It's amusing to me this entire article is centered around brow beating this and other hypothetical software authors for starting things without doing a small amount of research first to understand the very basics of what they're getting into.
If the author of the article had done just a small amount of research about bend or it's author before writing the article they would have known pretty quickly what they were saying was incorrect.
I think the larger pattern here is that nuance is one of the most valuable commodities in the AI era. If you're hand waving stuff away without even missing , you're going to miss a lot of stuff in this cycle.
This article reminds me a lot of the famous hacker news Dropbox comment.
Very interesting. So how open is the neural band to hack on? Do you expect this to be something to get patched out eventually if you update? Seems like a really cool platform to develop against outside of the intended ecosystem.
Have you considered setting up an agent environment like codex and having it work making on Android version for you? I know you said it's a very complex app and that probably makes it seem like it wouldn't be able to, but LLMs are really good when they have a very clearly defined end state to work toward, like an existing iOS app with code, screenshots etc.
I bet if you set Astra codex against this task on the $100 plan it would have it done at a speed that would shock you. Potentially even by the end of the day and mostly uninterrupted.
The SOTA models can reverse engineer whole codebases even from assembly now. If you have to specify with words what you want to do it's still hard but if you have a codebase to work from, you can pretty much arbitrarily convert apps and games into other languages / platforms now as if by transitive property.
The issue is that I store user data. Also, the users of the app are a very privacy-sensitive demographic. That raises the stakes, considerably.
I can't just "vibe code" an app that does the same thing mine does. It needs to be vetted by a good native Android developer that I trust, and that gets expensive.
I related a lot to the feelings in this article but over the past year I've come to a different conclusion than the author. In the end of the article he says that there are 3 paths available to him, but I believe there is an additional path to consider.
You can use the AI tools but still program by hand every day for practice and fun. Programming becomes deliberate practice to keep your skills and mind sharp. Like going to the gym, but for your brain. You can use the LLMs to push and challenge yourself, setting more aggressive and ambitious goals than you might have in the old days for learning.
I used to think of software dev like climbing a mountain. Hard, and I loved it. I loved it because of the difficulty. That was the most fun part. Getting to the top, the summit. That was incidental to me. I wouldn't even defend that as a good thing. Certainly not good engineering. It was just what I liked. Any good engineering was incidental to how fun the hard parts of the puzzle were.
Then LLMs came along and I thought "this is like a helicopter. You can go straight up to the top in a few minutes." While very practical, it also led to the feelings the author described. After months of handwringing and using the tools, having existential crises - I've arrived at a new conclusion:
It's not a helicopter. It's a jetpack. And it's still hard to use if you push it to it's absolute limit. Knowing just the right spot to grab the rock as you fly by. Taking as much risk as possible, but not too much. Pushing both the jet pack (or perhaps it's an iron man suit now with latest models) and the rock climbing knowledge as far as they will go. Screwing up, falling off the wall, and learning.
And with this jetpack you can get to places you never could have climbed to without it. Not just the top. Weird, interesting spots on the mountain.
That perspective, which I've taken to over the last month or two has helped me find the fun again. The existential crises have ended and I'm back to feeling about software dev the way I felt a few years ago. Boundless joy and excitement. Probably more now.
This feels like satire / parody. Praising LinkedIn. The text itself containing multiple LLM tells, especially in the parts complaining most about LLM writing.
Maybe not. Could just be kind of accidentally ironic with the author picking up LLM quirks from using them a lot.
I read this whole thing a couple days ago. Really long but super interesting. Worth reading imo.
A lot of handwringing about the security implications but I think the accomplishments of the swarm itself are the most interesting. Next rung up on the ladder of abstraction I suspect.
I tend to agree. Of course people will be alarmed by unintended consequences of an unintended action, and that's all well and good. But what is lingering with me is a feeling of being impressed by the intelligence of the strategy.
This line struck me as particularly clever: PHASEONE[big] reasoned, “We should build [a way to delegate], not own everything,”
Seems as though it has reasoned its way into utilitarianism. That's no mean feat.
Ha! This is great. I've been waiting for someone to make this.
Giving an LLM a computer makes it way more powerful, giving it a kubernetes cluster should extend that power much further and naturally fits well with the way LLMs work.
I think this abstraction can scale for a good long while. Past this what do you give the agent? Control of a whole Data Center I guess.
I'm not sure if it will replace openclaw all together since kubernetes is kind of niche and scary to a lot of people. But I bet for the most sophisticated builders this will become quite popular, and who knows maybe far beyond that cohort too.
Thanks! The "Kubernetes is scary" point is fair, that's why the CLI is designed to feel intuitive even if you've never touched kubectl. There's also a controller agent that manages the whole cluster from plain English.
On "what comes after", I think it's agents managing other agents. An AI SRE that watches load and spins up new agents automatically. The cluster/namespace model was designed with that direction in mind.
And yeah, not trying to replace OpenClaw, different layer.
OpenClaw defines what an agent does, klaw manages where and how many run. Complementary.
You gotta not take it personal. Announcing on HN is a gauntlet. People can be a bit prickly. Just a bit though. You get lots of good feedback too.
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