Like many of us, I've been hobbying away on some SaaS that wraps an LLM. But I often worry, isn't this just adding buttons to an LLM call? What's the real value here? Quick money grab and wait for copies? Or do my 20 years of saas and business development actually make my SaaS better then others?
Even if I could answer your question (which I can't), things change so fast right now that it might not be valid for long. All you can do is be willing to rapidly adapt and stay focused on where your product adds value.
I believe it completely depends on your values and perspective, as a poor analogy: when mobile apps were a novelty a bunch of them were just that, novelties, the beer drinking app, the flicking a Zippo-esque app, and many more that hadn't much functionality, were more a tech demo, cool toys, etc.
If you don't care so much about adding something significant to the world, and your LLM-buttons-wrapper is a novelty, chug along and see where it goes if you're having fun. Looking for what value mean at this moment is a much harder effort, and probably a luck-based endeavour.
I don't have fun creating LLM-wrappers or at least haven't thought of a fun idea for it that could be even a fun novelty to work on so personally I'm not doing it but I'm using LLMs for other fun stuff that required much more of my free time before.
I used to think like this, but eventually I realized it's mostly just a way to pat yourself on the back. And ironically, I rarely saw people doing significant things waste energy talking like that, since there's no benefit in the exercise.
Very few things can't be reduced to insignificance. MacOS was just cribbing PARC, Facebook is just a glorified PHP forum, Dropbox is just SFTP, etc. etc.
Even in deep-tech, Zipline is just wrapping from deeper-tech (batteries motors etc), GLP-1s were a VA throwaway that dusted off, etc. etc.
LLM wrapper doesn't mean anything, it's an implementation detail. Besides being an LLM wrapper what is a given thing?
The beer app wasn't just a beer app, it was the intersection of the first time accelerometers were doing something that the average consumer could interact with in their pocket, the first time there was something to spend money on for your phone besides a wallpaper, a ton of things.
If anything now when something seems trivial or like a toy, but it has a lot of traction, I want to spend energy figuring out why is it more meaningful than it appears.
> I used to think like this, but eventually I realized it's mostly just a way to pat yourself on the back. And ironically, I rarely saw people doing significant things waste energy talking like that, since there's no benefit in the exercise.
I don't get what exactly you are talking about as a reply to my comment, what exercise exactly? Deciding if something is worth spending time if you're having fun with it?
> If anything now when something seems trivial or like a toy, but it has a lot of traction, I want to spend energy figuring out why is it more meaningful than it appears.
Sure, if you're having fun (and in fun I include a sense of accomplishment, curiosity, whatever tickles you) with that, go for it.
It's a strangely arrogant reply to my comment, perhaps you read something into it that I didn't say and replied to that?
The exercise is trying to reduce the world into significant/not significant efforts and then write some things off as only worth it if you don't care about the former.
Also I honestly thought we were two arrogant people conversing in good faith: you don't find unarrogant people saying things like "If you don't care so much about adding something significant to the world..."
> you don't find unarrogant people saying things like "If you don't care so much about adding something significant to the world..."
I think text distorts what I meant with that, I personally don't care much about adding something significant to the world, not anymore at least.
I found my peace by pursuing what interests me personally even though I know it might not be of much significance to anyone else, and that I won't be pursuing the path of "adding something significant" just for the prestige of it in my life.
In a sense it's the opposite of arrogance since I care much more that the person is enjoying the process of whatever they are doing rather than the results of it. I've seen too many bright friends end up miserable chasing it, I've felt too miserable myself when putting too much focus on that, I'd rather have people enjoying doing what they are interested at if it's not something harmful.
Many of us have the exact same thought process. Related: I have heard indie game developers have stopped the traditional practice of updating a dev log as a form of marketing and community building because people will point their LLm at it and create your own game before you do
I have some strong feelings about this particular story (people point LLMs at your devlog)…
- Video devlogs were long a shitty way to make a community (I can explain this one in more detail, but in short, the tradeoff between opportunity cost and video quality is a Pareto curve that is bad at all points on the curve, if your goals include both “make game” and “build community for players with devlogs”, the way out is to drop one of those two requirements, either “make YouTube/Twitch/TikTok channel” replaces “make game”, or you build some other audience for your devlogs)
- Good devlogs don’t have that level of detail, to let people easily recreate games
- Most games can’t easily be replicated by LLMs, in short, the people who are good at steering LLMs like that are making their own games.
