Is someone who has $100k reasonable for wanting $1M? Sure, one would struggle to buy a nice house with only $100k. With $1M it is much easier.
Do you think someone who has only $100, whose only thought is how to pay for their next meal or rent check, might similarly wonder “what difference is there between $100k and $1M? They’re both very rich!”
Point is, ambition is like a gas, it tends to expand to the volume of its container. With $400M you have enough for your own and your family’s comfort forever. With $4B it’s less about lifestyle and more about shaping the world to your liking. You might not care about that if that’s 1000x away from where you are right now, but if it’s just 10x away, it becomes more tempting.
What if you want $4B so you can finally end homelessness, or really contribute meaningfully to cancer research, or ending mortality? These are "shaping the world" that aren't possible for someone with a measly $10M, but might take billions to achieve, as well as aligning political actors (who require donations). "Shaping the world" doesn't have to be a bad thing, that's what we otherwise call "civic duty" when we try to shape the world with our votes.
Although, at that level of raise, I assume the ceo/founder(s) would probably be taking a least a few million, maybe $10M over the course of the raises + elapsed time?
There’s definitely a substantial difference between a net worth of $10M and a net worth of $100M. After that, I imagine most people wouldn’t really be able to tell the difference day to day.
Just installed it, it's funny their landing page is littered with every AI buzzword too. But I am going to give Insomnia a try, I've heard people talk about it and a few others on HN over the years. I just need a glorified cURL GUI at the end of the day.
Curl UI wrappers are just the weirdest thing. They’re so popular, they offer so little (compared to other paid services), and they all have the same evolution of simple -> require account -> sell data.
They just all seem like things that developers would easily ditch. But up until now, I was also still stuck on postman because my team/org uses it as a knowledge repository. It’s just classic enshittification. They’re using high switching costs to make as much money as possible without everybody leaving. Who
I've been using Insomnia whenever I can since before Covid. Its been nice, but ever since they started pushing accounts so aggressively, I've switched to Yaak to get back to that feel of a simple API client that prompted me to switch to Insomia in the first place. 100% recommend. https://yaak.app/
That looks appealing but the existence of a Pricing page tells me it's just a matter of time.
I have a sense that a dumb Web API testing UI application is really not that hard to get AI to implement. These apps all look about the same for a reason. So maybe there will be a prevailing FOSS option that isn't trying to monetize.
Pretty much. It's just a question of how fast it happens. The more capable something is of making money without compromising the product or exploiting users the longer it will take, but once people who are sick with pathological greed get involved they'll eventually start to demand enshittifying the product and selling out the userbase to squeeze more and more money into their pockets.
Well, somehow the society has gone for the better over the course of history, even with pathologically greedy and evil people constantly in positions of power, so that counts as something.
For the better in spite of the pathologically greedy and evil, but not because of them. A lot of blood has been shed keeping them in check throughout the ages and only recently have they been allowed to feed off of the masses without any real fear. They just hold us back by draining us, stamping out competitors who drive innovation, and funneling everything into their own pockets.
Depends. Is it an investment grant or loan? The former is money to grow with no expectations on growth. The latter has an investor giving money in expectation of a return.
Most of the YC companies are loan backed with investors pushing milestones for the next investment chunk or round.
We went to bruno years ago and has been good. Nice to be able to store the request definitions in git. But to be honest, don't really need any of these tools anymore.
It's a shame what happened to Postman. It started as an excellent little developer tool for testing APIs. Then for some reason they raised over $400M in funding and hired 1,500+ employees, for what should have been a tiny OSS/passion project like curl or little snitch. Instead they now have to justify their valuation by forcing logins, collecting data, monthly subscriptions, AI features, etc.
I still don't know how they're valued at $5B+ when I don't know a single developer who actually uses it anymore
> Instead they now have to justify their valuation by forcing logins, collecting data, monthly subscriptions, AI features, etc.
All those people who gave them millions in funding are expecting to make a return on that investment and that means prioritizing turning it into something that will make money by selling out users. The valuation is just a guess at how successful it will be at screwing users over. Greed ruins everything.
That's just GUIs being easier to use than CLIs for most people. After all, that's why Postman got popular - it's a GUI to do curl without the CLI! Or Handbrake to avoid using ffmpeg. Or various "paint" applications to rotate images instead of using imagemagik.
The problem is that Postman decided to want to be a business and took VC money.
10 years ago I totally get that but these days there's plugins built into every IDE that can smooth over the annoyances of testing an API via curl without having to invoke paying for Postman and dealing with all of its nonsense.
Of course now that I said that today I'd probably just have Claude hit the API for me, or build a dashboard to test it, I really don't know how Postman continues to exist.
I know lot of bits with curl. But I find it always a pain to use. Fine for when you do scripting but I find command line pretty painful overall. So I understand want to use some other tool with better ergonomics.
I wrote a lot of python. Whenever I was working with an API, I'd just spin up a jupyter notebook and write out the calls I wanted to try out in a python notebook, once I had everything working, it was just a copy paste job into the codebase.
Using some kind of dedicated tool like postman always felt like a literal step backwards.
> for some reason they raised over $400M in funding and hired 1,500+ employees
You know the reason. A bunch of people were able to take home a lot of money because of that growth and now have the option to FIRE themselves whenever they want to shake off the stress.
That's the founder mentality that Y Combinator exists to leverage or encourage and it's ubiquity is what separates the prevailing 21st century technology movement from the nerdy, academic, UNIX-y movement that gave us GNU, linux, curl, ffmpeg, redis, etc
We got to watch innovative products get pumped full of helium until they explode with bloat and rent-seeking instead of accumulating a growing foundation of sturdy technical building blocks as we could have had on the other path.
AI now leads us into some new movement, the worst version of which a few model vendors protected by regulations absorb almost all technical accomplishment and lease it back out to everybody else, and the best version of which democratizes technical construction so widely that individuals can naively spin up effective solutions for the most idiosyncratic needs.
> AI now leads us into some new movement, the worst version of which a few model vendors protected by regulations absorb almost all technical accomplishment and lease it back out to everybody else, and the best version of which democratizes technical construction so widely that individuals can naively spin up effective solutions for the most idiosyncratic needs.
Yeah and the issues from these vibecoded one-off programs will be felt for generations.
I got out of IT partially because I could see the writing on the wall. The "load bearing Excel sheet" is one thing, manageable if you could catch the person who wrote it in time before they depart or die and know your way around Excel - there's only so many ways to achieve a desired goal (unless the author used VBA, at which point all bets are off, and I member encountering a spreadsheet that macro-called in a DLL shipped together with the sheet).
But vibe coded AI bullshit? That is supposed to be hosted by someone and kept secure (i.e. isn't hackable in a few seconds by anyone who manages to compromise some dingus's laptop? Oh hell no. I'm outta there, I'm too old for this crap.
