourself` speech given out relatively often. Even after employees commented on how they think they are being underpaid.
The compensation is on the low-end when it comes to what Coinbase pays to its employees. They wronged their hires on multiple occasions with dilutions too. Many of these employees had strike prices that were above what Coinbase IPO'd at. They were relying on their options, otherwise their base pay was undermarket.
This outrage talk is ridiculous, you don’t have the morale high ground to judge people, they didn’t break anything, taking VC money isn’t bad, the incident was caused by sore losers looking for drama, etc etc
No no who says we're smal indide hackers. It has to be that we're the genius god gifted visionaries fixated on a future for humanity that is invisible to mere mortal peasants hence mistakes are inevitable.
They appear to be 2 people. I kinda of think folks should cut two people, one of whom just publicly apologized, a little slack re: how buttoned up they are about licensing. Particularly when they appear to have started sharing source code before YC's investment, and the last time I spoke to an attorney who advises on open source licensing he was expensive.
> They appear to be 2 people. I kinda of think folks should cut two people, one of whom just publicly apologized, a little slack
Reading the room, people are upset about grifters, scams and fakery in general. The outrage is obviously built up over seeing our industry decline to buzzwords, bait and switch, and general enshittification. This is just one particularly clear-cut instance of opportunistic grift caught in the act. It’s like that IoT juice press – it’s not that harmful, but it’s a symbol of what people hate.
I'd take you up on that bet. The AI can get as good as you want, but the reason you get a human to write and verify legal documents is so there's someone accountable. Their own job and reputation is on the line if they're doing bad work. Unless the company providing LawyerBot As A Service and writing everyone's legal documents is going to take all accountability, but that's a massive liability.
> I'm starting to get annoyed with the "we moved fast and broke things, we're smol indie hackers" defense
It's worse than that; this whole kerfuffle came to people's attention after the founder posted a brag tweet about leaving a $300k job at Coinbase to go YC. Only to claim ignorance about the license and everything else later.
"Sorry officer I didn't know I couldn't just rewrite a license to whatever I wanted despite having ample access to legal resources. Yes officer I am a CEO. No officer I will not remain silent."
Terrifying, always afraid to touch unlicensed code. Tried to give most of my public code extremely open licenses because I’d assume some guy crawling the internet for a piece of code probably has enough stress in his life.
i agree with your sentiment, and them botching the license was clearly a problem, but at the same time i think a dev waives their right to be indignant about someone forking and commercializing their code when they provide a perpetual, irrevocable, commercial license to do so. if continue was GPL’d or something i would respect the uproar more
This apology is well done. It's humane, humble, acknowledges specific wrongs that were social failures and technical/legal failures, and explains the fixes going forward.
Whatever you may think of Pear AI, or startups playing too fast and loose, IMHO this apology sounds sincere and worthwhile.
yeah exactly. mistakes happen, they were definitely too influencer-brained in the launch, but its how you handle the feedback that shows your mettle.
still doesnt make pear an investable idea, but the founders showed some humility/ability to read the room here.
conversely, people who dunked on -them- too much showed either their lack of knowledge on open source/startup norms, or their ability to disingenuously ignore that for internet points, and provided many opportunities to be muted.
Here is a clear as day example of a startup who were completely reckless and indifferent to (a) the principles of open source and (b) the concerns of the developer community.
And instead of criticising them you've turned the tables and now the fault is with people like me who are doing this for internet points. Instead of defending what underpins the entire software industry and has contributed so much value to the world.
Maybe they should do a startup that offers apologies for screwing up fundamentals of a business project instead. That seems to be the tangible thing they can deliver.
Meh. Just another variant of the standard corporate "we did everything 100% intentionally but are now backtracking because of public outcry". It isn't a "humane, humble" apology but a PR statement.
I can't wait until this trend of reaction video goes away. The constant repetition and setup. It's like an unedited first draft of America's Funniest Home Videos
I disagree, here's a line which rubs me the wrong way: "We tried to be transparent about what we’d done as much as possible since the beginning of our journey, but that wasn’t good enough." Couple this to "talking about it so publicly online, made it look like we were stealing the work of others as our own."
Contrast that to their comment about "100+ contributors".
It feels like typical deflection.
Also egregious is "We thought the license in the root repo wasn’t that important, so we just generated one that we thought was open."
It's hard to trust someone who would think this in the first place.
> In summary, the apology appears mostly sincere but is tinged with some defensiveness and rationalization, which might affect how it's received, especially by those who were most upset by the initial actions.
Maybe they should pivot to developing an AI powered suite of software license generation and code rebranding and serial number filing and non-apology apology writing plugins for VSCode, so they can say they eat their own dog food.
They're manipulating the reader into thinking it's their unachievably high moral standards that is to blame here: "...but that wasn’t good enough".
