> I see this sentiment often, and I’m honestly not sure where this comes from, as it’s really not been my experience
If you see people saying it often, but you are convinced they are just feeling threatened, what AI generated software would point to to say, "Look at this! Definitive evidence that they are just coping!"
I'd say that the molotov cocktails being thrown at the house of an AI company CEO being met with mostly praise and a little bit of apathy is a good hint you might actually be in a bubble
A bit part of this that people are not understanding is that a major part of the author's success is due to the fact that he clearly does not care at all how anything is implemented, mostly because he doesn't need to.
You get way farther when you have the AI drop in Tailwind templates or Shadcn for you and then just let it use those components. There is so much software outside that web domain though.
A lot of people just stop working on their AI projects because they don't realize how much work it's going to take to get the AI to do exactly what they want in the way that they want, and that it's basically going to be either you accept some sort of randomized variant of what you're thinking of, or you get a thing that doesn't work at all.
> For me it’s just a huge force multiplier, maybe 10-20x of my ability to deliver with my own knowledge and skills on a web dev basis.
I can tell you that this claim is where a lot of engineers are getting hung up. People keep saying that they are 10, 20 and sometimes even 100x more productive but it's this hyperbole that is harming that building style more than anything.
If you anyone could get 10 to 20 years worth of work done in 1 year, it would be so obvious that you wouldn't even have to tell anyone. Everyone would just see how much work you got done and be like "How did you do 2 decades worth of work this year?!"
It's also worse than that. It uses the Raycast logo directly in the launcher itself. Which is odd because just above this, OP says:
"I've actually thought about that before; I've tried to be extremely clear in the project's README with a disclaimer that this is a non-commercial hobby project and is not affiliated with the official Raycast team in any way."
Clearly a bright kid, but that's quite a fumble. Among my ideas for being extremely clear about not being affiliated with Raycast I would have to say using their name and using their logo together would be the worst way to communicate that.
I was talking about both. Sometimes even in a problem space time constraints demand that you utilize something off the shelf (whether you use part of it or build on top of a custom version of it).
Tools aside, I think everyone who has 10+ years can think of a time they had a prototype go well in a new problem space only to realize during the real implementation that there were still multiple unknown unknowns.
> It can reveal “unknown unknowns”. Often, prototypes uncover things I couldn’t have anticipated.
This is the exact opposite of my experience. Every time I am playing around with something, I feel like I'm experiencing all of its good and none of its bad ... a honeymoon phase if you will.
It's not until I need to cover edge cases and prevent all invalid state and display helpful error messages to the user, and eliminate any potential side effects that I discover the "unknown unknowns".
Optifye is positioned hard as a way to make it easier for management to squeeze every drop of blood out of workers, it's pretty fucked to try to use the real issue of women's safety as a defense for this. If this had anything to do with women's safety, that video and the website would have been completely different.
I could probably be a pretty damn good cook, perhaps even a sous chef. But there is so so much I want to do that is not cooking. Is it really so difficult for CEOs and devrels of AI companies to imagine that some people don't want to spend their time making software, even if it is accessible?
How much is this saying when just a couple decades ago a 9 year old could imagine that a broomstick was a sword and that they were fighting knights on the battlefield?
A child can fill in tons of gaps with their animation (see: Rugrats). We're talking about "is AI good enough to enable a 100% non-technical user able to create software on the fly without the non-technical user losing patience?" This is the discussion.
I understand where this guy was coming from with the comment about Tauri being the same type of thing, but when you really take a look at Tauri, it seems to really hold up. There are some Tauri apps that have performance that is easily on par with native.
The only thing is that Tauri apps seem to be quite easy for the developer to botch and end up with performance problems. One of the worst performing apps I ever used in my life was a Tauri app.
It's actually not Electron, it appears to be Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF), which is what Spotify desktop app uses. I'm speaking completely separately from OP's product:
CEF was supposed to be more efficient than Electron, but I think that framework heavily missed the mark. I'd be interested to know why the dev chose CEF instead.
It definitely is sad to see people not want to deviate even a little bit. I've seen at least 3 instances on Twitter where someone launched a product and they had the same landing page as another popular app even where certain components don't make sense.
A classic example is the rotating globe that you can click and drag. That was usually meant for showing sales happening across the world, but now people are just throwing it in a card with the header: "Innovative new features".
Like there's just no thought put into anything and what bothers me is how popular low-effort is becoming in tech. Startling.
I very much dislike the tweet that OP uses on the Magic UI site that's directed at Linear:
"Companies spend $30,000 and several weeks to get designs like this"
Yes. Because being a first or early mover is expensive. You commoditizing their style after they've put in all the brain work to create or build it isn't the same thing.
Also, isn't the point of design engineering to be capable of coming up with relatively original and innovative UI?
Yeah you're probably right about there not being any pressure. the 2.2M was a seed round. 2.2M is a lot for 3 people salaries for 3 years in my opinion
They raised at least 2.2M in funding. Then they got acquired. Now it's over. I do think it's time we stop pretending that you can build a fully-fledged company on top of a developer tool or plugin.
Lots of companies like this are going to be struggling in the next 2 years.
I have to pay my respects to such an amazing artist, responsible for some of the most inspiring and motivating stories during my childhood. One of the parts of the series that stands out to me is when Android 16's broken body (head) is on the ground, and with the last of his life he pleads with Gohan to:
Yeah I noticed this too. That was a completely unfair comparison, and if the author of this article is a decent engineer, then he has to know how egregiously bad faith that comes across. The author won't have support from a lot of people after two mistakes:
1. He's published the article under his native Mac app's blog, which he has every incentive to do and for that reason is biased.
2. Comparing a local text editor to an app that loads tons of rich media content from one of the busiest servers in the world discredits the argument in a major way
If you see people saying it often, but you are convinced they are just feeling threatened, what AI generated software would point to to say, "Look at this! Definitive evidence that they are just coping!"