Yeah and the issues from these vibecoded one-off programs will be felt for generations.
No, they won't. There's nothing wrong with a vibecoded one-off program, at least not that another vibecoded one-off program can't fix.
Source code is now object code, and vice versa. And AI-written code is more secure than human-written code, not less. Deal with it. We won't be going back.
Oh it gets better (not the OP but I think the following is even worse).
That DLL hooks into SCADA and sometimes sends updates to a PLC controlling safety critical equipment. When does it send updates versus just query the controller? No one knows. The guy who wrote it died in an (unrelated) industrial accident involving a runaway forklift after leaving the company. Even so much as debugging it would require shutting down the entire factory and replacing all the crucibles afterwards ($$$).
Thankfully we are finally after all these years getting regulation on that sort of stuff. It seems EU was 20 something years late... And no I really think that regulation in case like this is really reasonable idea.
That's even worse than the time I was on a conference call with the COO of a Fortune 500 retailer who referred to "the Excel spreadsheet we use to keep track of the stores we own".
The subject matter was building an auditing system to comply with the requirements of an IRS consent decree as part of a settlement for shoddy accounting practices which may or may not have included tracking billions of dollars of assets with Excel.
sadly this is coming to your linux-distro in no time! Far too many single-dev core building block which are now adding features at breakneck speed conversing with AI only.
> But vibe coded AI bullshit? That is supposed to be hosted by someone and kept secure
It's also astonishingly stupid. I don't want a one-off program for everything. I want a well-designed and battle-tested program that I can extend with AI, and that has a ton of people's AIs directed at it, constantly finding bugs, posting them on the bugtracker, and writing and debating pull requests.
I can't comprehend people who think that everything should be built over and over again, and that that will be safe, practical or cheap. It's like they're telling me that I should design a new language for each conversation that I have. Why would I?
The worst part is how far the capabilities of AI are from that dream anyway. They can't even write readable, intelligible code. They're being celebrated for being able to notice buffer overrun errors in code that people would also notice if anybody had ever really looked at some particular span of code in the last 10 years. It's finding errors in move fast and break things code and code that has been maintained by a weirdo professor in his spare time for free and half the economy somehow relies on. That's not magic, its a sign of how sloppy things got.
Because IT/programmers/tech folks in general have abdicated their responsibilities for too long, imo. The industry collectively started huffing their own farts and forgot they operate in a support role for most organizations.
The state of IT has been stagnant at best for the past 20-30 odd years. The promises of the 90's or earlier that we were going to have average office workers being able to automate their workflows never was realized.
Today with AI I'm watching random sales people automate a large portion of the bullshit part of their jobs IT and technology systems foisted upon them for no real reason. Those CRM systems that force you to click 28 buttons per lead you enter into the system, with all sorts of amazing UIx like having to restart from scratch if you miss a field, get logged out during data entry, etc. This is the standard state of most software people interact with on a daily basis.
If current IT didn't absolutely suck for most people, and hadn't become a means to it's own ends I think you'd see a lot less pent up demand for these vibe coded one-off applications that solve a specific problem for a single user.
It's been interesting to watch. Normies can finally get stuff done without the IT and developer gatekeeping and get on with doing the meaningful bits of their jobs. For better or worse. It's certainly going to blow up in quite a few cases, but I think the cat is out of the bag if progress in tooling - not even models - continues at a rapid pace.
This sounds exactly like the promises of putting a PC on everyone's desktop rather than a terminal connected to a locked-down mainframe, which in the end led to the lockdown migrating to PCs and the few employees who had any interest in automation forced to use tools like Excel because it was at least an improvement over VBScript and batch files and IT wouldn't let them install legit development tools unless their job description required them.
What are the odds that the average corporate IT department is going to allow the use of anything other than locked-down corporate AI with strict token quotas and stricter acceptable use policies?
> The industry collectively started huffing their own farts and forgot they operate in a support role for most organizations.
And most organizations still treat IT as a "support role" which means "cost center", only changing attitude when they inevitably get hacked, and a few years down the line, when enough of the managers who were there during the Great Hack are gone, IT gets the cuts again.
> Today with AI I'm watching random sales people automate a large portion of the bullshit part of their jobs IT and technology systems foisted upon them for no real reason.
Sadly that doesn't help at all. Random people automating heaps of crap in order to do their actual work, just makes the crap easier to manage for them. It doesn't remove it.
I'm reminded of health workers or teachers complaining that half their time is wasted on various types of record-keeping, because employer wants to record, check & micromanage everything. Similar with tax systems becoming ever more complex. Those are just a few of many examples.
AI assisting with managing that, just puts some $profitable$ control knobs in the hands of a very few providers. While at the same time enabling the mountain of crap to grow even further.
A real fix would be to use AI to get a better understanding of the existing heap of crap, and use that understanding to cut large chunks out & re-organise the remainder into a simpler stack.
Doesn't seem to me that that's being done. So far AI is mostly used to ADD to the crap-heap, faster & easier.
> A real fix would be to use AI to get a better understanding of the existing heap of crap, and use that understanding to cut large chunks out & re-organise the remainder into a simpler stack.
The thing is, that's been known for a long time, at the latest since the release of Bullshit Jobs [1].
Unfortunately, too many too rich interests are tied up in the status quo.
I've gone through at least 30+ iterations of CRMs / Bug/ Issue/ WorkTrackers/ AP/ Expense / Project tooling in 7 companies over 20 years.
One of the conclusions I've come to - is that 90%+ of the featureitis is checkbox nonsense, often created for managers and administrators who will never use the tools themselves, and are materially harmful to the employees who actually use them, while, ironically, providing zero to sometimes negative value to the Enterprise.
Some of the most profitable projects have been at 20+ year $30B+ companies where a new-generation of technologists have come in and just ... thrown it all away. All the transitions, gates, forms, custom fields, labels, business rules - all of the crud just dumped in the garbage and, amazingly- zero interruption to business, and the tools all of a sudden became moderately useful instead of offensive.
This is very much on topic with Postman, Kibana, Jira, etc.. Pretty much any large enterprise software suite that in order to justify it's millions/dollar a year of license fees, has to pack in feature that aren't valuable to the end-users, but can be used to ratchet up and lock in the enterprise users.
The problem with all of these companies is that once they take VC money, and have a Board driving them to make the chart go up and to the right - they have no option but to destroy what once was a beautiful product, and turn it into a morass of pain.
Tools like ffmpeg, sqlite, vlc, curl, wireshark continue to be excellent because they were never infected with VC money.
> Frontier models can and do write readable, intelligible code
The problem is that even frontier models still are prone to regurgitation. They are not that capable of organization and relevance, which is part of why so much LLM output is insanely grating to read.
READMEs in particular are the worst. LLMs tend to regurgitate stuff like "what is located where" that is of zero relevance to the reader, especially if it's yet another bog standard Java, Symfony or React app.