You can't "tried to be transparent about what we’d done" and "made it look like we were stealing the work" at the same time.
Either you announce yourself as "Pear, the VS Code Fork that will change the way you code", or you try to be very low key about it yet hope to retain plausible deniability when people call you on your BS.
I'm not really getting that vibe from it, stylistically. I especially feel like ChatGPT (for all its unending shortcomings) would have gone with something more tactful than "that wasn't good enough" -- but this is precisely the kind of thing an undersocialized Computer Guy would actually say with good intentions. In conclusion, while the motivations of the original poster and the provenance of the apology letter text may be debatable, it is important to rem--
Eh, I hadn’t heard about this and now have. Which is wild since I was asked by someone considering trying them just yesterday and I said I frankly had no opinion. Revising that to a negative—I’m not bullish on founders more interested in tweeting than building.
I don't think it reflects well on the founders. The explanation about the license is either a lazy lie, or it shows they're incompetent.
> Our intention was to use the Apache 2.0 license like Continue does.
So why didn't they copy the license like they copied the rest of the code?
> We thought the license in the root repo wasn’t that important, so we just generated one that we thought was open.
Why would the license not be important? And why would they think that the one they generated was open? If they were going to blindly copy and paste from chatgpt, why wouldn't they blindly copy and paste from the original codebase instead, which is already known to be open.
Software licenses are a core part of any software company's business model, so I don't believe for a second that these YC-backed founders didn't realize what they were doing.
... With that said, Apache and all other "OSI approved" licenses are open to being exploited like this, so I don't think they're necessarily in the wrong. The apology, however, is 100% bullshit and I wouldn't trust these people with anything.
Why would you believe anything this person says after that? Default assumption #1 is any writing they output is an LLM product and insincere. Assumption #2 their actions are taken with little thought or intentionality.
This just completely blows my mind. Who in their right mind thinks that generating legal content without even proofreading it is a good idea? It would've probably been less bad if they omitted a license altogether. At the same time, wasn't it recent news that a company that touted AI-assisted lawyers turned out to be no lawyers and just an LLM? The world of today is weird to me.
GenAI usage has definitely has opened my eyes that the average person seems to think legalese is complicated for no rational reason, and it just needs to sound right.
The wild thing isn’t that they ChatGPT’d license. That’s incompetent but forgivable, maybe even smart.
The move that dials the dumbassery to eleven is using it as a defence. On Twitter. Like, Exhibit A for any lawsuit that company is ever in will be this tweet: it demonstrates a proud disrespect for law and contracts. That’s high-proof mens rea if I’ve ever seen any.
Why is that forgivable? Any serious venture would have a involved, you know, some kind of legal expert to do a license. Getting that wrong at any stage has serious repercussions and can effectively end the whole project.
I was given three pieces of advice on starting up my own business and they were good:
Because legal naïvete is common and isn't a good predictor of founder ineptitude. Is it better to be legally savvy? Of course. But thinking you can wing it with a license agreement because it's boring and unfamiliar and you're rather focus on building your product is understandable. (In some cases, it might even be the right call.)
> Claiming legal naivete is acceptable and sometimes even commendable is probably the most irresponsible thing I've ever read on here
I'll stand by it. Most Americans are legally naïve. Most founders are, too. A start-up has to make trade-offs--it's far from clear such licensing agreements are make-or-break at the angel or seed stage.
Once that's pointed out to you, you hopefully either hire a lawyer or mitigate your legal cross section until you can afford one, e.g. by using template license agreements instead of rolling your own. But until you've been given that feedback, it's not some bizarre conclusion someone can come to. Most small businesses, for example, are formed perfectly well without much legal sophistication.
Template license agreements have been presumably written or reviewed by a contract lawyer somewhere along the line. I certainly wouldn't judge a founding team that chooses to use vetted legal templates - that's a reasonable choice early on when money is better spent on product than expensive lawyer hours.
However, using templates is a far cry from asking an LLM to write your agreement and assuming it won't hallucinate something that's going to put you in legal jeopardy.
> However, using templates is a far cry from asking an LLM to write your agreement and assuming it won't hallucinate something that's going to put you in legal jeopardy
Sure. Not disputing it isn’t incredibly stupid. But if, on having that pointed out, the founders had admitted it was a dumb thing to do—they had acted thoughtlessly and recognised as much—I’d be willing to forgive them the error. Hence, forgivable.
"we busy building rn can't be bothered with legal"
Attribution is one of the most basic precepts of decency. Not even "open source" or "free software", just basic decency. Mistakes happen and that's okay, but being all derisive about it initially, and then trying to spin that as "we learned about licensing" after people call you out on it is hard to take as genuine.
A genuine good faith response would have been "oops, what a silly embarrassing mistake" and then spending all of 30 seconds fixing it.