This is not the first time I heard this story. Sometimes it comes with the lamentation “back in the day people could build communities with devlogs” and no, that was generally not a good way to build communities. It was mostly good streams from YouTubers who were making the game in order to make YouTube content or it was mediocre streams from random devs. Throw in a few people who are famous game devs who choose to stream and get a big audience because they already have a community.
It doesn't need to recreate your game. It can still muddy your marketing and redden the ocean. Especially if someone is in the business of trying to front run an indie game, they don't need to be any where close to a full or good game to attempt to steal any mindshare your project had.
AFAICT this is a fear that some game developers have, that someone will steal their game and run with it, and the stories told are more repeated based on this shared fear than based on realistic scenarios. People repeat it because it’s a good story.
And yes, I’m aware of some situations like 0x10c and the like.
I frequent a couple of game development communities, and it's kind of hilarious that some people won't even talk about their general game concept for fear that others will steal their idea. Like wow, you're making another rogue deck-builder, I have to steal that!
The idea is not valuable, ideas are a dime a dozen. The actual value is in your implementation.
I don't think it has to be about stealing their game with any level of skill or fidelity. It's enough to just spam 10 garbage clones with vaguely similar banner images and descriptions so that nobody will find theirs.
It really makes me appreciate how important good game design is. Claude is doing a fine job coding everything I describe, but it doesn't really understand fun, so I need to.
This is my experience too. I think people with no gamedev experience widely underestimate the challenge of good game design and the need for iteration with real people testing the game. In a similar way that an inexperienced game developer overestimates their skill to assess the fun and all the small details that matter, and will get demolished when it's first playtested by other people.
> indie game developers have stopped the traditional practice of updating a dev log as a form of marketing and community building because people will point their LLm at it and create your own game before you do
And that's why we can't have good things...
(This is just gonna keep happening more and more until eventually we'll need something like a patent system for ideas)
You'd be surprised how much money companies throw at very simple products, I'm working for a company making 100k mrr and was virtually entirely vibe coded by one dev until very recently
I don't think "is my SaaS better than others" is the important question, instead "is SaaS going to be valuable in a cheap bespoke software future".
I've been playing with an LLM backed reference checker for my partner who is a lecturer. For each reference in some work she's marking an agent is dispatched to read the referenced source and check that the reference is correct / accurate / not hallucinated.
It's useful to her, but it feels like it would be a waste of effort to turn into a product, because pasting the same document into Claude/ChatGPT with a prompt like "download and read each reference etc" would work pretty much just as well.
I had similar concerns about an AI backed training generation company I interviewed with. I asked how they saw themselves competing with increasingly capable generic harnesses. I don't recall exactly what they said but the impression I got was they were so focused on competing with the big LMS players that they hadn't really considered it.
Typically maintenance, reliability, support and liability; nothing new in SaaS land. Lots of companies have the money to hand-roll things that are provided by some external SaaS but would much rather it was someone else’s problem.
I built https://gallotails.com/ because I am a cocktail enthusiast. First commit, March 6th 2019. One of the features I am proud is which cocktails you can build based on your ingredients, and I was smart, the bar ignores garnishes and can suggest cocktails you're one ingredient away. But you have to add the ingredients. And interpret the bar screen.
Clicked the microphone icon and rambled for a few seconds (could have just taken a picture too I guess). Nudged ChatGPT to only give me simple cocktails I can stir instead of using a mixer. Said I could buy a lime, sure. Then asked how to keep the ginger beer fresh.
There is NO WAY I can code all of that in my little gallotails.com - a single chat window has entirely replaced my site. And that's my pet little project I do it on weekends, mostly to keep my tech skills sharp. I can only imagine what the biggest cocktails website, actual companies, are going / will go through once more and more people just realize the chat tab is enough. And I am not talking about purely content, ChatGPT can do everything my site does, and more, into any direction, in an instant.
Which left me with the question, then what should my site be? Community? To be taken over by agents?
Currently munching on what sites like mine should do, and what they should be.
I personally am more interested about personal opinions about things like cocktails rather than whatever statistically average cocktail the matrices of chatgpt come up with.
Chatgpt would shit on my great grandma's waffle recipe but it's the one I'll keep making till the day I die.
Books, writing, comments, etc on cocktails are certainly in the training set. The model doesn’t need a sensation of taste in order to understand what humans enjoy. RLVR specifically on cocktails is not needed as the general intelligence of the models increases
"I prefer" was the bit that the parent was pointing to that wasn't true. There isn't a person-to-person connection being made here. Though there is the fascamile of one.
I was saying this morning that LLMs have given Star Trek the last laugh.
My software development process feels exactly like every debugging session in the holodeck that seemed terribly unrealistic to me.
