Could you just be an API to serve intelligence instead of moving into the app layer and putting your clients out of business. How much wealth and power do you need to accumulate seriously?
It creates impression that they just fumble around for revenue ideas? And like they don't really publish stuffs relating to their core expertise as much as might be expected, right? Likely some hard working visionary peoples discovering things and it's just all hidden. I thought Google was obnoxious but some of these AI companies take it next level.
Don't worry, we had DreamWeaver, Wordpress and other tools for a long time now but it still did not replace web developers. Build quality tailor made websites that connect to humans and you will be fine.
DreamWeaver and WordPress both had limits on the complexity of site they could build. If you wanted more than what they can do, you look to web developers.
This was always the play…
Wait until the models are trained to work on “capsules of your data” stored by OpenAI, and deploy your apps/services onto OpenAI cloud where you can _easily_ share the development with your team members’ AI agents. Ofcourse, they will all work only if you use and pay for their models via their subscriptions. A new global {K-V, Relational, Vector} database that your coding model is already trained to work with! will come very soon…
They know the API price wars are a race to the bottom with little/no profit margins.
I think this is going to back fire. I have talked to 5 tech leaders at companies and universities this week about setting up their own infrastructure for inference and training. They are worried about multiple rug pulls: increasing cost of tokens, stealing ideas, training on data etc. they are all willing to uses less intelligence models if they avoid these issues. They’ve seen me setting up propelcompute.com for my start up and propelcode.app neither of which are intended to be commercial products and want to do the same.
The question of them moving into the app layer is completely irrelevant. If you are threatened by this the reality you need to begin making peace with is that your business is not going to exist within 10 years. And that's being extremely generous.
Irrelevant to what? It’s highly relevant to how AI will evolve and how the distribution of its benefits will propagate across society.
If they merely acted as APIs, even if that meant they would be “relegated” to the status of a utility then individuals and businesses would have faith and confidence that their use of AI wouldn’t be the very thing that puts them out of business. I think that would result in more innovation, faster adoption and deployment, and broader distribution of economic benefits.
As OpenAI and anthropic march towards an everything app they are smothering infant industries in the cradle and undermining their own users confidence that it’s safe to use their models.
I have talked to over 10 people at universities, SMBs, and large enterprises that are actively allocating millions of dollars to bring AI in house.
No it won't matter because if they don't someone else will.
You are advocating a protection of the managerial and owner class to keep the economy needlessly balkanized. Universities are some of the greatest offenders in perpetuating inequality. Why have universities gotten more unaffordable?
Replacing most universities with federated campuses, eliminating their managers, open classrooms, LLM TAs and other resources to respect the diversity of the student population, etc. would be better for the world, not worse. If you want to take the side of the incumbents in an economy already teeming with inequality be my guest.
The saving grace of the approaching compute as utility end state is the destruction of the class of interests you purportedly represent. With mass layoffs will come mass demand for UBI, and the destruction of universities that are in truth the ones doing the rug pulling you mentioned elsewhere. People complain about public incentives for AI? What about schools? Has the quality of schooling increased with price? And I'm supposed to be taking your side?
I am not suggesting we don't adopt tech, it's how the tech is allowed to be sold and propagated through society. Using your analogy it's like if we allowed only a single company to manufacture cpus, hard drives and build the software such that there was no possibility of a competitive market. That's a policy choice that can and should be evaluated for the harms monopoly systems create. We as a civilization don't have to allow openai and anthropic to move into the app layer we can say as a condition of the ability to operate a commercial enterprise they are prohibited. We do that with antitrust law, utility regulations, telecom and countless other sectors.
I am not advocating protecting the management class, quite the opposite, I am saying their demonstrated greed in vertical and horizontal integration should be stopped because they have shown they cant be responsible with management authority. You use the word balkenized to imply that fragmented AI is a bad but fragmentation is the basis of free market capitalism and in particular the start up ecosystem.
Your advocating that society just capitulate to Sam Altman and grant a permanent monopoly and the status as permanent underclass because he did "hard work" but that is flawed for two reasons: 1. Hard work doesn't justify destroying the very system that allowed the conditions for that hard work and innovation to create wealth by letting winners convert a free market to a monopoly. That tension is the internal contradiction of free market capitalism, winners will become monopoly such that no more winners are possible. We solved this in the progressive era with utilities, oil companies etc, by either breaking up the companies that had too much market dominance, or making them divest vertical integration units (like standard oil having to sell its rail lines because owning transportation gave it an insurmountable advantage). 2. There is no AI without training data AI which was taken without consent or compensation from public and private sources created by civilization over generations. So the polity has a clear preceding claim to that work and if any industry lacks a right to the ownership of what they've created it's AI. Sam Altmans hardwork is trivial compared to the totality of civilization writing over generations and creating the internet and maintaining libraries and a mailing system so they could collect that data economically.
For those reasons it's totally justified and we'll within the legal and commercial precedents we've established to limit how a single company can develop and operate AI. We should not allow vertical integration across the stack. Openai cant manufacture chips, train models, and build an everything app from customer training data. I don't know ow what owners your think I am defending or representing but I would suggest you are arguing with a phantom opponent that isn't me or are misunderstanding my position. I am not suggesting nationalizing AI or giving the polity ownership, I am suggesting standard corrective regulation to preserve a free market with clear preceding examples from the last technology transformation. We suffered great harm when the electric grid and phone lines and oil and shipping consolidation was unimpeded and unlocked innovation and broad wealth creation when we broke them up.
I appreciate the response but I think you need to read what I wrote again.
I don't think I'm arguing with a "phantom" at all, rather you seem to suggest I want OpenAI to own the economy when I rather precisely articulated the most desirable "rug pull" (using a phrase you yourself invoked elsewhere in this discussion) would be depriving them of that very opportunity. If anyone has misread this, I would suggest it's you. We simply seem to disagree on the timing and nature of the regulatory intervention.
Are you against UBI? We've gone back and forth with each other for a bit now and I still don't have an answer to that question.
I have read your posts closely. If I misunderstand them I am open to being corrected. So here is what I take from them. I don’t think you are advocating for OpenAI to be a monopoly. I think you assume that it’s inevitable that someone will. And the only solution is to nationalize them and then use the proceeds to fund UBI.
Is that accurate and complete? If not, what am I missing?
Btw you didn’t ask me for my opinion on UBI, you declared your opinion as a statement or at most a rhetorical question not something that warranted a response. That might not be what you intended but reread your sentence and ask if someone would interpret it as a question rather than a statement.
I am not opposed to UBI or nationalizing AI, and I am not defending a managerial or ownership class. I am arguing that there is an intermediate step available to prevent the emergence of a monopoly that is fully vertically integrated with custom chips —> training —> inference —> application—> deployment.
Society doesnt need to allow that. We can limit OpenAI and anthropics ability to build the app layer. We could limit their share of compute to a percentage of available compute and make the remaining share available to other competitors. We could require that they distribute their training data to others after some period of time. We could require they release their weights.
There are a broad set of tools available to ensure that don’t capture the whole intelligence stack and then expand horizontally to, as you said, make it so “my business doesn’t exist in 10 years”. The fact that you don’t know my business but could credibly predict that they could put most businesses out of existence is a massive problem that UBI won’t fix.