These people "like" open source only as means to extract value. They are only "part of the community" when it suits them. Nihilistic cryptobros considering everything that's not nailed down as a wankdoll to be abused and extract value from – who would have expected?
> "we busy building rn can't be bothered with legal"
This one line tells me that's an outfit that should be avoided entirely. It's either unfathomable incompetence, or a strong aversion to doing things properly. Either way, it says nothing good.
Modern Silicon Valley, YC included, has abandoned its pretences of encouraging meritocracy, product quality and competing in a free and fair market. It's personality hires and ideological alignment over substance these days.
Airbnb and Uber succeeded by simply pouring cash into funding legal challenges, and waiting for cities to give up. OpenAI can't chase after Middle Eastern cash fast enough. Musk and Thiel are openly backing the most brazenly corrupt presidential candidate in US history.
Yeah, I quite confused how these guys got money and I am sure this 'product' won't amount to anything. But some comment on twitter was correct; it's a launch people will remember; that's good I guess.
Wow, that post from the founder is as bad as it gets. Impressive amounts of arrogant, dumb, dismissive, and rude in a single tweet. I can see why yesterday blew up their face.
The "we busy building rn can't be bothered with legal" is especially hilarious given the paltry amount of coding they have actually done so far.
this says more about YC than this particular founder (lots of these types nowadays): i.e. their process, their due diligence, who is advanced from 1000's of applications.
i really used to be wowed by their products and see their immediately utility like stripe and dropbox. now everyone is going founder mode, become an influencer type first and be a (mostl likely AI) guru people might want to follow
People look at the top 5 YC success stories and think every company they fund is of that standard. In reality they "graduate" 500-1000 startups every year. They aren't all winners. In fact I'd wager Pear AI is a lot closer to the norm in terms of quality and competency than, say, Stripe or Airbnb.
I think it speaks to beginner mistakes on the part of the founders.
There are some exceptions but the typical demo day is absolutely stitched together from other peoples’ work. The difference is most hide this fact, instead of working in the clear on “open source” without understanding that it is meant to be a contribution from you to the community, because to finance bros that sounds like a joke.
The whole thing has gotten so washed out that they either thought that this is what people actually do, or they thought no one was going to look at their repo (for a coding product!).
there is a culture of "gaming" that is in fact promoted by YC.
one of the questions they had was to show an instance where the founders "hacked" or "gamed" a system.
ie, game the test, game the admission, game everything.
and some folks see this as "hustle".
eventually their own process gets gamed.
gaming incentivises a culture of "pretension" - you dont know sh* but you fake it. fake it til you make it. copy code-repos, trample over licenses, whatever, who cares as long as you are getting ahead.
That’s not something I’d be putting forward either, anywhere.
In my opinion, it’s just a way for them to be putting forward their “value,” which actually feels dishonorable.
> Our intention was to use the Apache 2.0 license like Continue uses …. we got this right in one of them and wrong in the other. We thought the license in the root repo wasn’t that important, so we just generated one that we thought was open.
99% of the people here would make this mistake.
and to be accused of taking something if you are giving attribution would just be absurd
OSS community has some lame and immature aspects
These guys might have gotten defensive but its obvious how to communicate, to me
I'm sorry but if you think 99% of people here would consider this an acceptable approach to licensing I think you have a weirdly low opinion of this forum:
> We thought the license in the root repo wasn’t that important, so we just generated one that we thought was open.
No part of this sentence makes any sense to anyone remotely informed about licensing.
“making the same mistake” doesn’t equal “considering it an acceptable approach”
the reaction was attributing it to malice, when it obviously was incompetence
that should have been 1 tweet or github issue opened asking them to change it, and it would have been corrected or not. firestorm if they didnt take it seriously
instead of whatever all this drama was pre-emptively
Now you've lost me. It's fine to be legally naïve. But you should have the self awareness to know you're winging it. When someone gives you feedback, especially for free, it's a damning personality trait for the first reaction to be petulance.
99% of people here would… have spicy autocorrect generate some legalistic-looking nonsense, for, based on the above, _absolutely no reason at all_ (given that they’re claiming they believed that it was still under Apache 2.0)?
> We thought the license in the root repo wasn’t that important, so we just generated one that we thought was open.
You know what's even easier than having an LLM generate your license? Copying one that already exists. I know a cool one, it's called Apache 2.0
This person took on (a little) additional work to do this. Since they used Apache 2.0 in one of their repos, they seem to grasp the concept of public licenses. If this truly was pure incompetence, it would have really been major.
It was a well planned and executed publicity stunt:
1. Maximize attention on social media by being super obnoxious and arrogant ("dawg I ChatGPT’d the license")
2. 1 day later while the chatter is still going, write a mea culpa and take on the poor victim role ("grew up in a single mother household on government subsidies")
3. --> Repair most of the reputational damage but keep all the attention.