I'm in SRE so systems reasoning is something of the value. But me writing code or even configuring stuff? That's dead. It is a total waste of time - Claude can do it better, faster and it works.
Why not replace the backend of your site with the LLM? Let it do the recommendations in structured inputs and outputs so the front end isn’t a chat interface but leverages the fuzzy nature of LLM’s.
I'd guess it's because of costs. Either API costs or hardware costs. Hosting a simple webapp is very different from having an LLM backend in terms of marginal costs.
Here’s an easy proxy: Did you feel the need to build it because nothing to your liking existed? Did it take some effort to build? Do others feel the need to use your thing for those reasons?
Then it’s sufficiently non-obvious. I believe there’s still a pretty big field of things that fall into this category. Making proper things is a lot more than writing some code.
>Or do my 20 years of saas and business development actually make my SaaS better then others?
Nope. If all your doing is prompting an agent to build stuff (especially if what it is building is based on LLMs), then you might as well take it back to the whiteboard and rethink how you're spending your time/tokens.
> Like many of us, I've been hobbying away on some SaaS that wraps an LLM. But I often worry, isn't this just adding buttons to an LLM call?
> That's why I created isitsaas.io: your platform for determining whether your llm wrapper has product potential, or whether people would rather just use claude directly instead. Simply pop in your business idea, and our award winning, proprietary technology will ask claude if you can make money off of it.
Making the edge cases work, and lowering the cost of running it via good model choice, context management etc is in some cases really hard. That's valuable in a decent number of cases.
I suspect publishing an MCP server that provides access to an interesting resource is a better move.
You can also host a chat interface that connects to said MCP server as a convenience. But serious users probably already have their own inference and it's already hooked into other resources as well.
Doesn't need to have technical meat to it, conditionally ever really needed to per se, as long as it has a design / context moat. The thing is that designs are now trivial to copy. So what remains is who provides a more reliable service, supporting and continuing that design, and how well connected the person selling the thing is, to surface it first and to the right audience.
I don't want to be a hater but I made this a while ago and I honestly think the videos are a good bit nicer than what you are creating with Opus 5.5. https://mnfst.video/
This is just taking an existing presentation slides skill and generating a video out of it. There are no drawings and animations that explain the actual concepts.
Looking at the absolute dog shit Ai menus and posters I see everywhere I can guarantee you a good 70% of the population is physically unable to produce good things no matter the tools they have access to. They can't even be bothered to add "make it look good" to their prompt
These aren't even that good in comparison to the stuff being posted on Reddit and twitter/X.
Some of the stuff I've seen is mindblowingly impressive in how they've captured quality creative decisions, and how the models can reason about visually appealing designs.
It understands things like continuity, themes, facial expressions, cultural memes/references, symbolism, etc. And it generates things using a lot of multi-modal behavior by using 3d, images, etc.
Agreed. Just yesterday, I recreated the XKCD comic “A Bunch of Rocks” (https://xkcd.com/505/) as a video. It took me about five hours, using ElevenLabs for the audio and a step-by-step process involving brainstorming, planning, storyboarding, and so on. Opus 5.5 has become remarkably capable.
I had already seen the comic, but watching the video reminded me of "The Last Question" by Isaac Asimov [1]:
> After all, I undertook to tell several trillion years of human history in the space of a short story and I leave it to you as to how well I succeeded. I also undertook another task, but I won't tell you what that was lest l spoil the story for you.
One important difference between animations/videos generated by Opus 5.5 and the stereotypical AI slop videos is that Opus 5.5 is not a video generation model: it generates and iterates the code and renders it, and there are various ways for it to do so.
This one's been stuck in my head since yesterday. I just keep thinking about how long this woulda taken in After Effects. So I was experimenting with having Opus 5.5 make these kinda animations in javascript and realized I can get it to export a JSX script for AE. So I can have it take the first swing, then bring it into the tool I actually use.
I've been experimenting with AI video generation beyond raw video gen for some time now. Opus 4.5 was the first tool I tried last year, and it was okay...
Fast forward a few months, and Opus 5.5 is now running my entire video production pipeline. This model is leaps and bounds ahead of the previous model.
I can generate a complete 5-minute explainer video on my MacBook Air M4 in about five minutes from a single prompt, using the Gemini TTS API and MiniMax H3 Max for b-roll. It creates thumbnails and titles, handles the entire process, and automatically uploads the result via the YouTube API—all powered by a Claude Code plugin. (youtube.com/@ctrlaltexplain for those interested).