I don’t want to live in a society where humanity is living on the patronage of monopoly AI. And AI won’t be viable if no one has money because they greedily expand everywhere and put people out of work and businesses out of existence.
I think there are intermediate solutions before UBI and full nationalization are needed and we should implement them. Specifically, making sure vertical integration isn’t allowed, making sure compute access is broadly distributed rather than let openAI and anthropic lock it all up, making sure training data sets must be released within a short time frame like we do with patents, making sure the labs can’t copy customers.
You mostly have it right. I appreciate the response.
Now it is my turn to make sure I understand what you are saying. On that count, I think there is a remaining point where we are not understanding each other. And really the rest of the discussion hinges on this.
You say:
> I am not defending a managerial or ownership class.
But also say:
> I have talked to over 10 people at universities, SMBs, and large enterprises that are actively allocating millions of dollars to bring AI in house.
Who are these people with such authority if not the managerial or ownership class, or at the very least, their representatives?
I think what you are saying is quite plainly a defense of such interests. We sort of need to agree on that or the rest of the discussion cannot follow.
Once we align on that, I will have more to say which I believe will close the loop I have been attempting to weave.
I have been enjoying this back and forth though. Some of your points do make sense. Perhaps you are even correct. But let's be accurate about the nature of the two options we each propose, only then can we attempt to grasp some sense of the tradeoffs.
Where do you live in a hut somewhere? How are you accessing the internet?
Civilization is all about giving up control. Are roads also a mechanism to control people?
UBI is desirable and will likely only come about by the sorts of collective action that defined the labor movement. Are weekends also a "mechanism to control people"? I think you need to consult a history book, it would give you a better grasp of who is "spreading nonsense" here.
The "intelligence API" layer seems like a pretty rough business to be in. The smarter the models the more they're commodities (since they can use any harness or scaffolding) resulting in a race to the bottom on pricing. And then each new better model requires double the cost of the previous one.
I'm surprised there's not a bigger push into better and useful memory, since that would result in actual lock-in.
What is wrong with being a commodity, or a utility? Oil companies do just fine. So do electricity companies. Why does everyone have to seek world domination instead of building a good business. My point is by cannibalizing their clients they risk not being trusted by anyone. But Microsoft did the same thing and created a durable monopoly because Republicans abandoned anti trust enforcement and that seems likely here.
It's worth for the token budget. You can do so much with gpt-6.1-sol (high) on a small sub. If the money is not aan issue it's probably still worth it for Astra because it can occasionally be smarter than Fable 5.1 (or so I heard).
Unfortunately right now most AI models get into the weeds of asking the user to sign up to netlify or firebase or buying a domain etc - none of which most users are interested in doing.
We’ve been building something like this, but perhaps even more powerful, safe, and beginner friendly. If Sites looks like it’s the right speed for you, we’d love your feedback on https://vibes.diy/
For whatever reason most of the sites are Arabic-language prototypes for things like plumbing companies. I'm not sure why - if those are solving a real problem, or whether someone is running a scam, or what.
Cool project, but the hero art is a little strange (what is the dude on the left hammering? Aren’t the ones on the right both pulling the pulley down from opposite ends?)
Thanks! I think the fox is steadying the log as the raccoon hoists it. Agree the badger is sort of hammering the air, haha. The art was AI-generated but with some manual editing in Affinity, so hopefully it's not too sloppy.
I think this has always been the end result - when the user can enter a business problem and it spins up a site, and they don't have to think about the hosting, database, app, etc.
Its not for those uses cases. though. THink about squarespace/wix hosting all the company landing pages, restaurant menus, daycares. This will replace it.
> And it will be good enough for 90% of use cases.
I think it’ll just raise the automation bar that much higher. In other words, it will be good enough for 90% of yesterday’s use-cases. But tomorrow’s? I’m bearish.
I imagine the amount of onerous bureaucracy when interacting with any entity is going to explode if they expect you to do it in an automated fashion, for both private companies and the government. Especially as roles are cut because they can be “automated”. Except only 80% of the workload can be reliably automated, the other 20% requires a long tail of effort.
I mean, with a Cloudflare API key you can pretty much already do that. But keeping your data straight and putting in the right authentication guards, etc. are all still where the business problems meet technical and the AI is not enough unless the agent is both architect and customer.
That's what I do but normal people don't know what any of those terms mean so their daily AI app does that shopping for them and they don't need to get an "Appy Key".
I don't think this provides a lot of value for more complex applications. It just lowers the bar for getting started.
Once the app gets a bit more complex, it won't be that much different to any more traditionally vibe coded application (code, git/pr, test, deploy, ops). It only removes the barrier to get started, but doesn't solve any of the real problems. Problems like AI slop, code rot, bad architecture, security issues, data loss/breach because of bad code, and so on.
That's my experience as well. Some folks like to dabble, but for the most part they have other stuff they want to focus on, they don't want to spend the time to ensure it's good and it works.
I'm not saying an agent couldn't make sure it's good and it works, but there are a lot of aspects to that: It's compliant, it's secure, the right data is stored, the right compromises are made for sometimes mutually exclusive business priorities, UX is decent, it's responsive, it scales, and so on and so forth. A lot of devil in the details, and the context required to know what to focus on is rather vast.
It usually comes down to how successful a business is. Just starting out with little to no funding? They'll want to dabble themselves. But if there's money, it can and will be exchanged for time.
The argument there wasn't that everyone everywhere would use individually customized software* instead of packaged SaaS; it was that, because AI greatly reduces the cost of building an internal app or service, it improves enterprises' BATNA when dealing with SaaS vendors, which means surplus will shift from producers to consumers. It's not obvious to me that that's not happening, since it may have been masked by a general increase in automation since AI also synergizes significantly with SaaS. (The Stripe Economics post gets into this a little, though it's mostly less curious than I'd like about why the "SaaSpocalypse" didn't materialize. Of course, Stripe has an economic interest here.)
* Some people do think this (e.g., https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2026/09/25/what-even-is-an-os-no...), but I remain somewhat skeptical that this'll be true for the most economically significant applications. This is not because I'm an AI capabilities skeptic (I'm not, I'm more of a doomer), but because even in a world where AI is designing and implementing all the software, there are probably still significant benefits to standardization. I see it as sort of analogous to compilers; we might get a world where compilers are both used and maintained almost exclusively by LLMs, but we probably won't get one where compilers stop being used or maintained at all because LLMs write everything in assembly.
In stuff like wikis and ticket systems what I see is people now just making their own little tools around the ones we already use, this arguably just sements their position even deeper.
Also I dont get the inhouse argument, you dont really save anything. So instead of paying X to SaaS, you now propose to pay X to anthropic instead AND maintain said SaaS... what? how is that better, that just shifted the cost to another company and you got the burden of maintenance and responsibility.
Honest question for devs out there... is anyone worried? I don't see enough frank conversation happening around this subject. Timelines. How long until salaries fall? Is it too early to stalk thinking about back up plans? Am I crazy?
Coding is probably solved. Honestly it’s probably going to be 5 years of runtime starting now depending on industry lag and uptake.