It’s definitely the best version. I’m seeing so many amazing open source projects since people who once had the vision, but not the coding chops, can now build what they imagine. I myself am building a personal OS that connects to everything and it’s way more fun to build things and use them yourself vs just paying for some other software. Especially when that software can be enshittified or start to squeeze its users like you mentioned.
It’s by Vercel Labs, but it’s a small team and it’s basically a small website builder and even comes with 5 free prompts. I’m building on it to build a universal storefront
Someone who got early access to Fable 5.5 asked it to make an anime style video using html and it’s amazing. I might make a short film doing this one day.
Suit yourself. Always diamonds in the rough and you can check repos I star on Github.
I built software to manage my own e-commerce business before AI coding existed but see teenagers I mentor vibe code applications that are actually helping them make money. They are 5-7 years ahead of where I was at their age and I started the e-commerce business in college.
And these people are making software for themselves and opensourcing it. So what are you on about peers resolving problems?
Have you built something you actually use? The feedback loop is immediate. You tell Claude and it goes it and fixes it.
You realize mostly proprietary software is made by people that haven’t even worked in that niche? Now people in that niche with these immediate loop can make software work way better and faster. Without the risk of it getting worse over time or selling out it a PE firm like Bending Spoons.
Not if you reach for something open-source and use that as the starting point. Most B2B customers are small businesses and once they build bespoke software that works with their business, they won’t need loads of tokens to keep it running.
Late-stage capitalism is addicted to ever-increasing quantities of money.
It'd be nice to imagine our society surviving our ruling classes' addiction, but I would not bet on that.
(You might read some essays by recovered addicts to get a sense of the monomania of it, and why they wouldn't about things like "mature" and "stable".)
Capitalism is a system that needs to be controlled. Setting the kitchen on fire is not late stage food preparation. Crashing a car because you drove fast on bald tires is not late stage vehicular mobility.
It’s basically wondering why your sales aren’t going up when there are still customers to be found. Even if you saturate a market, new people are born every day, at a greater rate than they die, so one would assume you grow or fade, unless customers just like… stop buying things in a category for some reason (maybe a superior category was invented?)
The problem isn’t infinite growth in a still-growing world, it’s exactly what you posted here: Growth at all costs. The pendulum has swung too hard in favor of growth over stability. This is great for shareholders (read:everyone in America who wants to realistically retire one day) but bad for workers (read: everyone in America, regardless of whether or not they want to retire one day).
Yes I know, and I’m purposely not giving it time because it’s a modification of the argument I’m making. As such, I’m giving him a choice between the two things I actually said and actually meant to keep the conversation on track.
If he wants to go and divide the stock market up between international and non-international companies to keep score for his own purposes, he is welcome, but it’s unrelated to the conversation he entered.
> Even if you saturate a market, new people are born every day, at a greater rate than they die, so one would assume you grow or fade, unless customers just like… stop buying things in a category for some reason
My own observation is that old people tend to spend less shit on silly things, compulsive purchases and focus on the essential. With an ageing global population I don't think one can expect infinite growth unless the category of services is focused on an older population.
Also society change and some stuff that is needed now won't be needed tomorrow. I don't think there is anything wrong with a shrinking market as long as it is gradual and slow enough that it lets people working for affected companies involved to retire and/or move.
Enshittification and capitalism are synonymous. There's no other magical form of equity that's any better. Steam's an oft cited counterexample but Steam is in enshittification stage 2 (once you have the users, be good to vendors to develop total platform lock-in).
I find it silly that we cite examples at all when it's a sample size of one and hasn't stood the test of time. Without the appropriate legal instruments existing within this system to ensure companies follow a specific founders vision when they retire/die, practically everything is bound to the same road. It either rots from the inside or gets taken over by force.
Yeah. The plucky rebels pretty much won against the evil empire, but the forces of darkness weren't completely beaten. They regrouped and then repurposed the rebels tools against them. The might of venture capital, big tech, SaaS, hyperscalers and AI was too much. The rebels weren't decisively beaten so much as eventually eroded out of any real significance.
MIT and other non copy left licenses were a mistake. In the 2000s and 2010s people were so concerned with usage and GitHub stars of their OSS that they just gave everything away to corporations and now don't have the right to complain anymore.
What do you mean? GPL licenses aren't truly free! They limit the right of corporations to abuse users! That can't be right! Better to use another license on the off chance you'll win the VC lottery.
I generally agree with fighting corporate abuse, though IMO, GPLv3's anti-tivoization clause is kind of misguided. It may stop locked-down hardware makers from using your software, but it doesn't stop the hardware from being locked-down in the first place.
We have evidence that any hardware maker that would open up their hardware will do it already (see: reMarkable, Ubiquiti offering SSH root access). If you try to fight that battle by holding software from them, you only lose them as a contributor as they make their own, which is worse for everyone.
Can you point at projects that got abused that way? I see plenty of things that got written by corps or by conglomerates, many of which landed with Apache. And I see lots of copyleft software that pulls whole systems with it.
What’s something that was released as MIT but, had it been GPL2, would have seeded a community?
Mostly it's not stuff that would've had a community if it was GPL - it's stuff that would've had a community either way, then Amazon took it and made it proprietary and took the community too.
Like, what? Solaris/SunOS, DEC Ultrix/Tru64, AIX, HP-UX, Xenix, etc., all with big bad monopolist AT&T's UNIX as their grandpappy. UNIX was corporate to the hilt.
Corporate, sure, but painting DEC, (old) HP, and Sun with the same brush as AT&T, IBM, and Microsoft just because they sold proprietary, but generally well-documented and reliable hardware and software at whatever prices the market would bear seems unfair.
Expect there's about a thousand Postman alternatives on GitHub. And unlike Dropbox you don't need capital for infra so it's easy to make another one. So unlike Dropbox, Postman actually is relatively simple to copy.
Articulate and well spoken - I hope that through threads like these that especially tech newcomers discover that there are alternatives to the YC founder mentality of "growth at all costs". A more gradual approach that respects users is also better for founders. You may not retire at 35 with some big exit or raise, but why is that the goal anyway? Build something that respects your users and you can see yourself working on for 30 years, living comfortably and in moderation.
A minor tweak to The Parable of the Mexican Fisherman[1]:
The venture capitalist laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time was right, you would announce an IPO, and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich. You would make millions!”
>". A more gradual approach that respects users is also better for founders. You may not retire at 35 with some big exit or raise, but why is that the goal anyway?
Well, living on the other side of the pond: I get shuffled around and laid off every few years in the game industry and any savings I had got obliterated surviving in this not-recession as everyone around me gaslights me into telling me that "the economy is fine", while doing regular layoffs in nearly all sectors. And it's not like I have some sort of high respect for my craft by those who enjoy it either.