None of this is illegal, but it's exploiting a system of mutual trust and I wouldn't want to live in a world where everybody acted like that.
P.T. Barnum once said, “There’s no such thing as bad publicity,” which is almost as good as Oscar Wilde’s version, who put it like this: “There’s only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”
I think this is a fine...day 1 "oh man did we dog that one" kind of post. Yah, they really screwed up. In a disqualifying way. But they can recover and you'll only know if you keep following them. Certainly they could say more and be more reflective - should one use chatGPT for a license? There are so many more people they could apologize to in a specific way.
I also believe this could be an inciting incident that leads them to think differently and approach things differently. They could also go right back to their old ways. But I think this is a pretty good day-one response.
Is it typical for VC to just throw money at projects without any sort of oversight/auditing of, oh jeez, IDK, Licensing/Legal issues?
I suppose they figure they can just buy it out in court appeals or something if someone were to take a grievance up with that.
How does Graham, et al justify this lackadaisical attitude... "You win some you lose some"? "It all comes out in the wash"? I guess if you got masses of money to throw away you don't particular care about the legal ramifications? It's just an entry in the books.
How did YC not smell that as a flag, and why should anyone TRUST YC after such a misstep? Or other VCs, not to dish just on YC... How many other situations like this are out there?
Are they going to work to verify licenses with all their projects? Or just wait til disaster erupts and someone finds out they done messed up (oh I know the answer based on the SV motto "ask forgiveness instead of permission").
I am slightly snarky with my attitude, but this is serious shit, and it matters, because the social contract matters, SV Homo Superior Morality be damned. This is the kind of attitude that leads to bank collapses, because they're so busy huffing greed and damn the consequences. In this case, it's obviously not nearly as catastrophic, but it gets tiring to see this attitude that they get to reap benefits while externalities? Those are for the little people to pay.
Traditionally YC invested in the potential of the team, not the details. One purpose of the YC program is/was to fix minor issues including legal ones.
Using a random number generator to write the legally binding license which you will be legally held to in a court of law is not a "minor issue" and not even something that's necessarily "fixable".
I am not a lawyer, but I guarantee you running this strategy past any lawyer will at best get you laughed out of the room.
This reads exactly the same as when people make irresponsible claims like "I know tons of people that don't have home insurance and they were fine. Therefore insurance is a scam"
I suspect the criteria is something like every engineer is going to end up w/ a subscription to some tool like this because the return on investment is so high. Saving 1 hour of work a month easily justifies spending $50. There's no clear winner yet, so let these folks -- who did work on dev tooling elsewhere -- take a stab at it.
Yeah if such a tooling is what you're building, YC is really really great for that. Some 4000 companies are your immediate clients. Well, most of them. And it is not like that another $50 a month is going to shorten the runway of any startup running it into ground.
Rather, you now have company in your portfolio with paying customers right off the bat that it would not have otherwise or would have taken longer than usual.
It’s a good theory. But in practice, it’ll become ever so easy to build something similar, and there’ll be numerous free options to choose from. Good enough free options. And quite probably the bigger fish will start buying the smaller, until it naturally becomes a monoculture. All major editors already have free AI extensions, including the legacy ones like Vim. The only subscription you might need is to the LLM. A way better bet would be to make a model over a specific programming language, you’d have unfairly superior end-to-end development quality and performance, plus a niche to cultivate. My opinion is that the age of general models will not last. You will never be able to run the most capable one on current consumer hardware, yet, you will be able to run a specialized model. All in all, it seems like this generation of AI products will be cemented as progress on AI interfacing, that it, the AIs UIs.
Having advised a company who applied to YC with traction, proven MRR, and a serious team behind, I can’t say it is certainly the case. But having seen a number of companies coming out of the latest batch, it only smells like YC has been drinking from the punch bowl that is HackerNews’ front page hype train.
Nothing wrong with forking, but I am confused that people who obviously do not understand the very simple practices of open source licenses (and if you don't understand; chatgpt does) can be expected to build anything. I don't mean the legal ins and outs of these licenses; I mean the root license 'we thought is not a big deal' and so on. This is so basic that I wonder if anyone actually spoke to them before transferring the money; to write code and make a good product, you need skills that vastly eclipse such kindergarten level license practices.
I was just commenting about this yesterday on here. I am still aghast about some of the drivel that YC appears to be funding. Is this an anomaly or is scale causing them to vet companies less?
Can I get more YC funding by forking Redis, adding OpenAI, and calling it an AI In Memory Cache?
If that is indeed what got funded, those changes appear to be extremely minimal and benign and I can understand why people would have an issue with funding this.
Let's take it to the extreme - how much would you fund a "tech startup" that doesn't have any of its own code at all, but rather just has its founder manually press buttons on a third-party tool's GUI?
