Not exactly, clawdbot is an open source project with hundreds of contributors (including me!) in only 3 weeks of its existence. Your characterization of just a one-man dev developed project is inaccurate.
I'm genuinely sorry you think that, and it's not my intention to offend you.
However your comment reads exactly like you saying to a Dropbox user "This is a user going to rsync, setting up a folder sync in a cron job, running the cron job, and saying "wow isn't dropbox great".
Sometimes the next paradigm of user interface is a tweak that re-contextualizes a tool, whether you agree with that or not.
I've seen many people say "I don't get the hype", so here's my attempt to explain it. I've been working in technology and software companies my entire life, but not as a developer.
Two days ago, I submitted and had my first pull request merged to an open source project (Clawdbot) thanks to my AI assistant rei.
A short story: rei suddenly stopped responding in some Slack channels. So I asked it to help me troubleshoot.
We traced the issue: adding custom instructions in one Slack channel incorrectly stopped it from replying in all the others.
I considered reporting the issue in GitHub, but then I thought, "Well... what if we just try to fix it ourselves, and submit a PR?"
So we did. We cloned the codebase, found the issue, wrote the fix, added tests. I asked it to code review its own fix. The AI debugged itself, then reviewed its own work, and then helped me submit the PR.
Hard to accurately describe the unlock this has enabled for me.
Technically, it's just an LLM call, and technically, I could have done this before.
However there is something different about this new model of "co-working with AI that has context on you and what you're doing" that just clicks.
Update: there is now a Hacker News Tokyo Slack community set up. There are currently over 140 people in there discussing business, technology, AI, machine learning, cryptocurrency, and various Japan related topics.
It's been really fun to watch this community come together in just the last few days!
If anyone is interested to check it out, you're very welcome. Please visit:
These meetups always attract of a wide range of people - from people hacking on unique and interesting projects, to founders/CEOs, to investors, to programmers and marketers.
If you're in Tokyo and interested in meeting more people in the technology space, it's a very friendly and welcoming group of people.
I've lived in Japan for 14 years, and I'm doing a startup here.
In my experience, if you stay in Japan for more than a year, you go through several phases.
The first phase is confusion. Why am I being treated differently, even though I'm doing and saying the same things as another Japanese person.
The second phase that quickly follows is anger. This is bullshit! I know my accent and pronunciation is correct! Why are they saying they don't understand me! WTF!
The third is dull acceptance. You're not going to change Japan. They're not like this because they're bad people. They're just inexperienced with foreigners and foreign things, and they're overcompensating and trying to be nice in the way they think is nice.
The final stage is fun. This is the best stage. You understand all the social patterns and why everything is happening, so you just relax and start enjoying it.
When you go into a restaurant and order in Japanese and the waiters response is "I can't speak English! Sorry!" you respond in Japanese "Oh, I'm terribly sorry. Is there anyone here who speaks Japanese?"
This often (not always) has the interesting effect of changing the "foreigners cannot speak or understand Japanese" mindset, if only for a moment.
Sounds like you're in between stages two and three. It gets better.
To quickly respond to your list:
1) It's your face. It's nothing personal. They're just trying to be accommodating.
2) My typical response is "I've been using chopsticks since I've been four, since we used to order Chinese takeout. So complimenting me on my chopstick skills feels the same as me complimenting you on your deft fork techniques." This may result in enlightening your Japanese friends as to why it's challenging to be overly grateful for their well-intended compliment.
3) Kanji is hard. They're just impressed that you can read it, since they spent years as kids studying and repeating kanji over and over again. Having said that, my typical response here is "Actually, I think English is much, much harder than Japanese. Sure Japanese is difficult, but it's logical. English is full of exceptions, weird spellings, inconsistent grammar, because it's a mix of languages. If I wasn't born a native speaker, I can't imagine how I'd learn English from scratch."
