I use my Anthropic sub with Pi. They keep saying they're going to disallow that and then walking back the decision. Or at least I think that's what's happening.
My absolute favorite modality is one I don't use all that much at the moment: Zed's edit completion.
If you're unfamiliar, it's like tab-completion, but it has a context that includes the edits you've made in the last few seconds, and it can predict around the cursor.
The model isn't advanced enough to understand complex tasks, but it has more the feel of the "crafting gun" in Subnautica or other survival crafting games, if that analogy makes any sense.
Personally I hate working with a chatbot - it's low-bandwidth and rage-inducing. If I could imagine a perfect workflow, it would be something like me whispering my train of thought as I program, and then pointing a very fancy "autocomplete gun" at the code.
I really like Orion, but I had to switch (currently trying Zen) because the 1password extension was so so broken. I know it's probably not their fault, but it really got in the way every day.
> Maybe the game has changed with LLMs, but its been a running joke that engineers will build a startup/product/library/thing only to then realize they can’t get any users and that marketing and sales are hard.
I agree with your premise, but you're still viewing this technology through the lens of "a successful product" versus "a successful piece of technology".
Plenty of open source projects stay open source and are popular without ever making any sales whatsoever. I'm not trying to project my own motivations on the Iroh team; they may want to build a product out of it. For me, though, the project has a lot of appeal already, because it exactly and excellently fulfills a technological need, not because they brought me in with a "it's x but for y" narrative.
We use Iroh in production at work, and I'm absolutely in love with it. I'd describe it primarily as "Tailscale-style hole punching as a rust crate", but of course you can sprinkle a lot of cool p2p stuff on top of the basic QUIC connections.
I can't tell what's worse: intentionally obscuring the fact that the vast majority of people would pay ~no wealth tax or unintentionally forgetting that the vast majority of people would pay ~no wealth tax.
Pi is a coding agent harness, like Claude Code, but significantly better and more elegant. Here is a good post describing it: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/1/31/pi/
I switched a few months ago and have not looked back. Unfortunately Anthropic blocked access from Claude Subscription users today, but that's a different story.
I'm surprised by the complete lack of dissent or even nuance in the discussion here. I'm much more ambivalent on this: the historical record for prohibition is not good, but instagram and the like are uniquely and disastrously harmful and the companies pushing them on children are powerful in a way that has no real historical precedent. In the balance, anything the reduces the power those companies have over our lives (and our politics) has to be at least considered. In other words, I don't think this is necessarily the right measure - but I'm desperate.