A team I was managing spent a whole year converting government forms into a web app. It took a while and there was a lot of discussion with the end users and a bunch of back and forth (keep in mind this is government software with a lot of onerous legal requirements). Then about 4 months ago, we just fed Codex the forms, along with the UI design and it spat it out in 1 hour. Was it perfect? No. But our iterative loop became make the web app, show it to end users and then incorporate feedback and completely cut out the UX team, product etc. We were able to complete the conversion in 2 weeks with one guy. For most corporate development work it’s basically over.
We're in a similar boat. Entire eng team went full AI about a year ago, and honestly we're struggling to find things to do. Features that would take weeks, take minutes.
I just don't see how we keep going like this without layoffs. The company cannot responsibly continue paying for this many engineers, when half, or less, could do the same job.
I have been the lone developer on a project for quite some time and was already feeling that way. Yet, recently found out that a second is being added to the team and a third is to come. I guess I'll enjoy what is effectively a paid vacation before it all comes crumbling down?
Serious question from a consumer of software: if software can be improved so effortlessly now, why isn't it getting better?
Like, why is it all still so buggy? Why does no website seem to consider 96 PPI displays in its design? Why don't we have ostensibly useful features like undo trees everywhere? Why is everything still a RAM hog? Why does the number of websites that pay no heed to accessibility seem to be going up rather than down?
I'm told we're living in the future, but it sure doesn't feel like it.
Lack of information. When you are on the building side you become blind to its faults. Consumers almost never tell you what isn't good about it.
> why is it all still so buggy?
Also lack of information. I haven't seen any bugs in years in the things I've worked on. LLMs have closed every last obvious testing gap, squashing any outstanding bugs there. That's not to say it is all bug-free now, but what bugs users may be experiencing aren't being reported.
AI is good at building software, but it is still not good at consuming software like actual consumers do.
For the same reason that increasing headcount never really solved the bug problem.
Flawless software isn't the goal, ever. Feature development is almost always the primary goal, and fixing bugs and performance issues is only done if the bug is bad enough.
I don't think you're wrong overall, and it jives with tripleee's reply, but I don't think wanting end-user software to be less buggy than it currently is is asking for "flawless" software.
You're right, I was being hyperbolic. Bugginess in software is a spectrum, and asking why we're not further along that spectrum toward being bug free, is really what the OP is asking. My answer still applies.
Because the goal isn't to make the future better for humanity. It's to make the future more addictive for humanity. Big difference. More clicks, more ad views, more engagement, not necessarily more pleasant. I mean, that's obvious.
I live in the future when it comes to my hobby of music making. I make my own little software tools that I did not have the ability to make 2 years ago. Little tools that are too specialized and specific for my obscure taste to have much wider economic value as tools in themselves.
Claude is also the greatest obscure book recommendation engine I have ever found so I have a lot more interesting books to read than in the past.
Outside of this, I basically live in 2019 but everything is more expensive.
I worry this is the future. It doesn't really feel much different other than things getting more and more expensive.
If your company isn't throwing you into R&D right now everyone is looking at layoffs. You are no longer in an environment where doing "the same job" will keep you afloat.
I've said it before but I'll repeat it here until someone changes my mind: jobs in IT are safe until using AI gets its equivalent of "no one ever got fired for buying IBM". Until there can be financial and legal responsibility for when things go bad, people are going to be needed.
Once it's so good AI labs will be happy to accept liability, it's game over. It was never about code quality.
You're not crazy. I think there's still room for the top 5% of devs working on genuinely hard technical problems.. but I don't see a bright future for the rest.
No. Saas hedge is to offer solid api + mcp for agents to use whilst still maintaining their own products alongside. That's it, that's the whole thing.
Are you going to trust a vendor who has been running for years with your business critical operations or brad_69's awesome saas skills and agents? Do you think these businesses are going to shift their whole product to be in Altman's walled garden when they don't need to?
There’s going to be a lot of chaos at some point but I think that “hybrid builders” (scientists, sales people, product developers, etc). true specialists, and new opportunities in hw/robotics/training/ will soak up a lot of talent, and be rewarding to work in. Feels very sadly k-shaped.
Slapping up a slop website is no threat to professional tech folk.
When they have full DevOps, with multiple environments for testing, compliance with security best practices, can do database updates and data migrations, move the app smoothly between different platforms, streamline costs, and scale to at least hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of users without crashing and burning... then go ahead and worry. We aren't anywhere near that.
On the other hand, if you are purely a coder, and cannot run a project that does all of the above... maybe start your worrying earlier.
We aren't, but the AI Labs no doubt are. They just can't release it right now because their bread and butter is still developers burning tokens, so there is still a business problem to solve.
Salaries won't fall, they'll go up. The number of roles is what'll fall. SWE is going to become a giant game of musical chairs, and people who can't find a seat will get pushed into human facing roles ("product" / "technical sales" / "customer support" ).
It'd be hard to compete when there are too many sellers like you. In many businesses, data is the moat and network effects keep making them more valuable over time.
I think technically building this stuff is now easier for the masses. But knowing what to build, how to describe it, how to test it, figuring out how to understand the users -- that's the hard part, always was and I'll be employed doing that for a couple more years at least. But after that, I see this all going towards building for agents, building for users will be a thing of the past. Then I think its not as easy for people to relate to that, probably want a machine designing for other machines. UX and taste don't really matter much at that point.
No, you should be thinking about backup plans, because you should assume you’re not going to walk into another career (I am not suggesting that you are).
- People in other industries actually have specialist knowledge (this is something IT people forget)
- AI is coming for those jobs too
- and so are lots of other people, not just displaced techies but from any number of other industries.
Thinking about it in advance should include training yourself up for other sectors.
If AI is successful, it will be a very different world of jobhunting. If it’s unsuccessful there will still be job losses for a while because of overspending, and because of the wider economic issues.
It is not clear to me that it is yet at a level of success to cause massive tech job losses (it's just causing large-scale misery).
It's also not clear to me that the level of success in the tech industry is truly being repeated anywhere else. There are industries where generative AI is actually a liability (the law, finance) and where it is increasingly viewed as repugnant (design, the arts, to some extent photography where deep learning noise reduction tools are OK but the culture is swinging hard against other generative uses).
I am also not convinced it is "objectively" successful in the tech industry, considering the extent to which most token pricing is subsidised and people's reluctance to demonstrate ROI even on subsidised/bundled tokens.
I'm not claiming it is unsuccessful. Just that I don't think the job apocalypse is here yet. Though this product (ChatGPT Sites) is very indicative of a coming tech job apocalypse in pure software services.
On one hand, I am incredibly tired of seeing the absolute train wreck of waste that is suave founders taking millions and blowing it on hundreds of personnel who do practically nothing— especially having seen what a single person can do with these tools.
On the other hand, death of a livelihood in a social structure that doesn’t care about you.
We’ve always had pump-and-dump trash. The terrible stuff loses and the good stuff wins. I don’t see why that would change.
The companies that ditch the management structures of yore and successfully build better software faster with the new tools will come out on top. I don’t think these companies will replace ALL saas subscriptions with in-house solutions, because one huge benefit of paying someone else to hold that bag is liability and regulatory overhead.
They’ve both been working on this for a while, I’m surprised they still haven’t launched.
Domains, auth, and databases are probably the stickiest software products of all time. I suspect it’s a combo of security concerns and the risk of eroding goodwill among developers (their most important customer base rn) if they move up the stack too quickly. Once you know that the goal is to become cloud vendors, train on/compete with their own customers, and own the entire software stack e2e it’s hard to really feel grateful that they’re dragging it out but planning on doing it anyway.
