Yes, but that's not its main selling point. An SQLite database is also a single file, which makes it incredibly easy to replicate, backup, transfer, restore, etc.
I don't think you can install "any other database" by pasting one file in a direcory somewhere? Even if you can produce such a backup with the same command.
Pretty much every embedded database since about 1988 has worked like that.
You say that being an embedded database isn't the main selling point, being contained within a single file is. But that's a completely normal feature of an embedded db, to the point that the one implies the other.
My current client has a forest of 90+ SnapLogic pipelines that were badly written and maintained even worse; one of those was completely wrong, in that it generated wrong accounting data which could eventually have financial, fiducial and legal repercussions.
I rewrote the pipeline in Python (a correct version of it) with state management in SQLite and logs in plain old flat files, and everything has been running smoothly ever since. In fact this is the only data flow that has worked without errors or interruptions in the last six months.
Instead of replicating the db file with Litestream I do a remote backup with Restic before and after each run; it's not an exact replacement of Litestream as we could possibly lose a whole run if the machine died / disappeared at the end of a run, but it lets one restore any day very easily. In an ideal world I think we should have both (live replica + backups).
> except that software has near-zero marginal cost
Yes, but not AI. This is where AI differs from other software: marginal cost is not zero, in fact it doesn't go down much, if at all, for each generated token (after accounting for the depreciation of hardware), and could even go up if trying to find an extra MWh gets more and more difficult and therefore more and more expensive.
So the author claims he's getting $2000 per month worth of frontier AI free of charge. Ok. If he's been doing that for 6 months that's $12k. What has this produced concretely? For $12k you can find a used car in decent condition. Heck for $1200 (his actual out-of-pocket spend) you get a brand new ebike! (on which you could put a pelican and make a photo of both if that's your fancy). But here it's unclear what has come of it.
> code that would have taken me years of work to produce without LLMs
As you might suspect, this is what I have an issue with. Without LLMs, isn't it possible or even likely that that code wouldn't have been written at all, and wouldn't have been missed? If LLMs are mostly used to produce throwaway prototypes then it's a stretch to say that's money well spent.
If indeed it let you advance your main product much faster then sure it's a different story. You're the judge of that. It's hard to see the impact from the consumer side; everything is still broken and no extraordinary app seems to be emerging. Maybe it's just a question of time. We'll see.
I've thought about this a lot. I am very confident that the way I use LLMs is both accelerating progress on my core projects (here's a substantial, reviewed PR I landed just yesterday https://github.com/simonw/datasette/pull/2741) and helping me create plenty of projects that otherwise would not have existed.
The point being made by GP was that your projects have no value and their non-existence wouldn't be a negative to this world.
And that is likely a fair assessment, though I understand perfectly the feeling that you have that you are accomplishing great(er) things thanks to AI.
Now what percentage of the 200$ have been used on the useful stuff and how much on exploration or other stuff.
How long would it taken you to do it yourself? How much longer will the next task take you, compared to when you would’ve written the code yourself. How is the mental model compared to when you would’ve written it yourself?.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, again there are use cases. But the calculation is not plain and simple it goes deep into our perception, perceived productivity versus actual productivity.
I’ve 2 months maxxed out all 6k of Claude Code and bought Antigravity on top. My codebase became 140k lines. I introduced tons of bugs and spent another 2 months, deleting 80k of code. I wish I would’ve just chatted with AI and not let agents touch my codebase. I would’ve saved approx 300$ subscription prices a month and 2 months of my life.
I had that experience back in January! I used it for a joke in a talk recently... did anyone really need a half-finished buggy slow implementation of a JavaScript interpreter in Python? They did not.
https://github.com/simonw/micro-javascript
It's taken me the best part of this year to readjust and find a pace and level of ambition that fits.
It was challenging for me as well, but my pace and level is now that I use it for these cases at the moment:
New language, infrastructure, general level of understanding of something I barely have an idea of.
Rubber duck debugging, if i dont know the correct solution
Checking my code for issues and bugs.
But not for:
- writing my code
- agentic coding (help me)
The inference has reduced drastically. It’s basically just chatting. I don’t let it write anything, but sometimes I purposely use the browser window instead of them sitting in my codebase, because I know it gets things subtly wrong and migth focus on the wrong things.
The same way people used to say don’t copypaste code at least write it out I think it’s still true. It helps to buidl the mental model and to find the right abstractions.
I was certainly not saying that all the author's projects, in general, have no value! That would be rude, mean and most of all, incorrect.
