Jobs was a marketer, a product visionary and a ruthless businessman. You need more than just marketing.

Asshole. The word you're looking for is asshole.

I once knew a guy who was disabled and walked on crutches. Jobs got mad at him for being late to a meeting, and the guy replied "well someone parked in the handicapped parking spot, and it took me awhile to walk from a normal parking spot.

No joke, Jobs looks him (a disabled person) directly in the eye, and says "oh, that was me; I think the country built an excess of disabled parking spaces after WW2." To the disabled guy!!!

Wow, that's the rare kind of thing where I might consider quitting on the spot.

Also considered to be one of the best ever at these

Buying options and rolling them might cost more than the decay on the etf

Yeah it’s so frustrating to have to constantly ask for the best solution, not the easiest / quickest / less disruptive.

I have in Claude md that it’s a greenfield project, only present complete holistic solutions not fast patches, etc. but still I have to watch its output.

Yeah, idk I guess it’s interesting if you are an engineer looking for something to do,

But like I see multiple sandbox for agents products a week. Way too saturated of a market

I disagree (as a sandboxing company).

With respect to the market, every single sandbox sucks. I'm not gonna shit talk competitors but there is not a good sandboxing platform out there yet — including me — compared to where we'll be in 6 months.

We've heard all the platforms have consistent uptime, feature completeness, networking and debugging issues. And in our own platform we're not 1/10ths of the way through solving the requests we've gotten.

Next generation of Agents needs computers, and those computers are gonna look really different than "sandboxes" do today.

I don't think you're wrong, but if you really want to really re-think the approach, building an orchestration layer for Firecracker like every other company in the space is doing is probably not it.

Wonder what you are thinking of then?

They can’t write maintainable code because they don’t have real world experience of getting your hands dirty in a company. The only way to get startup experience is to build a startup or work for one

What. Are you saying maintainable code is specifically related to startups? I can accept companies as an answer (although there are other places to cut your teeth), but startups is a weird carveout.

Writing maintainable code is learned by writing large codebases. Working in an existing codebase doesn't teach you it, so most people working at large companies do not build the skill since they don't build many large new projects. Some do but most don't. But at startups you basically have to build a big new codebase.

Duh, the only way to get startup experience is indeed to get startup experience.

My point is that getting into the weeds of writing CRUD software is not the only way to gain the ability to write complex algorithms, or to debug complex issues, or do performance optimization. It's only common because the stuff you make on the journey used to be economically valuable

> write complex algorithms, or to debug complex issues, or do performance optimization

That’s the stuff that ai is eating. The stuff I’m talking about (scaling orgs, maintaining a project long term, deciding what features to build or not build etc) is stuff very hard for ai

AI is only eating some of that though. For instance, everyone who does performance work knows that perhaps the most important part of optimization is constructing the right benchmark. This is already the thing that makes intractable problems tractable. That effect is now exacerbated — AI can optimize anything given a benchmark —- but AI isn’t making great progress at constructing the benchmark itself.

Sounds like maybe you might have some mixed feelings about becoming more effective with ai, but then at the same time everyone else is too so the praise youre expecting is diluted.

I see it all the time now too. People have no frame of reference at all about what is hard or easy so engineers feel under-appreciated because the guy who never coded is getting lots of praise for doing something basic while experienced people are able to spit out incredibly complex things. But to an outsider, both look like they took the same work.

A government app being built like b2c is exactly the problem

I'm sure that HN's preferred app would be <5MB, and has zero third party SDKs or telemetry, but half a dozen SDKs and third party domains is basically most mass market apps these days. Is it bad? Yes, but the whitehouse isn't being egregiously bad, but "whitehouse app is bad, just like most other apps" isn't going to get clicks.

"everything else sucks too" is not a great defense for the US govt.

If only. It would be a far better state of of affairs if the US government sucks like every other first world country. No other first country are waging war in the middle east, having paramilitary forces terrorize residents, or are undergoing a partial government shutdown.

Just because an app embeds YouTube instead of creating their own video hosting solution that does not mean that does not mean that the app sucks.

I didn't mention anything about YouTube.

This thread is about how there are too many requests to third parties for the app. Half of them are for YouTube.

Even if we eliminate the YouTube half it's still too many.

See gov.uk for a good example

For all our faults I am geniunely impressed by gov.uk. its not pretty, its not particularly fast, and its certainly not flashly, but I've never once not been able to find what I needed or have a flow not work.

Wow I thought it was tmux messing up on me, interesting to hear it happens without it too

Not tmux related at all had it happen in all kinds of setups (alacritty/linux, vscode terminal macos)

Open router is an upper bound of compute cost for the open source models. So people assume that opus and sonnet really isn’t sucking up 10x the resources because open source models aren’t 10x worse. Idk if it’s true or not, but haiku is $5/m tokens and it is much worse than the $2-3/mt models imo

Openrouter is a startup, what's the indication it serves token at a profit? It could be serving them at a loss to show growth.

According to open router token demand is growing at something like 10% a week

It’s insane

I wish this was higher up. I have been tracking the same since Thanksgiving ‘25 and the growth is unreal. Again I don’t know where the cards fall maybe the industry overspent on capex but it’s at least easier to see why they are spending based on demand. The risk of being left out is greater than overbuilding.

I do wonder how much of the apparent demand is driven by companies automatically running these things when users didn't actually ask for it. For example every web search I make now has an AI response that I scroll right past. I'm sure that counts for someone's token usage data, but I got zero value from it. This is happening in almost every software product now.

Tokens as a metric is the analogue of users as a metric.

In the end value per user is what matters in relation to being a healthy going concern and valuation in relation to Meta for example. Value per token is what should matter too - after all that’s what people are paying for.