For those of us working in infra/SaaS outside these companies it’s pretty clear that the only viable path that doesn’t involve getting cannibalized is training your own agents/models. The new coding agent-infra-data business model is a path towards full commoditization and undifferentiated prompting in 3-4 vertically integrated walled gardens. If you ever start making real money on pure software infra they’ll just be able to eat you alive by implementing something similar, training on their own tools rather than yours, and integrating it into their stack (which all of your customers are on already).
Also, you should only ever use $20-200/mo subscriptions on work you want them to train against or you don’t mind automate yourself out of. Think a little bit about what you’re teaching them to do when you use their products, especially if they’re the primary interface you’re working in. People are going to start caring about this a lot when the AI companies feel safe enough to begin the “extinguish” phase of AI coding. Train your own models!
It’s really only an existential problem for pure-software businesses/developers.
There’s a good chance that the next step after open weight models is something that makes it easier to post-train existing models on new workloads without running an entire pipeline just for yourself. Somebody has to actually build it though.
> I do not see enough people discussing this and trying to position their businesses in a way to avoid destruction at the hands of the labs.
What can most even really do about it? Assuming they pull off what they're saying they will: it won't matter what you do, what vertical, what moat you think you have. It will be a concentration of capital and power we've never seen before, and frankly that's terrible for the world.
I think that overlooks requirements like "absolutely ensure the end-user has to have seen and agreed to this exact text before billing them, because otherwise it's a massive fine."
Pessimistically, companies will ignore that and pick the cheapest solution and accept an unknown failure-rate that they assume will be tiny.
Optimistically, they will demand "the AI you just demo'ed, except fix whatever bug so that it never screws up." In that case, SaaS will not be about "training your own LLM model", but about investing in harnesses and rule-engines and GOFAI that constrain the actions of a not-necessarily-custom LLM which is acting as the consumer's UI or concierge. In other words.
It’s mainly mucus, from a piece of mouse colon that was cut open and gently flushed out, leaving the inner mucus layer attached. The actual mucus is black here by default but there is another channel you can turn on in the sidebar to see it.
On top of it we added bacteria (green) and bacteria sized beads (red). On the bottom are colon lining cells (blue).
The inner mucus layer of the colon was generally thought to be impenetrable to bacteria, serving as a way to protect you from the trillions of bacteria in the gut.
It turns out that actually, it’s really easy for bacteria to swim through mucus by using flagella. We found some bacterial mutants that swim through mucus (the green ones). The red beads serve as a control marking the top of the mucus since they can’t get through the mucus.
The real question is then - if they can get through the mucus at any time, why don’t they? And there are various theories about this - which I’m happy to elaborate on this you want. The basic idea is there is a risk whenever you cross the mucus (you get closer to the immune system) and mucus actually feeds and tames bacteria over time by providing them with various sugars and things like that. But if they get desperate/starve, then they will cross.
Mucus is still a mystery - there are substructures within mucus, take a look at this image for example:
People curate their brands on socials. Having a website is not really the badge it once was, and the ability to generate them like this further reduces the social proof they used to provide.
Look at squarespace + wix + lovable + framer + vercel + wordpress (and agencies), cloudflare, godaddy, etc. and think about how much more demand there is for a vertically integrated one stop shop without friction. This is a massive market even if it doesn’t become myspace.
This is the top of the funnel for most people building a tech product or marketing their business, so it’s very helpful if you intend to sell other services they might want to use down the line. (Cf Cloudflare except imagine if they also integrated ads into one of the most popular websites in the world)
You want to talk to a few guys not in the software industry to understand what the world is like first.
While there are many enthusiasts out there, lots and lots of people couldn't care less about ChatGPT allows them to "buuld their own website". It's simply irrelevant to their life.
If you're wondering why OpenAI's models seem to be struggling to stay ahead of Anthropic and are falling further behind, I think it's because of side quests like this.
They have dots, they had Sora, so many other things that take away attention from just having the best model. There are already a bazillion ways to do this. Sure, the integration's nice, but it's just not needed.
I think at this point assessments like this are more qualitative than quantitative. I use Codex far more than I use Claude for coding and my results are generally higher quality. I would not, however, go to someone and tell them that Codex is better than Claude generally. In large part it depends on how you use the model and the harness.
And even if you do know how to use the model and the harness, Claude is just generally still a much a better experience overall.
Returned to Claude as my main driver after many months of Codex and my frustration index is in much, much better place. I can't recommend Codex/GPT to anyone, not just normies. It does make for a really nice reviewer though.
Weird to describe something they could really easily sell to non-coders as a side quest.
I think programmers make the mistake of thinking generative AI is for us, when it is much more ominously about us.
This actually looks like it has meaningful potential, and given how easily they could train it to connect to a whole bunch of off the shelf APIs running in data centres they control, looks like the next generation of the threat to the tech industry.
This isn’t a side quest: it’s the next real step towards claiming a big chunk of the market.
Cloud AI has been the face-eating leopard of the tech industry for the last three years. It’s just starting to chew.
How long before they tweak it to build intranet apps?
Maybe some of the big firms who have been training ChatGPT to destroy them will now wake up to the need for open weights.
All of these "side quests" (and especially this one) are attempts to build a walled-garden.
Especially this. OpenAI will host it. OpenAI will throw "Sign in with ChatGPT" there. "Apps" will be built that depend on end users ChatGPT "connections". The app will fundamentally not work without an end-user having a ChatGPT account/subscription and "connected apps".
Having "the best model" will absolutely not support a $1T+ valuation. Owning the activity of 25-50% of internet users (assuming a split between OAI/Anthropic/Google/maybe-Meta), is.
Does anyone know if Claude makes it easy to publish sites u vibe coded to a custom subdomain or new domain? That’s the biggest reason I use this feature in ChatGPT over Claude
You can ask Claude to deploy it with ShipStatic. It works pretty well for this use case, no account is required, and you can publish to a custom domain/subdomain without much setup.
Disclaimer: I’m one of the people behind ShipStatic.
Gonna wager good money they attempt to relaunch Apps or something of the sort, where you build, launch, host within ChatGpt, seamlessly making it easier really soon.
I have been using Sites a few months now, really underrated feature IMO. Any time I get a quick app idea I just hand it off to Sites and usually get a working prototype within the hour.
Yeah if I were to make it harder I would introduce more sparse connections requiring the user to actually understand the layout, right now you can kind of "feel" your way towards the cheese. Most brutal maze would be one with only one possible path and lots of backtracking required.
Maybe I'll do that and post to HN later, didn't expect this much response!
Really cool idea! Beat level 6! I'm still not sure how to explain how it is showing more than 3 dimensions on a 2D screen though! Would be nice to be able to choose which dimensions are represented at the various N-dimensions, but the UI might be tricky to get nice.
Yeah you have actually picked up on something that the game intentionally does to help the user: If the cheese can be reached by any of the dimensions you are currently on, then it will ensure that dimension is in the subset of dimensions you receive when you go down a dimension.
Otherwise I'd have to introduce some kind of dimension picker. Maybe a fun hardmode.
Oh I see! Thanks for explaining that - I did notice that sometimes a subset that I didn't expect was chosen.