There's definitely a temptation to just sell out, find a huge buyout, and get out of the rat race so I can tinker to my heart's content on stuff I want to make. Not what "sells" or what some director wanted after 20 filters of HR, "focus groups, and other sales people get their hands on it. What integrity am I truly keeping in the former situation?
Of course, all this assumes I have the opportunity to sell out. Someone at that point is more than likely someone who was already in a trajectory to defy the typical 9-5 40 hour grind to begin with.
Also I am paying taxes for that and am glad of paying it for whoever has the need to instead of them or me having to setup a gofundme campaign.
I'd say voting for the right candidates is better than a system where a few of apparently lucky people can achieve that while in fact they are completely losing their mind in the process and leaving in constant stress
(if my observation of founders and so called successful tech bros is correct)
Eh. Human children are hardy and can figure their way out if shit really hits the fan.
You can't make it your life objective to guard against the 0.01% risk of your children becoming orphaned before 18. Just buy term insurance if anything.
My 4 year old with cancer is not figuring their “way out”, nor is my 7 yead old. We are down to a 1 income household, which is fine because we earn high incomes and work from home, so we can still split up and take care of each kid while being able to pay for health insurance and out of pocket maximums.
Or we can prioritize single payer and ubi along with other social safety nets to try to ensure its there for anyone who needs it and not those lucky enough to win the capitalism lottery
Back in my day, we had enough taste not to try to turn a person’s child’s cancer diagnosis into a chance to make a political point. Be a better person - you’re talking to an actual human people; writing something this callous is totally fucked up.
It's not a founder mentality as much as a VC mentality. Founders just realized that VCs are dumb rubes with too much money and easy to grift.
If you could raise $200 million with your stupid indie project and proceed to enrich yourself by 7-8 figures, why wouldn't you?
I think the greed percolates down from the VCs. And if you really trace it all the way, it's the ubiquity of index funds. The whole game is to get big enough to IPO and get into VTI's index. Then it's just free money from thereon out.
I was 100% sure, you are joking. Like they raised gazilion $ and have 100.000 employees. But when I checked, it is actually correct. WTF - what are the hundreds of people doing there? :)
I agree that I don't know a single competent developer who uses it, BUT, it's so extremely common to hear from very barely technical people that they'll use Postman to test an API... (and/or they'll complain about an API being hard to use because Postman is confusing them, because it's so bad).
Weird take. Just because you can use curl it doesn’t mean you can’t value a GUI to be able to store and manipulate requests quickly and view a formatted response body.
I use postman all the time to explore apis. Sure I could do it from the command line, but this is quicker and it saves my request payloads.
(Though now I’m obviously open to suggestions for better tools)
Weird take. I thought for myself about the problem and solved it rather than externalize such and end up locked into an increasingly abusive relationship.
Been using homegrown scripts designed around wget and curl, accessible as shell aliases so I save time never downloading Postman or developing muscle memory for it, yet can still explore APIs
There's an idea for a better tool; the one you patch right in to your workflow to avoid context switches to a GUI mental model; I just focus on computer generating data rather than color of the virtual captains chair
Not sure if you’re trolling but writing “homegrown scripts as shell aliases” is not faster than a gui. I totally agree Postman is enshittified, but when I just want to see a sample response for given input data, it does the job. Sure I’d like a more lightweight tool, but there’s no way I’m “context switching” to writing shell scripts when I just want to check a single endpoint. (I’d also wager than in many cases, opening a gui and hitting send on a pre-saved request is faster than using an llm too)
You can do what you like though, my original comment was against the gatekeeping and punching down. I don’t care one way or another what tool you use, but let’s not make people inferior because they aren’t using a TUI for everything.
Hey thanks for sharing the APIs You Won't Hate Link! I'm one of the cofounders of the community. I've had a good time with Bruno, personally. Being git-enabled is a big plus.
If you've got other suggestions, I'd love to give them a look!
Insomnia has enshittified over the past few years too, its original author started https://yaak.app/ and it's pretty alright for most of my Postman-relevant use. Not as heavy on automation or API-documentation, but for testing endpoints it's been great.
I logged in to postman today after 3 years to use some public API, and god, it was so damn unusable. It took me navigating through "workspace", "environments", etc etc before I could hit the simplest of http endpoints.
Ah thanks for name dropping Bruno. I actually never found the Postman alternative I was looking for. Using wget is fine. It would be nice to have an interface with collections again. Will check out Bruno this weekend…
For me this is one of the biggest features/nice-to-haves! Just a folder with text files to define your environment that you can easily sync to other devices, backup, move to the next client...
Exactly. Back in 2015 when I was still coding professionally Postman was our go-to tool for API testing.
Earlier this year I reached for Postman when kicking off a side project. I was appalled by how convoluted it has become. It really is a Frankenstein product. And they can’t seem to figure out what their offer really is.
No thanks. RIP to the OG Postman. The new Postman is dead to me.
Someone should vibe-code a VC death clock for developer tools. Enter a company, and it will deduce from its last funding round and headcount the moment it all goes to shit.
In an utlimate twist of irony such a tool could itself pivot to investors because the moment it gets really bad is also the moment to invest in the competition.
I'm not saying that's my strategy with Bugsink, but I'm not saying it isn't either.
I'm not sure why I'd trust a site that gives OpenAI and example.com equal marks as "already dead" because they're "vulnerable [...] to AI-native replacement" for anything but a laugh.
It seems like cursed(blessed) niche? In search of alternatives couple of years ago, I'm stumbled upon Mockoon which looked really like a single person project. Now, judging by their webpage, I see they are going the same way
I was looking to see if someone had posted a reaction to this part, because if no one had, I was going to! I don't disagree with the parent comment at all, but if curl is an example of a tiny project, I'm not sure what could possibly be considered large. It's literally the first example I'd give if asked for an example of an open source utility getting deployed on like, everything in the world.
For some reason, it is very popular in my country (Costa Rica). Every freelancer I’ve worked with only knows about postman
It’s like it was very popular back in the day and people never got the memo there’s better options out there
All that stuff you said above would have been in a fos tool if docker were made 15 years ago. So many tools have just as wide a scope and don't ask for a dime and give their stuff up under mit license. And I’m sure none of those maintainers of essential foss are hurting for work or opportunities with a resume that says you maintain a tool that a good fraction of the computers in the world use.
I used to use Postman daily almost ten years ago. Then as my last hurrah before retirement, I took an embedded job that didn't involve me beating on a web API, so I didn't use Postman anymore.
So imagine that I hear about this "Postman" product that involves subscriptions, and AI, and "valued at $X billion" and all this crap, and you can see how I seriously thought that there was another product called "Postman" that wasn't the product I used to use. Turns out...