But yes, it's likely that the ease of which code can now be outout lets us produce lots of unnecessary code just because we can, and the author says as much in a below comment
This is the economic theory of value creation though - arguably the world is better off because new projects can be created, and they are marginally cheaper than they would have been previously
I’m watching to see what happens to big enterprise software contracts. Why pay some vendor $800k annually for something a couple mid-level devs can replace—-and tailor closely to your needs——by leveraging AI.
Open source software changed the world. AI that will cheaply write whatever you want in a few days will also change the world.
(I have a feeling if I could say "and I closed $2m in sales with the software I wrote!" people would find a way to say that didn't mean anything anyway, because how can I prove I wouldn't have made those sales writing it by hand?)
I would be very curious what kind of answer would satisfy you here. Simon isn't building a product, where $200 is a line item on a balance sheet. If he tells you what sort of analyses or time savings $200/mo on coding agents have enabled him, do you honestly think that would satisfy you?
> The promise of capitalism has always been - you will have a spin at the roulette table.
This may be the promise of the American dream, but it's not the promise of "capitalism". Capitalism promises nothing to the individual. Capitalism means putting machines to work, and using as few people as possible, paying them as little as possible, to operate them. In that sense, AI is capitalists' wet dream: all machines and no people.
The comments on this page so far seem to agree that it all will happen like this. I have doubts. What I see mostly is slop. Slop can replace bullshit jobs, but the point of bullshit jobs is not to produce bullshit, it is to employ people. There is no point in having bullshit jobs done by machines. For the non-bullshit jobs (of which, yes, there may be fewer than we think), slop won't cut it.
Sure, it can still be on the front page if it's a good post (i.e., gratifies intellectual curiosity) but it can't be a Show HN if users can't play with it.
> Here is what you gain with your most improbable life: The authentic you. Your particular mix of talents, native abilities, personal inclinations, genetic limits, life experiences, and ambitious desires points to a mixture that is distinctly unique (...) The more you-ish you become, the less competition you have, because you are occupying your own niche.
This is profoundly true, and the corollary is: beware of titles.
From project manager at some company to CEO of some megacorp: there have been, there are and there will be others just like that. But if you're you, defined only by your name (or your existence, without a name), then there is no one else, there can be no one else, because there is only one you in the whole universe.
> Here is what you gain with your most improbable life: The authentic you
On the contrary, this is profoundly bullshit.
Firstly, anyone arriving at a "life's goal" via what a blogger says should be their life's goal is not being "authentically them".
Secondly, why does a broader, less likely mix of talents and experiences make you more "you"? It doesn't. Just because you've become more unique does not make you more "you-ish".
We're all influenced by our past experiences, the books we've read, the movies we've watched, the people in our lives, and yes, blog posts and essays as well. Our past is part of what makes us us. I don't know how you can claim that being influenced by a blogger is any less authentic than being influenced by anything else.
> why does a broader, less likely mix of talents and experiences make you more "you"?
Because it's highly improbable that any one person's natural mix of talents and experiences would be narrow and similar to everyone else's.
On one hand, you say that "you are your experiences therefore you're youness is absolute even if you're living out the instructions of a blogger"
And then on the next hand you seem to imply that being less similar to others makes you more you, which besides being without basis, contradicts the banal "you're you therefore you're you" of your first point.
> > why does a broader, less likely mix of talents and experiences make you more "you"?
> Because it's highly improbable that any one person's natural mix of talents and experiences would be narrow and similar to everyone else's.
For those of us having trouble, can you elaborate on how that isn't described by "you seem to imply that being less similar to others makes you more you"?
Your answer there is directly at odds with saying that allowing yourself to be influenced by a blogger spewing mass-market pop-philosophy doesn't make the result less authentic.
The two original questions I answered are intrinsically linked. If your answers to the two are contradictory, then there's a fundamental integrity problem with the aforementioned pop-philosophy.
I don't see the connection. We are, at least in part (and some argue fully) a result of our past experiences, teachings, etc. I don't see how it's valid to argue that learning from an essay is somehow inauthentic.
This is different from the claim that people naturally have a unique set of traits, experiences, and desires, and you would expect people who have successfully self-actualised to express that uniqueness.
This comment is maybe a little too aggressive but I kind of share the sentiment. Mostly, after reading this long article, I'm surprised he never quite explains why he never tried to go at it independently? He says
> I’ve always had a fairly entrepreneurial spirit
but that doesn't square well with being a cog in the huge Disney machine.
Yes, but that's not its main selling point. An SQLite database is also a single file, which makes it incredibly easy to replicate, backup, transfer, restore, etc.
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