Did the LLM explain its reasoning for how it is showing the higher dimensions? Or perhaps this is a standard way of attempting to display higher dimensional space?
I didn't ask about standard representations, but I think the graph representation works well when paired with the discrete moves this maze allows. If we wanted continuous spaces it would probably be harder to play and harder to represent, but maybe more interesting.
Polished and easy to use website builders have been around for a long time, from Wordpress all the way to Wix.
The fact is, most people aren't builders and never will be. Building software is about formalizing and automating processes, and 95% of folks aren't interested in putting even the most basic effort into improving their business by approching it at a strategic level. Too focused on keeping the lights on and/or more interested in field operations.
For another example look at the many businesses using @gmail addresses to run their business while Google Workplace has streamlined custom domains for a while.
So in practice, ChatGPT Sites will mainly enable software agencies to build websites and offload maintenance to the customer : just manage it from your ChatGPT account. The equivalent of Bring your own cloud for Mom and Pop businesses, and other small companies. Not even sure ChatGPT Sites will create meaningful downward pressure on agency rates.
> Polished and easy to use website builders have been around for a long time, from Wordpress all the way to Wix.
The issue with the Wordpress and Wix is that the site stay polished for approximately 1 second after it has been initially published. In 6mo~1yr it's unmaintainable pile of dogshit that is easier to redo from scratch.
Same. I went to a music festival and their website was hard to use, and the schedule was difficult to understand. And the area had bad connectivity. A few prompts and I was able to build a much better offline site.
Yes, I've exported and self-hosted in the past. I'll sometimes use Sites to mockup something and then I'll download and pass it onto another agent for use in something bigger.
Got curious and don't seem to be able to reproduce what you mean? In 2D Y+ corresponds to top of the screen and Y- to the bottom. X- is left and X+ is right. In 3D and above you can rotate the shape around so there is no real up or down? But maybe I'm missing some edge case where you go up into some high dimension position then back down?
The controls for the X are negative and positive buttons on the left and right. The controls for the Y are similar and this is contrary to logic because it should instead be up and down. And the controls for the Z axis should be in opposite corners.
As a developer I almost got defensive, but I think I feel what you're feeling. Dealing with change is hard. I am a developer who once felt value for knowing these things too. Today I wouldn't even bother opening the developer pane to test CSS changes. Tools that held so much potential to me are now headed for a museum, and it sucks.
I have been building https://github.com/openrundev/openrun. OpenRun allows you to build web apps, adding OIDC/SAML with RBAC to control who can access the apps. Supports MCP for app management. Also supports service bindings, which enables providing each app an isolated database account.
something that solves a real problem for businesses, that you are uniquely positioned to execute on well.
If you target the lowest common denominator, or consumers, or build something really quickly - good luck
Idk about that, a company like Form3, Edenred etc are technically just software companies - but no one in their right mind is going to build a black box payment provider. Sure, if your business is wordpress websites, you're probably going to see a big downswing in new customers. But there is absolutely still going to be a place for highly specialised and security dependent software.
My guess is Google and Apple are going to eventually take all the market share for this "app builder" category. They own the device market-share and can offer way better integration
You think thanks to AI companies are going to be soon building laptops that compete with Macbook Airs on build quality, performance, battery efficiency and compete on price? Or tablets that compete similarly with iPads?
I mean, fair opinion to hold. I don't think AI solves most of the things that were preventing Samsung and HP from doing this so far. Which ones do you believe it solves?
I'm genuinely sad that what we learned with hard work and sweat, our craft, our identity, our soul; is now something you can buy. I've been in this profession for a long time and now I see people who have absolutely no fucking clue, but lots of money, and they buy all these agents and make things that work (way more broken, with absolutely shit quality), but they work and so they brag about their creations to me all day long, and man that makes me feel like a total loser.
I spent decades trying to master media theory, language design, computer graphics, compiler design, rewriting systems, mathematics, logic, build systems, graphs, data-flow systems, making GUI kits, layout systems, ... all to make a better system for thinking, and now the whole idea of thinking is outsourced (as altman says "sold as utility by the meter"). I need to become an addict or something and be wasted. This is not a life.
Are we looking at the same website? My eyes immediately go to the font and typeface styling and it registers immediately as AI generated. There’s a very distinct “AI” website aura that Claude and ChatGPT make that requires you to change a ton of the styling to make go away.
I think people are missing the point. To fix the sloppiness all you need is a non-technical person who wanted the site/app to tell it what to fix. Either way the technical middle-person is gone
You spent decades on this and you think that linked website is not slop? You say its "basic" but its really not, its overengineered nonsense if you look closely.
If it's any consolation, almost no craft will be spared. Software was simply first in line because of how much training data was available, but it won't be the last.
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 32.0 ms ] threadThat limitation doesn't exist with ChatGPT
They know the API price wars are a race to the bottom with little/no profit margins.
I hope you support UBI.
If they merely acted as APIs, even if that meant they would be “relegated” to the status of a utility then individuals and businesses would have faith and confidence that their use of AI wouldn’t be the very thing that puts them out of business. I think that would result in more innovation, faster adoption and deployment, and broader distribution of economic benefits.
As OpenAI and anthropic march towards an everything app they are smothering infant industries in the cradle and undermining their own users confidence that it’s safe to use their models.
I have talked to over 10 people at universities, SMBs, and large enterprises that are actively allocating millions of dollars to bring AI in house.
You are advocating a protection of the managerial and owner class to keep the economy needlessly balkanized. Universities are some of the greatest offenders in perpetuating inequality. Why have universities gotten more unaffordable?
Replacing most universities with federated campuses, eliminating their managers, open classrooms, LLM TAs and other resources to respect the diversity of the student population, etc. would be better for the world, not worse. If you want to take the side of the incumbents in an economy already teeming with inequality be my guest.
The saving grace of the approaching compute as utility end state is the destruction of the class of interests you purportedly represent. With mass layoffs will come mass demand for UBI, and the destruction of universities that are in truth the ones doing the rug pulling you mentioned elsewhere. People complain about public incentives for AI? What about schools? Has the quality of schooling increased with price? And I'm supposed to be taking your side?
I am not advocating protecting the management class, quite the opposite, I am saying their demonstrated greed in vertical and horizontal integration should be stopped because they have shown they cant be responsible with management authority. You use the word balkenized to imply that fragmented AI is a bad but fragmentation is the basis of free market capitalism and in particular the start up ecosystem.
Your advocating that society just capitulate to Sam Altman and grant a permanent monopoly and the status as permanent underclass because he did "hard work" but that is flawed for two reasons: 1. Hard work doesn't justify destroying the very system that allowed the conditions for that hard work and innovation to create wealth by letting winners convert a free market to a monopoly. That tension is the internal contradiction of free market capitalism, winners will become monopoly such that no more winners are possible. We solved this in the progressive era with utilities, oil companies etc, by either breaking up the companies that had too much market dominance, or making them divest vertical integration units (like standard oil having to sell its rail lines because owning transportation gave it an insurmountable advantage). 2. There is no AI without training data AI which was taken without consent or compensation from public and private sources created by civilization over generations. So the polity has a clear preceding claim to that work and if any industry lacks a right to the ownership of what they've created it's AI. Sam Altmans hardwork is trivial compared to the totality of civilization writing over generations and creating the internet and maintaining libraries and a mailing system so they could collect that data economically.