My IDE has always been for a lot more than coding, so even though most of the coding is now done in a terminal by an AI agent, I still spend many hours everyday in my IDE.
There are a couple of open source alternatives (though at least some of those have tried to go the way of Postman to some extent), just using curl directly, or we've rolled our own wrappers (personally, or team- or company-wide) for our specific use cases.
>It's a shame what happened to Postman. It started as an excellent little developer tool for testing APIs. Then for some reason they raised over $400M in funding and hired 1,500+ employees, for what should have been a tiny OSS/passion project like curl or little snitch. Instead they now have to justify their valuation by forcing logins, collecting data, monthly subscriptions, AI features, etc.
The good thing is that now takes about 2 days to replicate with an agent the parts that matter from their whole offering and tell them to go f themselves.
I haven’t met anyone using MongoDB in what feels like 12 years, but it’s a $26B company.
There’s apparently a surprisingly profitable enterprise afterlife to developer tools that manage to become popular in the right moment, even if the moment is fairly short.
Databases are extremely sticky because migrating can be a nightmare. Postman seems like it would be much less sticky, you can just import your Postman collection to Bruno and it's pretty much a drop-in replacement.
Sales called me a couple weeks ago. I told them Postman had a bad reputation among developers and I wouldn’t be using it. The salesperson was just absolutely incredulous that anyone could feel this way. It was pretty funny. Maybe they’re drinking their own Kool Aid.
How did we even get here? Apparently I can't convince anyone to use Jellyfin off of their main computer to their main smart tv, because "it's too hard" (too hard to double click and icon and select a folder?)
But we can somehow magically convince non-technicals to share cloud collections of endpoint requests to backend services.
Because, current valuations are completely detached from any operational or market realities that affect a company. The metric has become the goal, and the metric is controlled by nontechnical people that have no intuitive understanding of how technical products are used. Even worse, they’ve all gone though a vibe coding tutorial and now either believe they have real technical depth, or believe that it doesn’t matter.
Technical is subordinate to business and always has been (apart from a bunch of last century hackers with university tenure). If business no longer thinks it can make money with human developers, they'll be laid off. It doesn't matter whether the product is better or worse.
That’s business administration, which has nothing to do with the valuation process, anymore. A company could be run by some trust fund kid with no understanding of business that hired a full-time department of 10 people to repaint the lines in the parking lot every day, but if their story was impressive enough, their valuation could be astronomical. It’s all about vibes (in SV, at least.)
If history has taught us anything, it's that there's at least a limited-time market for inferior GUI alternatives to nearly anything you can easily do from a command-line. Though to be fair, there's plenty of room for value-add over curl for web requests in terms of presentation where GUIs can work well: asset viewers, syntax highlighting, pretty printing, code folding, etc., especially if combined with interactive tools for decoding and deobfuscation that feed back into the viewer.
The obvious AI integration is reverse engineering tools, assuming the trend towards locking such things down doesn't continue.
And honestly, I worry less about people paying $29 for a GUI file renaming tool than I do about the same people copy/pasting LLM-generated shell snippets, given that LLMs will inevitably have trained on the existing corpus of shell scripts, many if not most of which contain potentially dangerous bugs, especially when used outside their intended context of known-trustworthy input.
They chased B2B revenue too hard, my work built internal alt in a few days that fits more appropriately with our orgs usecases earlier this year, Sad lol
From their website: "We're a global company headquartered in San Francisco—with offices in Bangalore (where the company was founded) and Japan—and distributed team members on multiple continents."
I don't want to be a snob, but my recollection of postman is as a smell: it indicated somebody had such discomfort with the CLI that their abilities were ceilinged by it.
It is crazy what people manage to raise funds for.
I was about to ask why on earth an HTTP client needs 1500 employees and a 5B valuation, but then I realized that perhaps it is just envy speaking.
Im simply envious that I dont own an AI-native cloud-first enterprise-grade zero-trust secure-by-design API lifecycle management ecosystem powered by agentic AI workflows autonomous coding agents pre built skills context graphs semantic knowledge retrieval augmented generation multi agent collaboration next generation developer productivity acceleration platform with a revolutionary cURL GUI client valued at 5 billion dollars with 1500 employees
Never liked Postman since they started forcing everyone to signup. Sometimes I hate VCs who unnecessarily funds and ruins a perfectly fine product (of course founders are equally guilty).
I don't understand how postman became the tool that it is today. The best version of it was just a logger and a formatter on top of an http client. The proto import was nice for gRPC. Who thought that relatively simple tool needed accounts and MCPs and whatever else they've thrown into it?
> I don't understand how postman became the tool that it is today.
You can’t have a unicorn valuation built on a simple offline client.
This is basically standard SV play book - first step is „fix“ it to have a cloud component/account. Then store some of the data in cloud only - say for example for team sharing or a „workspace“. Then make some features paid only. Then ramp up the enshitification till metrics show it’s saturated and users will bear no more
I've always kind of thought that Postman was an enshittification story waiting to happen. I've always felt like they prey on people who just aren't comfortable with the command line, and so there isn't much more stooping lower for them than something like this.
I have been building Kreya [1] for over 6 years now as a Postman alternative. It's offline-first and privacy focused with a storage format made for git.
In all our years, Kreya "just worked" for our users without any drama or unwanted changes, unlike most of our competitors...
Mad respect.
Kreya is my go-to for playing GRPC endpoints. Basically every other tool has some whacky behaviour, got rapidly abandoned, or had janky ux.
Sorry to hear that! That warning is unlikely the cause of the crash, it just means that some GKT3 settings are no longer supported in GTK4 and should be removed from the settings.ini, but they do not crash the app.
Please note that our AppImage does not include the required libgkt-4-1 and libwebkitgtk-6.0-4 dependencies. I just noticed that this is not documented, my bad! Installing them will probably fix your issue.
If not or if you have any other questions, you can write me at hello@kreya.app
If there's ever been a perfect app to vibecode your own replacement, it's postman. Claude can knock out a completely usable competitor in under an hour, I'm sure of it. A day of tweaking and you'll have everything you need.
Wow, the timing is perfect, I was going to post about this. I also found out last night that they actually proxy your requests without your permission. I have setup an exclusion within my firewall for certain request parameters, but it kept getting blocked despite all my settings a though it was going through their server. That really pissed me off since these requests actually contain sensitive data they did not have permission to intercept.
Postman also removed the ability to export individual requests and grouped them into "Share" which means now you have to get a subscription to get your data out, and most export options are gone completely, except for collections itself - which they ask you questions why before you can get your data out. Fuck Postman. I moved to Insomnia as of last night (open source).
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 153 ms ] threadVs making tools for donations and no one appreciating it!
Maybe I'm just too small minded to imagine, but having that kind of money just seems so unnecessary to me
Do you think someone who has only $100, whose only thought is how to pay for their next meal or rent check, might similarly wonder “what difference is there between $100k and $1M? They’re both very rich!”