4) Yep - you're definitely not alone. It can be hard to avoid feeling a bit slighted here. If you haven't seen this already: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLt5qSm9U80 I gently correct people here. "Excuse me - since I'm ordering, could you please look at me?"
By the way, thinking of these things as "micro-aggressions" is a terrible way to think. They're not being aggressive. They're often just not very familiar with foreign people, and they're doing their best to be accommodating. Once you get to stage four, this becomes a lot easier.
Good luck, and don't forget to swing by the Hacker News Tokyo Meetups if you're in Tokyo - https://hntokyo.doorkeeper.jp/ - we're just about to announce another one.
None that I can quickly share right now, but suffice it to say that if a company gets one invoice that says "Powered By MakeLeaps", it's a coincidence.
But if they get two or three, they start looking into this new service that everyone seems to be using now.
Product/Market fit is good, but you need Founder/Product/Market fit. A problem that resonates with you so deeply and personally, that you will climb mountains over years to solve it.
Short term problems, doubts and anxiety quietly fade away if you're 200% focused on a long term goal, where the outcome is of intense personal importance to you.
For me, I went through years of Excel hell in Japan trying to manage our invoicing because there was no good software available. I feel VERY, VERY strongly about fixing that for Japan.
Two further pieces of advice: I highly recommend finding some advisors who have done what you're trying to do. Getting a "Yep, that's the right thing to focus on" from one or two smart people tends to make concerns fade away as well.
I also recommend getting laser focused on why people are saying yes, and why people are saying no to your solution. Once you have great answers to both of these questions, your next steps become much clearer.
It was really just the basic set of investor questions compressed down into a very short and high bandwidth discussion. I think the general idea was to see how familiar I was with all the aspects of the business and the market.
It was at a dinner, so I was two beers in, but from memory some of the questions and answers were things like:
Q: How do you get new customers?
A: The great thing about MakeLeaps (For context: MakeLeaps is an online invoice creation and management tool for Japan) is that it's inherently viral, since every customer sends tens, hundreds or thousands of invoices to other customers, and each one is an opportunity to introduce MakeLeaps, since we have a tiny "Powered by MakeLeaps" stamp at the bottom of the email.
In addition, we do paid marketing campaigns such as Adwords and retargeted Facebook newsfeed ads which we've found to be effective in Japan, and a lot of content marketing. We're working on partnerships with BigCo1, and BigCo2, and integration X and Y that could also be a great new way to get in front of more viable customers.
Kind of thing. Some other questions were just general fact finding such as:
Q: How big is your team?
Q: What's your biggest challenge right now?
Q: Why are you doing this?
Q: Why don't Japanese companies already use a tool like yours?
Q: What's your business model?
Are the ones that I remember of the top of my head. Happy to field any more questions, and thanks again for listening.
Hi there - we're a startup based in Tokyo and we're looking for a developer with Python/Django experience to join us as a full-time remote staff member, with the possibility of coming to live in Tokyo to work near/in the office.
We have a strong team consisting of 6 developers, a designer, and a bunch of great customer support staff. We're getting some exciting growth, traction, and users love our service.
We have a huge whiteboard full of exciting features we can't wait to get started on, and we need your help to turn them into a reality, and to help continue to delight our existing and future users.
We're mainly looking for Python/Django experience to start, but if you've got a wide variety of skills, it always helps to be a generalist in a startup.
To apply, can you please send me some information about some business apps you've worked on in the past. Ideally anything relating to business processes/quotes/invoices/accounting is great, but is not necessary, since we believe that a cultural fit is just as important as technical skill.
We'd offer a trial to start with, and then if we're both happy with how we work together, we'd offer you a full-time position.
Please send me an email directly at [email protected] - I'm one of the founders. Looking forward to chatting with you!
(We also organise the Hacker News community meetups in Tokyo, so if you're planning on traveling to Japan and want to get a feel for the startup community here, see if there's a meetup going on at hntokyo.doorkeeper.jp)