For those reasons it's totally justified and we'll within the legal and commercial precedents we've established to limit how a single company can develop and operate AI. We should not allow vertical integration across the stack. Openai cant manufacture chips, train models, and build an everything app from customer training data. I don't know ow what owners your think I am defending or representing but I would suggest you are arguing with a phantom opponent that isn't me or are misunderstanding my position. I am not suggesting nationalizing AI or giving the polity ownership, I am suggesting standard corrective regulation to preserve a free market with clear preceding examples from the last technology transformation. We suffered great harm when the electric grid and phone lines and oil and shipping consolidation was unimpeded and unlocked innovation and broad wealth creation when we broke them up.
I don't think I'm arguing with a "phantom" at all, rather you seem to suggest I want OpenAI to own the economy when I rather precisely articulated the most desirable "rug pull" (using a phrase you yourself invoked elsewhere in this discussion) would be depriving them of that very opportunity. If anyone has misread this, I would suggest it's you. We simply seem to disagree on the timing and nature of the regulatory intervention.
Are you against UBI? We've gone back and forth with each other for a bit now and I still don't have an answer to that question.
Is that accurate and complete? If not, what am I missing?
Btw you didn’t ask me for my opinion on UBI, you declared your opinion as a statement or at most a rhetorical question not something that warranted a response. That might not be what you intended but reread your sentence and ask if someone would interpret it as a question rather than a statement.
I am not opposed to UBI or nationalizing AI, and I am not defending a managerial or ownership class. I am arguing that there is an intermediate step available to prevent the emergence of a monopoly that is fully vertically integrated with custom chips —> training —> inference —> application—> deployment.
Society doesnt need to allow that. We can limit OpenAI and anthropics ability to build the app layer. We could limit their share of compute to a percentage of available compute and make the remaining share available to other competitors. We could require that they distribute their training data to others after some period of time. We could require they release their weights.
There are a broad set of tools available to ensure that don’t capture the whole intelligence stack and then expand horizontally to, as you said, make it so “my business doesn’t exist in 10 years”. The fact that you don’t know my business but could credibly predict that they could put most businesses out of existence is a massive problem that UBI won’t fix.
I don’t want to live in a society where humanity is living on the patronage of monopoly AI. And AI won’t be viable if no one has money because they greedily expand everywhere and put people out of work and businesses out of existence.
I think there are intermediate solutions before UBI and full nationalization are needed and we should implement them. Specifically, making sure vertical integration isn’t allowed, making sure compute access is broadly distributed rather than let openAI and anthropic lock it all up, making sure training data sets must be released within a short time frame like we do with patents, making sure the labs can’t copy customers.
Now it is my turn to make sure I understand what you are saying. On that count, I think there is a remaining point where we are not understanding each other. And really the rest of the discussion hinges on this.
You say:
> I am not defending a managerial or ownership class.
But also say:
> I have talked to over 10 people at universities, SMBs, and large enterprises that are actively allocating millions of dollars to bring AI in house.
Who are these people with such authority if not the managerial or ownership class, or at the very least, their representatives?
I think what you are saying is quite plainly a defense of such interests. We sort of need to agree on that or the rest of the discussion cannot follow.
Once we align on that, I will have more to say which I believe will close the loop I have been attempting to weave.
I have been enjoying this back and forth though. Some of your points do make sense. Perhaps you are even correct. But let's be accurate about the nature of the two options we each propose, only then can we attempt to grasp some sense of the tradeoffs.
This is rather just another mechanism to control people - by creating a dependency from entity which is providing this kind of support.
Civilization is all about giving up control. Are roads also a mechanism to control people?
UBI is desirable and will likely only come about by the sorts of collective action that defined the labor movement. Are weekends also a "mechanism to control people"? I think you need to consult a history book, it would give you a better grasp of who is "spreading nonsense" here.
I'm surprised there's not a bigger push into better and useful memory, since that would result in actual lock-in.
I haven't used ChatGPT in over a month. I bounce between Grok, Gemini & Claude. Is ChatGPT even worth it.
Grok can do things the other two can't, like read and fetch websites sometimes where Claude and Gemini cannot.
Gemini is just someone to feed javascript to when you want to save on Claude tokens.
If you ask something like "please make a little website for me and my friends to plan our shopping lists on", I would expect the result to be:
"Here you go: https://shopping-lister.chatgpt.com/"
Unfortunately right now most AI models get into the weeds of asking the user to sign up to netlify or firebase or buying a domain etc - none of which most users are interested in doing.
Lo and behold the homepage bundle size is almost 10mb… Seems to mostly be caused by all of those images. I suggest you guys compress those ASAP.
https://tidal-house-retreat.openai.chatgpt.site/
> Quiet cabins. A view of your own.
For whatever reason most of the sites are Arabic-language prototypes for things like plumbing companies. I'm not sure why - if those are solving a real problem, or whether someone is running a scam, or what.
I got tired of spinning up repos for basic pages, so made my own host last year - https://pageplane.app.
I think the SEO/AEO agencies are using them to seed content for clients.
Very clean site design though.
Vibe coding full circle
And it will be good enough for 90% of use cases.
I think it’ll just raise the automation bar that much higher. In other words, it will be good enough for 90% of yesterday’s use-cases. But tomorrow’s? I’m bearish.
I imagine the amount of onerous bureaucracy when interacting with any entity is going to explode if they expect you to do it in an automated fashion, for both private companies and the government. Especially as roles are cut because they can be “automated”. Except only 80% of the workload can be reliably automated, the other 20% requires a long tail of effort.
Once the app gets a bit more complex, it won't be that much different to any more traditionally vibe coded application (code, git/pr, test, deploy, ops). It only removes the barrier to get started, but doesn't solve any of the real problems. Problems like AI slop, code rot, bad architecture, security issues, data loss/breach because of bad code, and so on.
An average customer of mine hasn't got the slightest interest in dealing with this stuff.
Sure, they show me llm generated prototypes these days of how they envision a certain feature, ui and ux wise.
But that's great, because even with AI I save time iterating with them.
But for the actual programming and maintenance they still come to me.
Why? Because THEY ARE NOT INTERESTED IN IT!
I'm not saying an agent couldn't make sure it's good and it works, but there are a lot of aspects to that: It's compliant, it's secure, the right data is stored, the right compromises are made for sometimes mutually exclusive business priorities, UX is decent, it's responsive, it scales, and so on and so forth. A lot of devil in the details, and the context required to know what to focus on is rather vast.
It usually comes down to how successful a business is. Just starting out with little to no funding? They'll want to dabble themselves. But if there's money, it can and will be exchanged for time.
That and you need to be able to even ask the right questions.
These are people that have NO IDEA about how computers or their software works.
Sure they can let it be explained by an LLM but unless they thoroughly study these things, they simply can't know which questions to ask.
* Some people do think this (e.g., https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2026/09/25/what-even-is-an-os-no...), but I remain somewhat skeptical that this'll be true for the most economically significant applications. This is not because I'm an AI capabilities skeptic (I'm not, I'm more of a doomer), but because even in a world where AI is designing and implementing all the software, there are probably still significant benefits to standardization. I see it as sort of analogous to compilers; we might get a world where compilers are both used and maintained almost exclusively by LLMs, but we probably won't get one where compilers stop being used or maintained at all because LLMs write everything in assembly.