Point is, ambition is like a gas, it tends to expand to the volume of its container. With $400M you have enough for your own and your family’s comfort forever. With $4B it’s less about lifestyle and more about shaping the world to your liking. You might not care about that if that’s 1000x away from where you are right now, but if it’s just 10x away, it becomes more tempting.
Nah, it sounds sociopathic no matter what amount of money you have
Controlling other people by "shaping the world to your desires" isn't what I was hoping to hear
Although, at that level of raise, I assume the ceo/founder(s) would probably be taking a least a few million, maybe $10M over the course of the raises + elapsed time?
There’s definitely a substantial difference between a net worth of $10M and a net worth of $100M. After that, I imagine most people wouldn’t really be able to tell the difference day to day.
It's built by a former Postmanaut, me!
Older versions are fine, though.
https://github.com/Kong/insomnia/discussions/6590
They just all seem like things that developers would easily ditch. But up until now, I was also still stuck on postman because my team/org uses it as a knowledge repository. It’s just classic enshittification. They’re using high switching costs to make as much money as possible without everybody leaving. Who
I have a sense that a dumb Web API testing UI application is really not that hard to get AI to implement. These apps all look about the same for a reason. So maybe there will be a prevailing FOSS option that isn't trying to monetize.
Bruno [1] is the current better alternative to Insomnia.
[1] https://www.usebruno.com/
Edit: mankind has gone for the better
I don't really think mankind or society has gotten better AT ALL in my lifetime. It turned into a short-term, rent-seeking, low-trust, shit society...
But I am open to hearing the experiences of others my age. Why do you feel so positive?
Most of the YC companies are loan backed with investors pushing milestones for the next investment chunk or round.
I'm currently using Bruno (https://www.usebruno.com/)
Works well enough without getting in my way.
They offer a paid version though, so I'm always afraid it's going to enshittify in the future, just like Postman and then Insomnia did.
I still don't know how they're valued at $5B+ when I don't know a single developer who actually uses it anymore
All those people who gave them millions in funding are expecting to make a return on that investment and that means prioritizing turning it into something that will make money by selling out users. The valuation is just a guess at how successful it will be at screwing users over. Greed ruins everything.
The problem is that Postman decided to want to be a business and took VC money.
Of course now that I said that today I'd probably just have Claude hit the API for me, or build a dashboard to test it, I really don't know how Postman continues to exist.
Using some kind of dedicated tool like postman always felt like a literal step backwards.
You know the reason. A bunch of people were able to take home a lot of money because of that growth and now have the option to FIRE themselves whenever they want to shake off the stress.
That's the founder mentality that Y Combinator exists to leverage or encourage and it's ubiquity is what separates the prevailing 21st century technology movement from the nerdy, academic, UNIX-y movement that gave us GNU, linux, curl, ffmpeg, redis, etc
We got to watch innovative products get pumped full of helium until they explode with bloat and rent-seeking instead of accumulating a growing foundation of sturdy technical building blocks as we could have had on the other path.
AI now leads us into some new movement, the worst version of which a few model vendors protected by regulations absorb almost all technical accomplishment and lease it back out to everybody else, and the best version of which democratizes technical construction so widely that individuals can naively spin up effective solutions for the most idiosyncratic needs.
We'll see how it goes.
Yeah and the issues from these vibecoded one-off programs will be felt for generations.
I got out of IT partially because I could see the writing on the wall. The "load bearing Excel sheet" is one thing, manageable if you could catch the person who wrote it in time before they depart or die and know your way around Excel - there's only so many ways to achieve a desired goal (unless the author used VBA, at which point all bets are off, and I member encountering a spreadsheet that macro-called in a DLL shipped together with the sheet).
But vibe coded AI bullshit? That is supposed to be hosted by someone and kept secure (i.e. isn't hackable in a few seconds by anyone who manages to compromise some dingus's laptop? Oh hell no. I'm outta there, I'm too old for this crap.
No, they won't. There's nothing wrong with a vibecoded one-off program, at least not that another vibecoded one-off program can't fix.
Source code is now object code, and vice versa. And AI-written code is more secure than human-written code, not less. Deal with it. We won't be going back.
That sounds absolutely horrifying. I never encountered one of those before thankfully.
That DLL hooks into SCADA and sometimes sends updates to a PLC controlling safety critical equipment. When does it send updates versus just query the controller? No one knows. The guy who wrote it died in an (unrelated) industrial accident involving a runaway forklift after leaving the company. Even so much as debugging it would require shutting down the entire factory and replacing all the crucibles afterwards ($$$).
The subject matter was building an auditing system to comply with the requirements of an IRS consent decree as part of a settlement for shoddy accounting practices which may or may not have included tracking billions of dollars of assets with Excel.
It's also astonishingly stupid. I don't want a one-off program for everything. I want a well-designed and battle-tested program that I can extend with AI, and that has a ton of people's AIs directed at it, constantly finding bugs, posting them on the bugtracker, and writing and debating pull requests.
I can't comprehend people who think that everything should be built over and over again, and that that will be safe, practical or cheap. It's like they're telling me that I should design a new language for each conversation that I have. Why would I?
The worst part is how far the capabilities of AI are from that dream anyway. They can't even write readable, intelligible code. They're being celebrated for being able to notice buffer overrun errors in code that people would also notice if anybody had ever really looked at some particular span of code in the last 10 years. It's finding errors in move fast and break things code and code that has been maintained by a weirdo professor in his spare time for free and half the economy somehow relies on. That's not magic, its a sign of how sloppy things got.
>They can't even write readable, intelligible code.
Skill issue.
The state of IT has been stagnant at best for the past 20-30 odd years. The promises of the 90's or earlier that we were going to have average office workers being able to automate their workflows never was realized.
Today with AI I'm watching random sales people automate a large portion of the bullshit part of their jobs IT and technology systems foisted upon them for no real reason. Those CRM systems that force you to click 28 buttons per lead you enter into the system, with all sorts of amazing UIx like having to restart from scratch if you miss a field, get logged out during data entry, etc. This is the standard state of most software people interact with on a daily basis.
If current IT didn't absolutely suck for most people, and hadn't become a means to it's own ends I think you'd see a lot less pent up demand for these vibe coded one-off applications that solve a specific problem for a single user.
It's been interesting to watch. Normies can finally get stuff done without the IT and developer gatekeeping and get on with doing the meaningful bits of their jobs. For better or worse. It's certainly going to blow up in quite a few cases, but I think the cat is out of the bag if progress in tooling - not even models - continues at a rapid pace.
What are the odds that the average corporate IT department is going to allow the use of anything other than locked-down corporate AI with strict token quotas and stricter acceptable use policies?