Note that I'm not asking whether it's ethical, or even if the service is worth it to a customer (maybe the founder really is good at pressing the right button at the right time) - but would you as a founder fund it, knowing that there's pretty much no barrier-to-entry whatsoever?
I don't know much about this codebase and I am probably one of the dumber people on this site (that's ok, I'm happy and eat well), but take a closer look at some of these commits:
Now to be fair I've never been paid 270k by coinbase so presumably these guys are a lot smarter than me, but I'm still really confused why they got funded.
Your mistake, the right way to do this is to optimize 100% for the leetcode interview and 0% for how to do a job.
You get hired and undercontribute for nine months before putting in notice after you win another interview, which is easier this time because you won one before and got the pedigree.
There is a whole generation of people who write solutions to assignments and have no idea how to create software. These commits are what happens when they don’t receive a prompt requiring a from-scratch implementation of a topological sort.
That's on the companies for structuring their interviews like that. Actual technological competence is not measured, only skill in algorithms and data structures, 75% irrelevant for the job..
Well, I looked through the work and it's mostly random config/frontend changes. I don't see a lot of meaningful work done? Whether LoC matters or not, it doesn't change that pretty much nothing was changed.
Maybe, as a prerequisite for VC funding in the modern world, tech founders should have to show a functional knowledge of open source licensing. It seems to be the cause of a lot of grief in recent years.
It would not have been a problem if they started small (like many open source stuff normally is) and someone would have noted their errors to them. On a small scale. Allowing them to learn.
VC funding turbocharged yet another AI bullshit something-something right into a wall.
Even more ridiculous: someone is giving money to a company that is essentially a patch/extra feature to an existing editor. Imho that is not a "company".
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[ 1.4 ms ] story [ 241 ms ] threadAs an aside, I'm starting to get annoyed with the "we moved fast and broke things, we're smol indie hackers" defense that has been popping up more lately in various contexts. The whole incident started because they got venture capital for their fork and were in a startup accelerator for several months: that's not moving fast or being indie.
More specifically PearAI forked the OSS code editor Continue, which was itself funded by YC, and got YC funding for it. Also the editor they forked is itself a fork of VS Code, but is not to be confused with Void Editor, which is a third YC funded VS Code fork with AI features. It's YC funded VS Code forks with AI all the way down.
This makes more sense now that I think about it.
A legal wrapper will use domain specific legal expertise to structure and develop their product and functionality. It will likely have many functions that are specifically optimized for the legal use case.
If a wrapper can easily move across many domains, then the wrapper likely adds little value to the base model.
people seem so caught up in founders' particular ideas at the pre-seed stage and forget that YC is investing in people - specifically: people who try. you can jokingly quip that you'd be better at forking vs code, but at the end of the day they're doing it - not "waiting for their check" - and you're making fun of them on the internet ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Also, maybe consider you're spending your time baselessly defending strangers on the internet. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Are they? Seems like based on this YC alum [0], the reality these days is otherwise.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41697032
But seriously, this has got to feel pretty shite for continue. What is their impetus to roll out new features when they know that pear can focus on only the icing on top of that milestone, inherently making continue look like a less polished version of pear, when in fact they were the innovators?
I think what we have here is an antisynergy of the incentives baked into open-source and capital speculation. It’s a recursion bug that undermines the incentive structure, and YC was foolish to be so disloyal to their partners.
I don't see many AI companies reaching billion dollar valuations and I don't see any AI company retaining billion dollar valuations in the next five to ten years.
I think the safest bet is in niches where you bring unusual or hard to obtain datasets to the table. Training data is the only moat.
Which is of course fine but you see Dalton's Request for Startups and I've not seen only a tiny handful in the last two batches.
Are you talking about continue.dev?
That's not an editor itself, nor is if a fork of VS Code; it's an extension for VS Code (and JetBrains).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0OylwLzBQw&t=257s
Which I suppose isn't necessarily a gotcha, it's totally possible to be a user of software and figure out ways it could be improved. But the way they pitched themselves was they're building an AI code editor, whereas it seems like they're just making some changes to a free, open-source project.
If I had any guess, the reason they got accepted is from their YouTube followings, and this was essentially a marketing experiment. These guys have audiences of young aspiring developers who could be potential customers if their favorite youtuber were to start claiming they "built" an AI code editor. Not a crazy idea but certainly doesn't smell of an attempt to make an honest and good product.
They aren't funding the viability of the product, they are funding for a take of future earnings of the morally bankrupt or the righteous will of the hopelessly naive. In either case, it's all about how effectively they can affix a leash.
Rent-seeking over value-creation.
A mission that is, "I have an AI, input is business plan, output is entire IT infrastructure" is what YC sees here. i.e. programming as a field (quite a cost center) is no longer needed, ironically. Because of that the bar is low. Honestly if anyone is reading this, if you find a very clever novel way to go after this, surely you would be funded
Edit: I just realized the old t-shirt slogan of GitHub was “Fork you.” Even better.