Jaw literally dropped. I ran the prompt from the "Made entirely with Opus 5.5" post on my own project. Here's what Claude Code made on its own for about $4.Claude Code Workflow
Recent models have been a big step up on graphics generation. Not exactly sure why, it would be neat if they would release any quantity of technical blogs.
Over a year and a half after DeepSeek, it feels like we're slowly saturating what RLVR can do, and are back to RLHF instead.
Fable was a huge leap in terms of model persistence and raw intelligence, but it still had terrible taste for human writing and code architecture. It would constantly keep making decisions which would achieve the desired objective (and make the code correct), but would bite you n years from now, and n years from now isn't RLVR checkable.
Opus 5.5 has a very different "feel" than anything else I've seen in this generation, though GPT-6 does seem to be moving in a similar direction. They have finally solved the writing part, and architectural taste also seems to have improved significantly.
I did a review of some GPT 6 Sol's code with Opus 5.5 yesterday, and it went "the code is correct, but there's a bunch of things here that could be simplified, and the split of responsibilities doesn't follow your established architectural layers" (which was true and exactly what I've noticed myself when reading the diff). I don't think I've ever seen a model do this before and actually be on-point.
AI doing things that creative people do makes me sad. Stole everyone's art to regurgitate it on command to billionaires richer, and save businesses the expensive of hiring someone with actual talent to do it.
I don't care how "good" the graphics become - it will always just be slop. This isn't the part of our lives we should be trying to replace with technology.
In the end, the market decides. If a colleague sends me an LLM message I dont really want to read it. I also wouldnt watch an LLM video if I knew. So, for now, human intentionality seems to be worth a price to some so thats a reason to stay optimistic.
No, in the end society should decide. Saying "let the markets decide" means immediately ceding to those with wealth, since those with wealth can distort markets however they see fit.
I rather live in a world where society decides the nature of technological change, for better or worse, in a democratic fashion than the current iteration we have which is mostly about lighting trillions of dollars on fire while never providing basic needs for civilians (free school lunches, medicare for all, universal childcare, free community college) only to be force fed on what to use by a group of people that do not care about me or my community that always seem to espouse anti-human beliefs.
Ah yes, "the things will never improve if you help workers one iota" mantra. There's nothing else to say except you want workers to suffer and think progress is based on the amount of immiseration we inflict onto workers.
It's a sick anti-human ideology and it's not shocking when you look at how anti-human tech leaders truly are.
entertainment hasn't consumed art in a while most of it is mass produced at minimum cost and zero artistic freedom. some sparingly rare project that could be called art remains, driven by passion of the craft, and these aren't going away
You see this as making animators obsolete. I see this as giving everyone the ability to make professional looking videos for their products, services, events, and websites. Automation has taken many jobs over the years, but it has also given us much cheaper and better products and services. I do not lament progress, but I think we should do a better job of distributing the benefits of this progress.
"Professional looking" is a moving window, has been for a long time.
Right now, looking like an AI did it (even if it was actually a human) is a sign of being un-professional. To a limited degree, one can prompt an AI better and get something that doesn't look as cliché as the default settings, but even then there's often someone who can spot a tell. "You can fool all of the people some of the time, some of the people all of the time, but not all of the people all of the time" applies here.
Art is at least two different things, for at least two different groups: nice to look at etc. is one of them; the human equivalent of a peacock's tail (i.e. the effort is the point and cheating is worse than having nothing) is the other.
Still enables people to do more. Just like Microsoft Word and and a printer / photocopier allowed small scale kinda-nicely-typset amateur magazines / news publications in schools or small local or hobby communities, but it didn't quite rise to the level of professional publishing and typesetting of actual prestige magazines and papers. But that didn't matter, because both relative prestige and practical value are real things.
Making frozen pizza doesn't get close to eating pizza at an authentic Italian restaurant, but frozen pizza is still pretty good. So if someone says "introducing frozen pizzas will enable anyone to eat a good pizza at home, no need to go to a restaurant" then it's a half truth. The true restaurant experience will still have its role, but the frozen product is still pretty good compared to not having that option at all. But your friends will not be at awe at your culinary skills if you make frozen pizza. But they'll still likely eat it and appreciate it when hungry and chilling at your house.
I worked as an animator for years, the work sucks, well, the specific act of animating life is fun, but that's like 20% at most of the job, the rest is politics and coming to terms with the massive out of control exploitation that is the animation industry. Tear it all down.
People used to say someday you can sit around all day and create things. Now they say you can go into the trades and build someone's house or something.
