There are already plenty of SaaS that offer open source version as a way to push to the cloud and charge for hosting, maintenance, support and some extra features. In that way, a working code have already been commoditized and those companies didn't disappear.
I was looking for this comment (I was going to say the same) - I'm mostly on the backend services and infra side, and I have the option to host a lot of open-source tooling as opposed to paying for a service. I have to weigh up my options when deciding what to do, but a lot comes down to how much time I have and how much I'm willing to waste in time & hosting costs to keep the thing running. Also, do I need support, and ensure uptime and SLAs etc. Or what if I'm on holidays. I'm sure there are other things I'm not thinking of right now.
This. First I try it just a little to do a boring part. It feels great. The boring part that was holding me is gone and all it took was a little instruction. The dopamine hit is real. So of course I will try it again. But not so fast. It needs to be corrected to make everything aligned with the architecture. And as my requests get bigger, it needs more and more corrections. Eventually correcting everything becomes too tedious, and accepting is just too easy, and so I lower my standards, and soon enough lose track of all the decisions. The branch is now useless as I don't want to debug or own this code I no longer understand hence I start over. I want work to felt like a training session where you get fairly rewarded for your efforts with better understanding, not like a slot machine where you passively hope it gets it right next time.
"My requests get bigger" is the issue here. You're not talking to a real human with common sense or near-infinite working memory.
It's a language mode with finite context and the ability to use tools. Whatever it can fit into its context, it can usually do pretty well. But it does require guidance and documentation.
Just like working with actual humans that aren't you and don't share your brain:
1) spec your big feature, maybe use an LLM in "plan" mode. Write the plan into a markdown file.
2) split the plan into smaller independent parts, in github issues or beads or whetever
3) have the LLM implement each part in isolation, add automatic tests, commit, reset context
Repeat step 3 until feature is done.
If you just use one long-ass chat and argue with the LLM about architecture decisions in between code changes, it WILL get confused and produce the worst crap you've ever seen.
Yes, on one hand, it was so wonderful. Cloudflare came and said, "Yeah, now we'll save everyone from DDoS, everything's perfect, we'll speed up your site," and bam, they became a bottleneck for the entire internet. It's some kind of nightmare. Why didn't several other such popular startups appear, into which more money was invested, and which would allow some failure points to be created? I don't understand this. Or at least Cloudflare itself should have had some backup mechanism, so that in case of failures, something still works, even slowly, or at least they could redirect traffic directly, bypassing their proxies. They just didn't do that at all. Something is definitely wrong.
Thank you for sending these alternatives, they look good. And, of course, the most important thing is that Cloudflare is free, while these alternatives cost money. And they cost hundreds of dollars at my traffic volume of tens of terabytes. Of course, I really don't want to pay. So, as they say, mice wept and jabbed, but they kept gnawing on the cactus.
I had to use Borland when studying but never really liked it. Later I tried Notepad+ with console for the first time and everything clicked. There is a console for compiling and running and there is a text editor for editing. It was the flow that made sense.
Database is one of those places where it's justified, I think. Application containers do not need the same level of care hence are easy to run yourself.
Not sure about windows but I solved it for myself with basic provisioning script (could be an ansible playbook also) that installs everything on a fresh linux vm in a few minutes. For macos, there is tart vm that works well with arm64 (very little overhead compared to alternatives). Could be a rented cloud vm in a nearby location with low latency. Being a neovim user also helped not to having to worry about file sync when editing.
Sounds like social coaching has all the attributes of an untapped business niche. The question is, if there is just a obvious pain, why there is such a shortage of solutions. I think it could be because of the stigma associated with this issue or because people affect by it lack genuine interest in solutions as people are usually happy to pay for all kinds of self-improvements.
> Sounds like social coaching has all the attributes of an untapped business niche
The problem is that most of the potential customers are well aware that the field is full of hucksters and certifications are largely meaningless. I'm not about to pay for services I don't believe will pan out.
Doesn't scale is a huge issue. Lack of evidence that it works is another - and anything remotely evidence based is given by somebody like a psychologist and is very expensive.
Social coaching is just another venue through which scammers do their thing. Eg the Andrew Tate-esque "schools" making men even more dysfunctional in the name of teaching them to be "attractive".
It's very easy to talk about some sort of coaching for these issues, but imo it isn't really that straightforward. The people being suggested to take coaching are often very easily manipulated, and there's also the issue of everyone having a different standard for a healthy level of socialization, and everyone also loves to force their standard onto everyone. Result is that "social coaching" is going to be more like brainwashing/indoctrination in practice.