Also I dont get the inhouse argument, you dont really save anything. So instead of paying X to SaaS, you now propose to pay X to anthropic instead AND maintain said SaaS... what? how is that better, that just shifted the cost to another company and you got the burden of maintenance and responsibility.
The SaaS to inhouse argument is just something I've heard that came to mind when reading this thread.
A team I was managing spent a whole year converting government forms into a web app. It took a while and there was a lot of discussion with the end users and a bunch of back and forth (keep in mind this is government software with a lot of onerous legal requirements). Then about 4 months ago, we just fed Codex the forms, along with the UI design and it spat it out in 1 hour. Was it perfect? No. But our iterative loop became make the web app, show it to end users and then incorporate feedback and completely cut out the UX team, product etc. We were able to complete the conversion in 2 weeks with one guy. For most corporate development work it’s basically over.
I just don't see how we keep going like this without layoffs. The company cannot responsibly continue paying for this many engineers, when half, or less, could do the same job.
I have been the lone developer on a project for quite some time and was already feeling that way. Yet, recently found out that a second is being added to the team and a third is to come. I guess I'll enjoy what is effectively a paid vacation before it all comes crumbling down?
Like, why is it all still so buggy? Why does no website seem to consider 96 PPI displays in its design? Why don't we have ostensibly useful features like undo trees everywhere? Why is everything still a RAM hog? Why does the number of websites that pay no heed to accessibility seem to be going up rather than down?
I'm told we're living in the future, but it sure doesn't feel like it.
Lack of information. When you are on the building side you become blind to its faults. Consumers almost never tell you what isn't good about it.
> why is it all still so buggy?
Also lack of information. I haven't seen any bugs in years in the things I've worked on. LLMs have closed every last obvious testing gap, squashing any outstanding bugs there. That's not to say it is all bug-free now, but what bugs users may be experiencing aren't being reported.
AI is good at building software, but it is still not good at consuming software like actual consumers do.
Flawless software isn't the goal, ever. Feature development is almost always the primary goal, and fixing bugs and performance issues is only done if the bug is bad enough.
Like the old quip that a cup of coffee lets you do stupid things faster.
I live in the future when it comes to my hobby of music making. I make my own little software tools that I did not have the ability to make 2 years ago. Little tools that are too specialized and specific for my obscure taste to have much wider economic value as tools in themselves.
Claude is also the greatest obscure book recommendation engine I have ever found so I have a lot more interesting books to read than in the past.
Outside of this, I basically live in 2019 but everything is more expensive.
I worry this is the future. It doesn't really feel much different other than things getting more and more expensive.
Are you going to trust a vendor who has been running for years with your business critical operations or brad_69's awesome saas skills and agents? Do you think these businesses are going to shift their whole product to be in Altman's walled garden when they don't need to?
When they have full DevOps, with multiple environments for testing, compliance with security best practices, can do database updates and data migrations, move the app smoothly between different platforms, streamline costs, and scale to at least hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of users without crashing and burning... then go ahead and worry. We aren't anywhere near that.
On the other hand, if you are purely a coder, and cannot run a project that does all of the above... maybe start your worrying earlier.
We aren't, but the AI Labs no doubt are. They just can't release it right now because their bread and butter is still developers burning tokens, so there is still a business problem to solve.
That said, getting a frontier model self-improvement harness to work correctly end-to-end isn't trivial.
- People in other industries actually have specialist knowledge (this is something IT people forget)
- AI is coming for those jobs too
- and so are lots of other people, not just displaced techies but from any number of other industries.
Thinking about it in advance should include training yourself up for other sectors.
If AI is successful, it will be a very different world of jobhunting. If it’s unsuccessful there will still be job losses for a while because of overspending, and because of the wider economic issues.
Sorry, I switched senses in the middle of this.
Should have written either:
"because you should not assume you’re going to walk into another career (I am not suggesting that you are)"
or something like
"because you should assume you’re not going to walk into another career (I am not suggesting that you think you might)"
Need to write my posts less hurriedly.
It's also not clear to me that the level of success in the tech industry is truly being repeated anywhere else. There are industries where generative AI is actually a liability (the law, finance) and where it is increasingly viewed as repugnant (design, the arts, to some extent photography where deep learning noise reduction tools are OK but the culture is swinging hard against other generative uses).
I am also not convinced it is "objectively" successful in the tech industry, considering the extent to which most token pricing is subsidised and people's reluctance to demonstrate ROI even on subsidised/bundled tokens.
I'm not claiming it is unsuccessful. Just that I don't think the job apocalypse is here yet. Though this product (ChatGPT Sites) is very indicative of a coming tech job apocalypse in pure software services.
Hopefully you've been living below your means and saving.
If I can't work as a computer scientist anymore (I am my own business since many years), I'll simply do something else.
I have many interests and "talents".
Maybe I can work as a gardener, or I help the farmers around, or I do some social work, or I work as a garbage man, or I ...
I am not worried in the slightest on a personal level.
Society might crumble though.
But then again, was it ever more than barbarism in disguise?
On the other hand, death of a livelihood in a social structure that doesn’t care about you.
We’ve always had pump-and-dump trash. The terrible stuff loses and the good stuff wins. I don’t see why that would change.
The companies that ditch the management structures of yore and successfully build better software faster with the new tools will come out on top. I don’t think these companies will replace ALL saas subscriptions with in-house solutions, because one huge benefit of paying someone else to hold that bag is liability and regulatory overhead.
Domains, auth, and databases are probably the stickiest software products of all time. I suspect it’s a combo of security concerns and the risk of eroding goodwill among developers (their most important customer base rn) if they move up the stack too quickly. Once you know that the goal is to become cloud vendors, train on/compete with their own customers, and own the entire software stack e2e it’s hard to really feel grateful that they’re dragging it out but planning on doing it anyway.
For those of us working in infra/SaaS outside these companies it’s pretty clear that the only viable path that doesn’t involve getting cannibalized is training your own agents/models. The new coding agent-infra-data business model is a path towards full commoditization and undifferentiated prompting in 3-4 vertically integrated walled gardens. If you ever start making real money on pure software infra they’ll just be able to eat you alive by implementing something similar, training on their own tools rather than yours, and integrating it into their stack (which all of your customers are on already).
Also, you should only ever use $20-200/mo subscriptions on work you want them to train against or you don’t mind automate yourself out of. Think a little bit about what you’re teaching them to do when you use their products, especially if they’re the primary interface you’re working in. People are going to start caring about this a lot when the AI companies feel safe enough to begin the “extinguish” phase of AI coding. Train your own models!
I do not see enough people discussing this and trying to position their businesses in a way to avoid destruction at the hands of the labs.
There’s a good chance that the next step after open weight models is something that makes it easier to post-train existing models on new workloads without running an entire pipeline just for yourself. Somebody has to actually build it though.
What can most even really do about it? Assuming they pull off what they're saying they will: it won't matter what you do, what vertical, what moat you think you have. It will be a concentration of capital and power we've never seen before, and frankly that's terrible for the world.
Pessimistically, companies will ignore that and pick the cheapest solution and accept an unknown failure-rate that they assume will be tiny.