That is on an entirely different level! Good direction, a storyline… the OP’s are simple slides with poor copywriting, something models could do a year ago.
A given model may or may not have strong self-awareness with respect to how strong it is with different tools.
If it's unusually skilled with one tool, but it's not the default tool for a job, then you have to put it in their hands before they reach for something else.
The Opus 5.5 javascript-art + art direction definitely seems to be one of these surprise capabilities jumps. Maybe strong enough that providers will start to nudge in that direction in the system prompt, so that the user request doesn't need to specify it.
I think the idea was mostly just to push it towards a style that isn’t the typical uncanny valley videos. Like that look from so many youtube ads, now.
This is mindblowing indeed, but I guess you have to iterate over it rather than just one-shotting it. OPs outputs seem more one-shot renders using remotion.
It works as one shot. The only feedback i gave for the one I had it do was the music was too loud, and then after i told it, it was great, it said: "Your notes on the music balance made a real difference.", which was kind of weirdly passive aggressive!
It was good enough that our CEO and marketing team are in a room trying different ideas with it after I showed it to them an hour ago.
I took a cue from this link and created an explainer for a complex new feature I've been building with heavy Claude assistance.
The one shot video was brilliant and polished. It would need minor refinement before presenting to a customer, because it used some of that internal vocabulary Claude makes up to describe parts of a system it's working on.
However: I found the explainer astoundingly useful to me. Now, finally, I understand some of that internal vocabulary Claude's been burying me with. The visuals really helped round out my understanding of what it's been talking about.
I love LLMs in research, programming, email cleanup—the list goes on. I want the word guessing program to give me lessons I can test and verify. But I’ll ask humans to give me opinions on unanswerable questions. I don’t want a confident dead bot telling me about life. FO. I guess it was only a matter of time before someone created something with LLM that rankles. /rant
I had Sol 5.6 about a month ago populated a test account, take screen shots, write a script, used ElevenLabs TTS, with Remotion. It did an amazing job.
I suppose we should've seen this coming (and many did) in the 80s. This is the late stage of digital and computerised media. We conned ourselves for a few decades into thinking this was a new medium for art or a new frontier of human communication, but in reality we were just training a simulacrum of reality, devoid of meaning or intent.
These explainer videos are garbage, whether done by humans or not. Just like those crappy Netflix "documentaries". Don't get me wrong, it's impressive, but it's just a more automated way of outputting low effort, low quality content
It is kinda funny I am always interested in Anthropic's new releases, but i have a great distaste for their actual release posts/videos. They LOVE these stupid style videos for any feature they release, their text posts are usually just a ton of nonsense that i dont wanna read, and now there is this huge "revelation" that their models can pump this annoying format out.
I say Bummer if more people adopt this style, its gonna become less and less authentic feeling as the months go on now.
Indeed, it's really great.
It does the smartest thing of all: it creates an HTML page and uses raw JS timed animations to make it work. Then it records it with ffmpeg and saves the output as the final video.
About 6 months ago I spent 12 hours creating a video for our Edge.js [1] announcement that, in the end... people were not very inspired by (to say the least). See the video here [2].
Then, about a month ago, I spent 6 hours creating a video for our Wasmer SDK announcement. It was better, but still didn't go as viral as I wanted [3]. I always thought we would need a big budget to do them.
But then, yesterday I tried Opus 5.5... and man, I'm impressed. The video was one-shotted with this prompt:
Make a modern slick and punchy video for this announcement:
[content of the blogpost in markdown]
211 comments
[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 67.4 ms ] threadIf you're the author congrats, great work!
(not that they were great before, but ...)
If you don't care so much about adding something significant to the world, and your LLM-buttons-wrapper is a novelty, chug along and see where it goes if you're having fun. Looking for what value mean at this moment is a much harder effort, and probably a luck-based endeavour.
I don't have fun creating LLM-wrappers or at least haven't thought of a fun idea for it that could be even a fun novelty to work on so personally I'm not doing it but I'm using LLMs for other fun stuff that required much more of my free time before.
Very few things can't be reduced to insignificance. MacOS was just cribbing PARC, Facebook is just a glorified PHP forum, Dropbox is just SFTP, etc. etc.
Even in deep-tech, Zipline is just wrapping from deeper-tech (batteries motors etc), GLP-1s were a VA throwaway that dusted off, etc. etc.
LLM wrapper doesn't mean anything, it's an implementation detail. Besides being an LLM wrapper what is a given thing?
The beer app wasn't just a beer app, it was the intersection of the first time accelerometers were doing something that the average consumer could interact with in their pocket, the first time there was something to spend money on for your phone besides a wallpaper, a ton of things.