I wonder if it's possible to get funding for a fork of an already funded fork that you launched recently.
Might even be an easy money glitch: every couple of years or so you fork your YC funded code editor, get YC funding for the new fork, and cruise on that money for a while.
(all of the above is said tongue in cheek)
Don't give blockchain bros any ideas...
It’s like somewhere in between getting grant funding for a university project and real corporate work.
I don't get it either - why spend $2m on 4 YC companies under different group partners, creating a hunger games of sorts, instead of convincing all of them to combine their talent for $500k. Sure, egos will be bruised and they might fight over who's boss, but the chances of the final product succeeding would be much higher.
They are experienced software developers coming from $300K jobs at Coinbase. As experienced developers they know the requirements in the Apache License 2.0. As former employees at highly regulated Fintech companies like Coinbase they know better than letting ChatGPT make up new legal texts.
They are cynical manipulators hiding behind a made up fictive "careless Gen Z tech bros" image.
Um.
I mean... crypto companies are well known for being chock full of decent and honest employees who aren’t zealots or bandwagon jumpers in any way, shape or form.
Just like a lot of recently created “AI” companies.
I’ve worked at a company with hundreds of devs where I caught an obvious error (a reference to a section that did not exist) in the pre-employment agreement. To imply that most devs are carefully reading documentation in general, much less legalese, is laughable.
The compensation is on the low-end when it comes to what Coinbase pays to its employees. They wronged their hires on multiple occasions with dilutions too. Many of these employees had strike prices that were above what Coinbase IPO'd at. They were relying on their options, otherwise their base pay was undermarket.
That's in general not specific to any situation.
Reading the room, people are upset about grifters, scams and fakery in general. The outrage is obviously built up over seeing our industry decline to buzzwords, bait and switch, and general enshittification. This is just one particularly clear-cut instance of opportunistic grift caught in the act. It’s like that IoT juice press – it’s not that harmful, but it’s a symbol of what people hate.
It's like saying 25 years ago that it doesn't take an expert to know that you shouldn't put your credit card on the internet.
It's worse than that; this whole kerfuffle came to people's attention after the founder posted a brag tweet about leaving a $300k job at Coinbase to go YC. Only to claim ignorance about the license and everything else later.
Whatever you may think of Pear AI, or startups playing too fast and loose, IMHO this apology sounds sincere and worthwhile.
still doesnt make pear an investable idea, but the founders showed some humility/ability to read the room here.
conversely, people who dunked on -them- too much showed either their lack of knowledge on open source/startup norms, or their ability to disingenuously ignore that for internet points, and provided many opportunities to be muted.
Mistakes are made without intent. That's not the case here.
Here is a clear as day example of a startup who were completely reckless and indifferent to (a) the principles of open source and (b) the concerns of the developer community.
And instead of criticising them you've turned the tables and now the fault is with people like me who are doing this for internet points. Instead of defending what underpins the entire software industry and has contributed so much value to the world.
I Ranked the Worst Influencer Apology Videos - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYeR7hvpTfw
Contrast that to their comment about "100+ contributors".
It feels like typical deflection.
Also egregious is "We thought the license in the root repo wasn’t that important, so we just generated one that we thought was open." It's hard to trust someone who would think this in the first place.
> In summary, the apology appears mostly sincere but is tinged with some defensiveness and rationalization, which might affect how it's received, especially by those who were most upset by the initial actions.
Clearly they are using “moving fast” as an excuse because they have no moral compass
Smug self entitled YC people thing they are doing amazing things because YC says so.
Really makes you wonder what YC even looks for in a business these days. They're certainly neglecting their due diligence.
You can't "tried to be transparent about what we’d done" and "made it look like we were stealing the work" at the same time.
Either you announce yourself as "Pear, the VS Code Fork that will change the way you code", or you try to be very low key about it yet hope to retain plausible deniability when people call you on your BS.
> Our intention was to use the Apache 2.0 license like Continue does.
So why didn't they copy the license like they copied the rest of the code?
> We thought the license in the root repo wasn’t that important, so we just generated one that we thought was open.
Why would the license not be important? And why would they think that the one they generated was open? If they were going to blindly copy and paste from chatgpt, why wouldn't they blindly copy and paste from the original codebase instead, which is already known to be open.
Software licenses are a core part of any software company's business model, so I don't believe for a second that these YC-backed founders didn't realize what they were doing.
... With that said, Apache and all other "OSI approved" licenses are open to being exploited like this, so I don't think they're necessarily in the wrong. The apology, however, is 100% bullshit and I wouldn't trust these people with anything.
Why would you believe anything this person says after that? Default assumption #1 is any writing they output is an LLM product and insincere. Assumption #2 their actions are taken with little thought or intentionality.