And most organizations still treat IT as a "support role" which means "cost center", only changing attitude when they inevitably get hacked, and a few years down the line, when enough of the managers who were there during the Great Hack are gone, IT gets the cuts again.
Sadly that doesn't help at all. Random people automating heaps of crap in order to do their actual work, just makes the crap easier to manage for them. It doesn't remove it.
I'm reminded of health workers or teachers complaining that half their time is wasted on various types of record-keeping, because employer wants to record, check & micromanage everything. Similar with tax systems becoming ever more complex. Those are just a few of many examples.
AI assisting with managing that, just puts some $profitable$ control knobs in the hands of a very few providers. While at the same time enabling the mountain of crap to grow even further.
A real fix would be to use AI to get a better understanding of the existing heap of crap, and use that understanding to cut large chunks out & re-organise the remainder into a simpler stack.
Doesn't seem to me that that's being done. So far AI is mostly used to ADD to the crap-heap, faster & easier.
The thing is, that's been known for a long time, at the latest since the release of Bullshit Jobs [1].
Unfortunately, too many too rich interests are tied up in the status quo.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
One of the conclusions I've come to - is that 90%+ of the featureitis is checkbox nonsense, often created for managers and administrators who will never use the tools themselves, and are materially harmful to the employees who actually use them, while, ironically, providing zero to sometimes negative value to the Enterprise.
Some of the most profitable projects have been at 20+ year $30B+ companies where a new-generation of technologists have come in and just ... thrown it all away. All the transitions, gates, forms, custom fields, labels, business rules - all of the crud just dumped in the garbage and, amazingly- zero interruption to business, and the tools all of a sudden became moderately useful instead of offensive.
This is very much on topic with Postman, Kibana, Jira, etc.. Pretty much any large enterprise software suite that in order to justify it's millions/dollar a year of license fees, has to pack in feature that aren't valuable to the end-users, but can be used to ratchet up and lock in the enterprise users.
The problem with all of these companies is that once they take VC money, and have a Board driving them to make the chart go up and to the right - they have no option but to destroy what once was a beautiful product, and turn it into a morass of pain.
Tools like ffmpeg, sqlite, vlc, curl, wireshark continue to be excellent because they were never infected with VC money.
That really is no longer an up to date view of LLM's. Frontier models can and do write readable, intelligible code.
They can also write shit code.
Kind of like human devs.
The problem is that even frontier models still are prone to regurgitation. They are not that capable of organization and relevance, which is part of why so much LLM output is insanely grating to read.
READMEs in particular are the worst. LLMs tend to regurgitate stuff like "what is located where" that is of zero relevance to the reader, especially if it's yet another bog standard Java, Symfony or React app.
fx0
https://github.com/vercel-labs/fx0
It’s by Vercel Labs, but it’s a small team and it’s basically a small website builder and even comes with 5 free prompts. I’m building on it to build a universal storefront
Moss Keeper
https://github.com/ChetasLua/moss-keeper
Someone who got early access to Fable 5.5 asked it to make an anime style video using html and it’s amazing. I might make a short film doing this one day.
Money Shot
https://github.com/SocialAcolyte/monet-shot
A sort of screen studio alternative with a twist
MailCheap
https://github.com/marclou/mailcheap
Opensource alternative to BeeHiv
These are my latest stats on Github: https://github.com/junaid33?tab=stars
I built software to manage my own e-commerce business before AI coding existed but see teenagers I mentor vibe code applications that are actually helping them make money. They are 5-7 years ahead of where I was at their age and I started the e-commerce business in college.
And these people are making software for themselves and opensourcing it. So what are you on about peers resolving problems?
You realize mostly proprietary software is made by people that haven’t even worked in that niche? Now people in that niche with these immediate loop can make software work way better and faster. Without the risk of it getting worse over time or selling out it a PE firm like Bending Spoons.
That is true, hackers, that is true.
But they cannot help their neighbors;
That's not good, hackers, that's not good.
Join us now and share the software;
You'll be free, hackers, you'll be free.
-- The Free Software Song, as written and sung by rms
https://www.gnu.org/music/free-software-song.en.html
It'd be nice to imagine our society surviving our ruling classes' addiction, but I would not bet on that.
(You might read some essays by recovered addicts to get a sense of the monomania of it, and why they wouldn't about things like "mature" and "stable".)
The problem isn’t infinite growth in a still-growing world, it’s exactly what you posted here: Growth at all costs. The pendulum has swung too hard in favor of growth over stability. This is great for shareholders (read:everyone in America who wants to realistically retire one day) but bad for workers (read: everyone in America, regardless of whether or not they want to retire one day).
Not true.
If he wants to go and divide the stock market up between international and non-international companies to keep score for his own purposes, he is welcome, but it’s unrelated to the conversation he entered.
My own observation is that old people tend to spend less shit on silly things, compulsive purchases and focus on the essential. With an ageing global population I don't think one can expect infinite growth unless the category of services is focused on an older population.
Also society change and some stuff that is needed now won't be needed tomorrow. I don't think there is anything wrong with a shrinking market as long as it is gradual and slow enough that it lets people working for affected companies involved to retire and/or move.
We have evidence that any hardware maker that would open up their hardware will do it already (see: reMarkable, Ubiquiti offering SSH root access). If you try to fight that battle by holding software from them, you only lose them as a contributor as they make their own, which is worse for everyone.
What’s something that was released as MIT but, had it been GPL2, would have seeded a community?
Its not that complicated, most engineers could write their own tool in a day or two.
You have to be terribly myopic not to appreciate it.
Honestly, the more money made off the "dumber" product, the more intelligent the businessman.
My favorite business is 1800GotJunk
A minor tweak to The Parable of the Mexican Fisherman[1]:
The venture capitalist laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time was right, you would announce an IPO, and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich. You would make millions!”
“Millions – then what?”
[1] https://aliabdaal.com/newsletter/the-parable-of-the-mexican-...
Well, living on the other side of the pond: I get shuffled around and laid off every few years in the game industry and any savings I had got obliterated surviving in this not-recession as everyone around me gaslights me into telling me that "the economy is fine", while doing regular layoffs in nearly all sectors. And it's not like I have some sort of high respect for my craft by those who enjoy it either.
There's definitely a temptation to just sell out, find a huge buyout, and get out of the rat race so I can tinker to my heart's content on stuff I want to make. Not what "sells" or what some director wanted after 20 filters of HR, "focus groups, and other sales people get their hands on it. What integrity am I truly keeping in the former situation?
Of course, all this assumes I have the opportunity to sell out. Someone at that point is more than likely someone who was already in a trajectory to defy the typical 9-5 40 hour grind to begin with.
Because then I can guarantee access to food/shelter/healthcare for my kids if me or their mom or one of them were to become incapacitated in some way.
Also I am paying taxes for that and am glad of paying it for whoever has the need to instead of them or me having to setup a gofundme campaign.