If anything now when something seems trivial or like a toy, but it has a lot of traction, I want to spend energy figuring out why is it more meaningful than it appears.
I don't get what exactly you are talking about as a reply to my comment, what exercise exactly? Deciding if something is worth spending time if you're having fun with it?
> If anything now when something seems trivial or like a toy, but it has a lot of traction, I want to spend energy figuring out why is it more meaningful than it appears.
Sure, if you're having fun (and in fun I include a sense of accomplishment, curiosity, whatever tickles you) with that, go for it.
It's a strangely arrogant reply to my comment, perhaps you read something into it that I didn't say and replied to that?
Also I honestly thought we were two arrogant people conversing in good faith: you don't find unarrogant people saying things like "If you don't care so much about adding something significant to the world..."
I think text distorts what I meant with that, I personally don't care much about adding something significant to the world, not anymore at least.
I found my peace by pursuing what interests me personally even though I know it might not be of much significance to anyone else, and that I won't be pursuing the path of "adding something significant" just for the prestige of it in my life.
In a sense it's the opposite of arrogance since I care much more that the person is enjoying the process of whatever they are doing rather than the results of it. I've seen too many bright friends end up miserable chasing it, I've felt too miserable myself when putting too much focus on that, I'd rather have people enjoying doing what they are interested at if it's not something harmful.
- Video devlogs were long a shitty way to make a community (I can explain this one in more detail, but in short, the tradeoff between opportunity cost and video quality is a Pareto curve that is bad at all points on the curve, if your goals include both “make game” and “build community for players with devlogs”, the way out is to drop one of those two requirements, either “make YouTube/Twitch/TikTok channel” replaces “make game”, or you build some other audience for your devlogs)
- Good devlogs don’t have that level of detail, to let people easily recreate games
- Most games can’t easily be replicated by LLMs, in short, the people who are good at steering LLMs like that are making their own games.
This is not the first time I heard this story. Sometimes it comes with the lamentation “back in the day people could build communities with devlogs” and no, that was generally not a good way to build communities. It was mostly good streams from YouTubers who were making the game in order to make YouTube content or it was mediocre streams from random devs. Throw in a few people who are famous game devs who choose to stream and get a big audience because they already have a community.
AFAICT this is a fear that some game developers have, that someone will steal their game and run with it, and the stories told are more repeated based on this shared fear than based on realistic scenarios. People repeat it because it’s a good story.
And yes, I’m aware of some situations like 0x10c and the like.
The idea is not valuable, ideas are a dime a dozen. The actual value is in your implementation.
There's no moat in an idea either so I guess it's down to marketing budget.
It requires discernment, taste, on the part of the user to be able to point the LLM at the weird parts that look wrong.
Even with that, the LLM can only fix most of, not all of, those rough edges.
More specifically to AI... A blog on a nice website is no longer a signal for quality so there's just no point in devs investing in that.
It really makes me appreciate how important good game design is. Claude is doing a fine job coding everything I describe, but it doesn't really understand fun, so I need to.
(It's not a great game)
And that's why we can't have good things...
(This is just gonna keep happening more and more until eventually we'll need something like a patent system for ideas)
Some SaaS products have network effects, but that doesn't appy to new software.
Starting a SaaS business in 2026 seems a bit silly to me. Not saying people won't make money, but you'd have to be pretty lucky.
The LLM only does average returns from average inputs.
I've been playing with an LLM backed reference checker for my partner who is a lecturer. For each reference in some work she's marking an agent is dispatched to read the referenced source and check that the reference is correct / accurate / not hallucinated.
It's useful to her, but it feels like it would be a waste of effort to turn into a product, because pasting the same document into Claude/ChatGPT with a prompt like "download and read each reference etc" would work pretty much just as well.
I had similar concerns about an AI backed training generation company I interviewed with. I asked how they saw themselves competing with increasingly capable generic harnesses. I don't recall exactly what they said but the impression I got was they were so focused on competing with the big LMS players that they hadn't really considered it.
I built https://gallotails.com/ because I am a cocktail enthusiast. First commit, March 6th 2019. One of the features I am proud is which cocktails you can build based on your ingredients, and I was smart, the bar ignores garnishes and can suggest cocktails you're one ingredient away. But you have to add the ingredients. And interpret the bar screen.
And here's what I did with ChatGPT a few days ago: https://chatgpt.com/share/6ab59877-4b74-83e8-8da5-966d9f3a38...