He deleted the tweet, so link with pic (I don’t endorse the generational dig in this tweet): https://x.com/anothercohen/status/1840515897804623882
The detrimental English usage however is.
Is it supposed to hurt using those words?
The move that dials the dumbassery to eleven is using it as a defence. On Twitter. Like, Exhibit A for any lawsuit that company is ever in will be this tweet: it demonstrates a proud disrespect for law and contracts. That’s high-proof mens rea if I’ve ever seen any.
I was given three pieces of advice on starting up my own business and they were good:
1) Get a lawyer
2) Get an accountant
3) Listen to every word they have to say
Because legal naïvete is common and isn't a good predictor of founder ineptitude. Is it better to be legally savvy? Of course. But thinking you can wing it with a license agreement because it's boring and unfamiliar and you're rather focus on building your product is understandable. (In some cases, it might even be the right call.)
I'll stand by it. Most Americans are legally naïve. Most founders are, too. A start-up has to make trade-offs--it's far from clear such licensing agreements are make-or-break at the angel or seed stage.
Once that's pointed out to you, you hopefully either hire a lawyer or mitigate your legal cross section until you can afford one, e.g. by using template license agreements instead of rolling your own. But until you've been given that feedback, it's not some bizarre conclusion someone can come to. Most small businesses, for example, are formed perfectly well without much legal sophistication.
However, using templates is a far cry from asking an LLM to write your agreement and assuming it won't hallucinate something that's going to put you in legal jeopardy.
Sure. Not disputing it isn’t incredibly stupid. But if, on having that pointed out, the founders had admitted it was a dumb thing to do—they had acted thoughtlessly and recognised as much—I’d be willing to forgive them the error. Hence, forgivable.
ChatGPT'ed license signals to me that whoever does that thinks law is not a serious matter rather BS that can be generated via BS generator.
Reasonable people can both respect the law and think license agreements are meaningless gibberish.
They're wrong. But not uncommonly--and I'd argue, not unreasonably--so.
Not realising you're legally naive is beyond stupid. Extraordinarily stupid.
I would assume it would be just an email away for a YC statup.
Attribution is one of the most basic precepts of decency. Not even "open source" or "free software", just basic decency. Mistakes happen and that's okay, but being all derisive about it initially, and then trying to spin that as "we learned about licensing" after people call you out on it is hard to take as genuine.
A genuine good faith response would have been "oops, what a silly embarrassing mistake" and then spending all of 30 seconds fixing it.
These people "like" open source only as means to extract value. They are only "part of the community" when it suits them. Nihilistic cryptobros considering everything that's not nailed down as a wankdoll to be abused and extract value from – who would have expected?
This one line tells me that's an outfit that should be avoided entirely. It's either unfathomable incompetence, or a strong aversion to doing things properly. Either way, it says nothing good.
Airbnb and Uber succeeded by simply pouring cash into funding legal challenges, and waiting for cities to give up. OpenAI can't chase after Middle Eastern cash fast enough. Musk and Thiel are openly backing the most brazenly corrupt presidential candidate in US history.
The "we busy building rn can't be bothered with legal" is especially hilarious given the paltry amount of coding they have actually done so far.
Where it's all about the hustle, founder mode, the scene and whatever you can get away with to make money and take advantage of people.
There are some exceptions but the typical demo day is absolutely stitched together from other peoples’ work. The difference is most hide this fact, instead of working in the clear on “open source” without understanding that it is meant to be a contribution from you to the community, because to finance bros that sounds like a joke.
The whole thing has gotten so washed out that they either thought that this is what people actually do, or they thought no one was going to look at their repo (for a coding product!).
ie, game the test, game the admission, game everything. and some folks see this as "hustle".
eventually their own process gets gamed.
gaming incentivises a culture of "pretension" - you dont know sh* but you fake it. fake it til you make it. copy code-repos, trample over licenses, whatever, who cares as long as you are getting ahead.
99% of the people here would make this mistake.
and to be accused of taking something if you are giving attribution would just be absurd
OSS community has some lame and immature aspects
These guys might have gotten defensive but its obvious how to communicate, to me
> We thought the license in the root repo wasn’t that important, so we just generated one that we thought was open.
No part of this sentence makes any sense to anyone remotely informed about licensing.
the reaction was attributing it to malice, when it obviously was incompetence
that should have been 1 tweet or github issue opened asking them to change it, and it would have been corrected or not. firestorm if they didnt take it seriously
instead of whatever all this drama was pre-emptively
Doubtful. That said, some may.
> guys might have gotten defensive
Now you've lost me. It's fine to be legally naïve. But you should have the self awareness to know you're winging it. When someone gives you feedback, especially for free, it's a damning personality trait for the first reaction to be petulance.
99% of people here would… have spicy autocorrect generate some legalistic-looking nonsense, for, based on the above, _absolutely no reason at all_ (given that they’re claiming they believed that it was still under Apache 2.0)?