I'd say voting for the right candidates is better than a system where a few of apparently lucky people can achieve that while in fact they are completely losing their mind in the process and leaving in constant stress (if my observation of founders and so called successful tech bros is correct)
You can't make it your life objective to guard against the 0.01% risk of your children becoming orphaned before 18. Just buy term insurance if anything.
If you could raise $200 million with your stupid indie project and proceed to enrich yourself by 7-8 figures, why wouldn't you?
I think the greed percolates down from the VCs. And if you really trace it all the way, it's the ubiquity of index funds. The whole game is to get big enough to IPO and get into VTI's index. Then it's just free money from thereon out.
It's a pretty reliable (in)competence shibboleth.
I use postman all the time to explore apis. Sure I could do it from the command line, but this is quicker and it saves my request payloads.
(Though now I’m obviously open to suggestions for better tools)
Been using homegrown scripts designed around wget and curl, accessible as shell aliases so I save time never downloading Postman or developing muscle memory for it, yet can still explore APIs
There's an idea for a better tool; the one you patch right in to your workflow to avoid context switches to a GUI mental model; I just focus on computer generating data rather than color of the virtual captains chair
You can do what you like though, my original comment was against the gatekeeping and punching down. I don’t care one way or another what tool you use, but let’s not make people inferior because they aren’t using a TUI for everything.
OP is all "here's my way" and you're all "weird take" where weird felt wielded like a pejorative relative to OP not using GUI for everything.
Didn't realize it was possible to attack someone with their own rhetorical style. Figured they'd be used to themselves by now.
It is basically that, also similar to Bruno but using 20 times less RAM.
or any of these
https://apisyouwonthate.com/blog/http-clients-alternatives-t...
If you've got other suggestions, I'd love to give them a look!
You can give an AI agent a documentation page and it will create the collection of routes pretty quickly in files you can commit to git.
I can't remember why I settled on this over Bruno, but its much better than dealing with Postman.
Earlier this year I reached for Postman when kicking off a side project. I was appalled by how convoluted it has become. It really is a Frankenstein product. And they can’t seem to figure out what their offer really is.
No thanks. RIP to the OG Postman. The new Postman is dead to me.
Nowadays Portman is forbidden for project delivery, unless the customer development team also uses it.
... what the fuck. Certainly explains things
> I still don't know how they're valued at $5B+ when I don't know a single developer who actually uses it anymore
Yep, one of them. I loved Postman but gone back to plain cURL and the dogshit that is IntelliJ's built-in HTTP request tool.
As for the question... easy. Markets can stay irrational for a very long time...
In an utlimate twist of irony such a tool could itself pivot to investors because the moment it gets really bad is also the moment to invest in the competition.
I'm not saying that's my strategy with Bugsink, but I'm not saying it isn't either.
Hacker News (comment) hug of death? Or victim of its own punchline?
Um.
SQLite would be another strong contender.
cross-platform container virtualization
integrated single-node kubernetes orchestration
plus various services such as
global container image hosting
automated supply chain security
distributed cloud build system
production container runtime
collaborative development sandboxes
vs
a curl competitor
Yes, they're in the same league.
Wtf!! how
So imagine that I hear about this "Postman" product that involves subscriptions, and AI, and "valued at $X billion" and all this crap, and you can see how I seriously thought that there was another product called "Postman" that wasn't the product I used to use. Turns out...
Just out of curiosity, what are developers using these days?
1: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=humao.re...
2: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=anweber....
My IDE has always been for a lot more than coding, so even though most of the coding is now done in a terminal by an AI agent, I still spend many hours everyday in my IDE.
https://xkcd.com/2347/
The good thing is that now takes about 2 days to replicate with an agent the parts that matter from their whole offering and tell them to go f themselves.
There’s apparently a surprisingly profitable enterprise afterlife to developer tools that manage to become popular in the right moment, even if the moment is fairly short.
Like statistics, 90% of valuations are totally made-up.
Its endemic in enterprise engineering/QA, for all the reasons we mourn its loss its big, and big is trusted in these circles
Any non-programmer can now copy-paste http requests from Dev Tools or a free-tier LLM for a better service than Postman.
New companies have no good reason to use Postman. Old ones can slowly migrate away.
I do know business analysts, testers, non-technical people asking me for postman collections.
Postman became de-facto standard for businesses. Even though devs have ditched it.
But we can somehow magically convince non-technicals to share cloud collections of endpoint requests to backend services.
Because, current valuations are completely detached from any operational or market realities that affect a company. The metric has become the goal, and the metric is controlled by nontechnical people that have no intuitive understanding of how technical products are used. Even worse, they’ve all gone though a vibe coding tutorial and now either believe they have real technical depth, or believe that it doesn’t matter.
The obvious AI integration is reverse engineering tools, assuming the trend towards locking such things down doesn't continue.
And honestly, I worry less about people paying $29 for a GUI file renaming tool than I do about the same people copy/pasting LLM-generated shell snippets, given that LLMs will inevitably have trained on the existing corpus of shell scripts, many if not most of which contain potentially dangerous bugs, especially when used outside their intended context of known-trustworthy input.
This feels like dropbox comment.
... for.... .... postman?
It is crazy what people manage to raise funds for.
Im simply envious that I dont own an AI-native cloud-first enterprise-grade zero-trust secure-by-design API lifecycle management ecosystem powered by agentic AI workflows autonomous coding agents pre built skills context graphs semantic knowledge retrieval augmented generation multi agent collaboration next generation developer productivity acceleration platform with a revolutionary cURL GUI client valued at 5 billion dollars with 1500 employees
You can’t have a unicorn valuation built on a simple offline client.
This is basically standard SV play book - first step is „fix“ it to have a cloud component/account. Then store some of the data in cloud only - say for example for team sharing or a „workspace“. Then make some features paid only. Then ramp up the enshitification till metrics show it’s saturated and users will bear no more
btw - I'm the author.
[0]https://github.com/unkn0wn-root/resterm
In all our years, Kreya "just worked" for our users without any drama or unwanted changes, unlike most of our competitors...
[1] https://kreya.app
It was stuck at
(kreya:99500): Gtk-WARNING *: 09:39:54.893: Unknown key gtk-modules in /home/daniel/.config/gtk-4.0/settings.iniPlease note that our AppImage does not include the required libgkt-4-1 and libwebkitgtk-6.0-4 dependencies. I just noticed that this is not documented, my bad! Installing them will probably fix your issue.
If not or if you have any other questions, you can write me at hello@kreya.app
Sannr is an API platform built for coding agents that builds API context over time.
Postman also removed the ability to export individual requests and grouped them into "Share" which means now you have to get a subscription to get your data out, and most export options are gone completely, except for collections itself - which they ask you questions why before you can get your data out. Fuck Postman. I moved to Insomnia as of last night (open source).