Clicked the microphone icon and rambled for a few seconds (could have just taken a picture too I guess). Nudged ChatGPT to only give me simple cocktails I can stir instead of using a mixer. Said I could buy a lime, sure. Then asked how to keep the ginger beer fresh.
There is NO WAY I can code all of that in my little gallotails.com - a single chat window has entirely replaced my site. And that's my pet little project I do it on weekends, mostly to keep my tech skills sharp. I can only imagine what the biggest cocktails website, actual companies, are going / will go through once more and more people just realize the chat tab is enough. And I am not talking about purely content, ChatGPT can do everything my site does, and more, into any direction, in an instant.
Which left me with the question, then what should my site be? Community? To be taken over by agents?
Currently munching on what sites like mine should do, and what they should be.
Chatgpt would shit on my great grandma's waffle recipe but it's the one I'll keep making till the day I die.
Eg from your share, the model output “I prefer it Scotch-heavy rather than 50/50 because otherwise it gets very sweet.”
It’s basically cribbed this from someone; it literally can’t taste.
The frontier labs are not yet able to do rlvr over mixology/meatspace. So maybe think on how to capitalize on that.
My software development process feels exactly like every debugging session in the holodeck that seemed terribly unrealistic to me.
I'm in SRE so systems reasoning is something of the value. But me writing code or even configuring stuff? That's dead. It is a total waste of time - Claude can do it better, faster and it works.
Then it’s sufficiently non-obvious. I believe there’s still a pretty big field of things that fall into this category. Making proper things is a lot more than writing some code.
Nope. If all your doing is prompting an agent to build stuff (especially if what it is building is based on LLMs), then you might as well take it back to the whiteboard and rethink how you're spending your time/tokens.
> That's why I created isitsaas.io: your platform for determining whether your llm wrapper has product potential, or whether people would rather just use claude directly instead. Simply pop in your business idea, and our award winning, proprietary technology will ask claude if you can make money off of it.
> Trial memberships start at $10/month
Start from thinking about product value add, and user behaviors first.
You can also host a chat interface that connects to said MCP server as a convenience. But serious users probably already have their own inference and it's already hooked into other resources as well.
Some of the stuff I've seen is mindblowingly impressive in how they've captured quality creative decisions, and how the models can reason about visually appealing designs.
It understands things like continuity, themes, facial expressions, cultural memes/references, symbolism, etc. And it generates things using a lot of multi-modal behavior by using 3d, images, etc.
Some really incredibly impressive stuff.
[0] https://simulationcorner.net/A_Bunch_of_Rocks.mp4
The drawing/animation style feels suitably off from xkcd - more naive stick figure, than what xkcd looks like?
Some speed/timing issues with the walk cycles.
For all that - mind-blowing that it's generated so quickly.
Say more about the process and / or drop some link pointers.
> After all, I undertook to tell several trillion years of human history in the space of a short story and I leave it to you as to how well I succeeded. I also undertook another task, but I won't tell you what that was lest l spoil the story for you.
[1] https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html
I asked it to make a site for my TI4 reference project: https://axiomvortix.com
It produced a video about an AI startup with the vague goal of centralizing data.
The code for the infamous "I'm upping my p(doom)" video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8j-hR4fJywU) is open-source and uses Processing: https://github.com/JohnHeibel/PDoomVideo
Fast forward a few months, and Opus 5.5 is now running my entire video production pipeline. This model is leaps and bounds ahead of the previous model.
I can generate a complete 5-minute explainer video on my MacBook Air M4 in about five minutes from a single prompt, using the Gemini TTS API and MiniMax H3 Max for b-roll. It creates thumbnails and titles, handles the entire process, and automatically uploads the result via the YouTube API—all powered by a Claude Code plugin. (youtube.com/@ctrlaltexplain for those interested).
Made entirely with Opus 5.5 + $3.21 of OpenRouter API usageClaude Code Workflow
https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1wogab3/
Jaw literally dropped. I ran the prompt from the "Made entirely with Opus 5.5" post on my own project. Here's what Claude Code made on its own for about $4.Claude Code Workflow
https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1wovwao/
Fable was a huge leap in terms of model persistence and raw intelligence, but it still had terrible taste for human writing and code architecture. It would constantly keep making decisions which would achieve the desired objective (and make the code correct), but would bite you n years from now, and n years from now isn't RLVR checkable.
Opus 5.5 has a very different "feel" than anything else I've seen in this generation, though GPT-6 does seem to be moving in a similar direction. They have finally solved the writing part, and architectural taste also seems to have improved significantly.