I mean, this place is bad, but not that bad.
You know what's even easier than having an LLM generate your license? Copying one that already exists. I know a cool one, it's called Apache 2.0
This person took on (a little) additional work to do this. Since they used Apache 2.0 in one of their repos, they seem to grasp the concept of public licenses. If this truly was pure incompetence, it would have really been major.
Unless the quality of HN has dropped to such catastrophically low levels that TikTok comments section infested with bots is higher, no.
Seriously, this is ignorance at its finest.
Cmon guy
1. Maximize attention on social media by being super obnoxious and arrogant ("dawg I ChatGPT’d the license")
2. 1 day later while the chatter is still going, write a mea culpa and take on the poor victim role ("grew up in a single mother household on government subsidies")
3. --> Repair most of the reputational damage but keep all the attention.
None of this is illegal, but it's exploiting a system of mutual trust and I wouldn't want to live in a world where everybody acted like that.
I also believe this could be an inciting incident that leads them to think differently and approach things differently. They could also go right back to their old ways. But I think this is a pretty good day-one response.
I suppose they figure they can just buy it out in court appeals or something if someone were to take a grievance up with that.
How does Graham, et al justify this lackadaisical attitude... "You win some you lose some"? "It all comes out in the wash"? I guess if you got masses of money to throw away you don't particular care about the legal ramifications? It's just an entry in the books.
How did YC not smell that as a flag, and why should anyone TRUST YC after such a misstep? Or other VCs, not to dish just on YC... How many other situations like this are out there?
Are they going to work to verify licenses with all their projects? Or just wait til disaster erupts and someone finds out they done messed up (oh I know the answer based on the SV motto "ask forgiveness instead of permission").
I am slightly snarky with my attitude, but this is serious shit, and it matters, because the social contract matters, SV Homo Superior Morality be damned. This is the kind of attitude that leads to bank collapses, because they're so busy huffing greed and damn the consequences. In this case, it's obviously not nearly as catastrophic, but it gets tiring to see this attitude that they get to reap benefits while externalities? Those are for the little people to pay.
I am not a lawyer, but I guarantee you running this strategy past any lawyer will at best get you laughed out of the room.
YC has a long history of funding companies that blatantly break laws such as AirBnB and Uber, so I wouldn't expect they'd be bothered by this.
_Generated_? Oh, yeah, that’ll go well.
Of all the comically inappropriate uses of LLMs I’ve heard of, _writing legal documents_ has to almost number one, behind perhaps only medical use.
Maybe there's a billion dollar company in that or a sustainable business model because consumer hardwar may never be able to run LLMs.
But I really don't know because otherwise I'm sure pretty stable, serious ideas with proven demand would be rejected outright.
Rather, you now have company in your portfolio with paying customers right off the bat that it would not have otherwise or would have taken longer than usual.
Can I get more YC funding by forking Redis, adding OpenAI, and calling it an AI In Memory Cache?
No. But, maybe if you call it RediAI
Here are the commits from the founders:
* https://github.com/trypear/pearai-submodule/commits?author=n... (71 commits)
* https://github.com/trypear/pearai-submodule/commits?author=F... (21 commits)
This is what got funded... I leave it to folks to decide if the changes to date are meaningful.
If someone builds an electron app and gets VC funded, is that somehow unethical?
Lines of code is irrelevant. Only issue is if they are building on top of a codebase whose license they have violated.
Let's take it to the extreme - how much would you fund a "tech startup" that doesn't have any of its own code at all, but rather just has its founder manually press buttons on a third-party tool's GUI?
Note that I'm not asking whether it's ethical, or even if the service is worth it to a customer (maybe the founder really is good at pressing the right button at the right time) - but would you as a founder fund it, knowing that there's pretty much no barrier-to-entry whatsoever?
Lines of code is a proxy for "how hard would it be for someone else to do what these guys are doing but better" and the answer here is "not very".
https://github.com/trypear/pearai-submodule/commit/bf67ece35...
Just dd a promptfrom one object and p it to another.
https://github.com/trypear/pearai-submodule/commit/c59d90a4c...
change a keyboard shortcut lol
https://github.com/trypear/pearai-submodule/commit/489004ae0...
manually set font size in 3 places but remove the variable that would still be valid in 2 places???
https://github.com/trypear/pearai-submodule/commit/9bbee4c3d...
made an error message longer
Now to be fair I've never been paid 270k by coinbase so presumably these guys are a lot smarter than me, but I'm still really confused why they got funded.
You get hired and undercontribute for nine months before putting in notice after you win another interview, which is easier this time because you won one before and got the pedigree.
There is a whole generation of people who write solutions to assignments and have no idea how to create software. These commits are what happens when they don’t receive a prompt requiring a from-scratch implementation of a topological sort.