Optimistically, they will demand "the AI you just demo'ed, except fix whatever bug so that it never screws up." In that case, SaaS will not be about "training your own LLM model", but about investing in harnesses and rule-engines and GOFAI that constrain the actions of a not-necessarily-custom LLM which is acting as the consumer's UI or concierge. In other words.
Yesterday my dot made a web app to view 3D microscopy files
https://mucus-atlas-viewer.pazimzadeh.chatgpt.site/?sample=k...
I didn't even know about the sites feature
On top of it we added bacteria (green) and bacteria sized beads (red). On the bottom are colon lining cells (blue).
The inner mucus layer of the colon was generally thought to be impenetrable to bacteria, serving as a way to protect you from the trillions of bacteria in the gut.
It turns out that actually, it’s really easy for bacteria to swim through mucus by using flagella. We found some bacterial mutants that swim through mucus (the green ones). The red beads serve as a control marking the top of the mucus since they can’t get through the mucus.
Find this and other images in my paper: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11784811/
The real question is then - if they can get through the mucus at any time, why don’t they? And there are various theories about this - which I’m happy to elaborate on this you want. The basic idea is there is a risk whenever you cross the mucus (you get closer to the immune system) and mucus actually feeds and tames bacteria over time by providing them with various sugars and things like that. But if they get desperate/starve, then they will cross.
Mucus is still a mystery - there are substructures within mucus, take a look at this image for example:
https://mucus-atlas-viewer.pazimzadeh.chatgpt.site/?sample=f...
And here is a good paper too from my collaborator (who actually took these images) who discovered a sub-type of mucus and mucus-producing cells:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33859001/
People curate their brands on socials. Having a website is not really the badge it once was, and the ability to generate them like this further reduces the social proof they used to provide.
This is the top of the funnel for most people building a tech product or marketing their business, so it’s very helpful if you intend to sell other services they might want to use down the line. (Cf Cloudflare except imagine if they also integrated ads into one of the most popular websites in the world)
While there are many enthusiasts out there, lots and lots of people couldn't care less about ChatGPT allows them to "buuld their own website". It's simply irrelevant to their life.
They have dots, they had Sora, so many other things that take away attention from just having the best model. There are already a bazillion ways to do this. Sure, the integration's nice, but it's just not needed.
Returned to Claude as my main driver after many months of Codex and my frustration index is in much, much better place. I can't recommend Codex/GPT to anyone, not just normies. It does make for a really nice reviewer though.
Which means non-technical ChatGPT users are a bit bewildered as to how to pick.
This makes that easy; I suspect normies will fucking love it. My boss will.
I think programmers make the mistake of thinking generative AI is for us, when it is much more ominously about us.
This actually looks like it has meaningful potential, and given how easily they could train it to connect to a whole bunch of off the shelf APIs running in data centres they control, looks like the next generation of the threat to the tech industry.
This isn’t a side quest: it’s the next real step towards claiming a big chunk of the market.
Cloud AI has been the face-eating leopard of the tech industry for the last three years. It’s just starting to chew.
How long before they tweak it to build intranet apps?
Maybe some of the big firms who have been training ChatGPT to destroy them will now wake up to the need for open weights.
The frontier companies are scrutinized heavily for their trillion dollar valuations all without a clear mass-consumer use-case. They're trying stuff.
They are trying to build an ecosystem that can capture the value of AI, whereas LLMs are quickly becoming a commodity.
Where is the moat? How can they convert users?
If you were sitting on a rocket burning cash to not crash you would do that too.
Anthropic is just trying to get to ASI and relying on the blind faith of investors that there will be a return at the end.
What matters is which strategy is more effective for attracting investor capital, because neither can survive without it.
Especially this. OpenAI will host it. OpenAI will throw "Sign in with ChatGPT" there. "Apps" will be built that depend on end users ChatGPT "connections". The app will fundamentally not work without an end-user having a ChatGPT account/subscription and "connected apps".
Having "the best model" will absolutely not support a $1T+ valuation. Owning the activity of 25-50% of internet users (assuming a split between OAI/Anthropic/Google/maybe-Meta), is.
Disclaimer: I’m one of the people behind ShipStatic.
Then the app economy gets going within ChatGPT
For example, here's a game where you are a mouse hunting for cheese in higher dimensional mazes: https://manifold-six-axis-escape.nathan338932.chatgpt.site/
Idea came to me while at a concert, was ready to play that same night.
Maybe I'll do that and post to HN later, didn't expect this much response!
Otherwise I'd have to introduce some kind of dimension picker. Maybe a fun hardmode.
Did the LLM explain its reasoning for how it is showing the higher dimensions? Or perhaps this is a standard way of attempting to display higher dimensional space?
The fact is, most people aren't builders and never will be. Building software is about formalizing and automating processes, and 95% of folks aren't interested in putting even the most basic effort into improving their business by approching it at a strategic level. Too focused on keeping the lights on and/or more interested in field operations.
For another example look at the many businesses using @gmail addresses to run their business while Google Workplace has streamlined custom domains for a while.
So in practice, ChatGPT Sites will mainly enable software agencies to build websites and offload maintenance to the customer : just manage it from your ChatGPT account. The equivalent of Bring your own cloud for Mom and Pop businesses, and other small companies. Not even sure ChatGPT Sites will create meaningful downward pressure on agency rates.
Lesson learned the hard way.
Whats going to happen is a) easier to shop around for agencies b) expectations of agencies to go up c) deflation etc etc.
The issue with the Wordpress and Wix is that the site stay polished for approximately 1 second after it has been initially published. In 6mo~1yr it's unmaintainable pile of dogshit that is easier to redo from scratch.
But no.. lol. This place has limited deep thinker's who understand why humans prefer what they do.
Is it possible to export site to own domain?
if i need something with personal data, i let the build process encrypt it and js to decrypt it.
If i need save/load/state i use local storage + json import/export.
Slightly ignorant how frugile i'm doing this tbh $4 is not a lot.
I know that Vercel or something similar is quite close to that, but it's not that well integrated into MCP/Skills.
Wonder what domain they're going to pick next. I feel like many LLM-dependent businesses are going to get sherlocked by OpenAI and Anthropic.
hard out here hard for startups too
I mean, fair opinion to hold. I don't think AI solves most of the things that were preventing Samsung and HP from doing this so far. Which ones do you believe it solves?
Let alone network effects..
I'm genuinely sad that what we learned with hard work and sweat, our craft, our identity, our soul; is now something you can buy. I've been in this profession for a long time and now I see people who have absolutely no fucking clue, but lots of money, and they buy all these agents and make things that work (way more broken, with absolutely shit quality), but they work and so they brag about their creations to me all day long, and man that makes me feel like a total loser.
I spent decades trying to master media theory, language design, computer graphics, compiler design, rewriting systems, mathematics, logic, build systems, graphs, data-flow systems, making GUI kits, layout systems, ... all to make a better system for thinking, and now the whole idea of thinking is outsourced (as altman says "sold as utility by the meter"). I need to become an addict or something and be wasted. This is not a life.
Are we looking at the same website? My eyes immediately go to the font and typeface styling and it registers immediately as AI generated. There’s a very distinct “AI” website aura that Claude and ChatGPT make that requires you to change a ton of the styling to make go away.
And I wish there was a SponsorBlock type, crowdsourced slop filter for Youtube.
I agree the second site is nice looking though.