I did a review of some GPT 6 Sol's code with Opus 5.5 yesterday, and it went "the code is correct, but there's a bunch of things here that could be simplified, and the split of responsibilities doesn't follow your established architectural layers" (which was true and exactly what I've noticed myself when reading the diff). I don't think I've ever seen a model do this before and actually be on-point.
Does the js stuff render real-time?
Did you get script/dialog and voice settings (again, for making other films in same series/theme) - or just the rendered audio?
I don't care how "good" the graphics become - it will always just be slop. This isn't the part of our lives we should be trying to replace with technology.
I mean, ever since AI was a research program, it was assumed it will some day achieve its goal -- in particular, make computers be creative.
I rather live in a world where society decides the nature of technological change, for better or worse, in a democratic fashion than the current iteration we have which is mostly about lighting trillions of dollars on fire while never providing basic needs for civilians (free school lunches, medicare for all, universal childcare, free community college) only to be force fed on what to use by a group of people that do not care about me or my community that always seem to espouse anti-human beliefs.
It's a sick anti-human ideology and it's not shocking when you look at how anti-human tech leaders truly are.
Right now, looking like an AI did it (even if it was actually a human) is a sign of being un-professional. To a limited degree, one can prompt an AI better and get something that doesn't look as cliché as the default settings, but even then there's often someone who can spot a tell. "You can fool all of the people some of the time, some of the people all of the time, but not all of the people all of the time" applies here.
Art is at least two different things, for at least two different groups: nice to look at etc. is one of them; the human equivalent of a peacock's tail (i.e. the effort is the point and cheating is worse than having nothing) is the other.
Making frozen pizza doesn't get close to eating pizza at an authentic Italian restaurant, but frozen pizza is still pretty good. So if someone says "introducing frozen pizzas will enable anyone to eat a good pizza at home, no need to go to a restaurant" then it's a half truth. The true restaurant experience will still have its role, but the frozen product is still pretty good compared to not having that option at all. But your friends will not be at awe at your culinary skills if you make frozen pizza. But they'll still likely eat it and appreciate it when hungry and chilling at your house.
Who are they gonna sell those to, though, if everyone is unemployed because they're not needed?
Exactly who, do you think, will remain employed, and what will they do?
How far away are we from “build a startup that generates $1M MRR, my openrouter key is in my .env”?
What is it that makes it "better" versus simply asking for an animated video? Is it the ability to later do some adjustments programmatically?
If it's unusually skilled with one tool, but it's not the default tool for a job, then you have to put it in their hands before they reach for something else.
The Opus 5.5 javascript-art + art direction definitely seems to be one of these surprise capabilities jumps. Maybe strong enough that providers will start to nudge in that direction in the system prompt, so that the user request doesn't need to specify it.
It was good enough that our CEO and marketing team are in a room trying different ideas with it after I showed it to them an hour ago.
I did one for our company and showed it to the CEO and now I am talking him out of just yeeting it directly onto social media.
The one shot video was brilliant and polished. It would need minor refinement before presenting to a customer, because it used some of that internal vocabulary Claude makes up to describe parts of a system it's working on.
However: I found the explainer astoundingly useful to me. Now, finally, I understand some of that internal vocabulary Claude's been burying me with. The visuals really helped round out my understanding of what it's been talking about.
I love LLMs in research, programming, email cleanup—the list goes on. I want the word guessing program to give me lessons I can test and verify. But I’ll ask humans to give me opinions on unanswerable questions. I don’t want a confident dead bot telling me about life. FO. I guess it was only a matter of time before someone created something with LLM that rankles. /rant
So predictable.
I say Bummer if more people adopt this style, its gonna become less and less authentic feeling as the months go on now.
No way to download or watch it in the webapp of opencomputer. No instructions on what to do? Do I need to run it locally? It seems it did use usage.
What exactly renders the video from the HTML page?
About 6 months ago I spent 12 hours creating a video for our Edge.js [1] announcement that, in the end... people were not very inspired by (to say the least). See the video here [2].
Then, about a month ago, I spent 6 hours creating a video for our Wasmer SDK announcement. It was better, but still didn't go as viral as I wanted [3]. I always thought we would need a big budget to do them.
But then, yesterday I tried Opus 5.5... and man, I'm impressed. The video was one-shotted with this prompt:
This is what Claude Opus 5.5 one-shotted (tl;dr: we went viral): https://x.com/wasmerio/status/2102849543260029379[1] https://edgejs.org/
[2] https://x.com/wasmerio/status/2033966082944577693
[3] https://x.com/wasmerio/status/2094845905379922302