Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit
I get what the author is saying, but his examples like "a ripgrep fork that ... is faster for my codex ripgrep workloads" don't strike me as particularly ambitious.

Perhaps we should be more ambitious in the types of problems we try to solve, and the types of value we try to provide with the software we build.

Amen to that. I was surprised to see yours seems to be the only comment with this sentiment. This post was kind of depressing to read. Like if AI is so amazing and can one-shot so much astounding stuff, why is anyone wasting their time on pointless "projects" like making ripgrep faster?
Because it can cut their total time by double digit percentages?

Both your comments there seem to latch on to a detail and miss the context totally. Ambition scales with the number of "small" things you can get done too.

loading story #50236366
loading story #50229308
loading story #50229427
The note taking genre of opensource apps is saturated with many options but most of them are electron based.

I was hoping that someone with enough motivation and money for tokens would come up with a non-electron option that is similar to onenote, with free form note placement and handwritten notes.

Basically I wish there is an opensource app having good feature parity with OneNote. Thats a good benchmark to have.

A few years ago I was wishing the same, but I was wishing it for someone knowledgeable enough.

Today I wish the same, but for someone with enough motivation and tokens instead.

Don't get the wrong idea: I would be glad for a OneNote/Obsidian alternative that's performant. I just lament the days where I'd stare in awe thinking about the levels of wizardry one must get to in order to build something that I admire. Now the first thing that comes to mind is "I wonder how many tokens did this took them to make".

an ambitious version of a note-taking program might be one that comes in pieces that you then put together by explaining to an AI what type of program you want, adding only the features you want and ignoring everything else

its always been a problem for me that ive never been able to find something that works exactly how i want, so i just put up with whatever is close enough, like obsidian for example. its probably because note taking is just a very personal thing so everyone is going to have different needs, and the amount of options out there is kind of proof of that

from the point of view of a developer, an AI would help with the complexity of a program that has every feature under the sun, and for the end user ian Ai would help the complexity of having to put all those modules together and making them work well

obviously each person could just vibe code their own program right now but each one would be starting from scratch. it would be more efficient to start with the same modules that have been tried and tested and then piece them together into something more standardised

i would love if this was a thing for most software actually. photoshop for example has only a dozen features that i ever use and the other 1000 features are wasted on me and just mean a longer startup time and a larger install size, but also i dont want want an AI to make me a custom version from scratch because you would probably spend more time trying to iron out all the weird bugs in it than actually using it

loading story #50229698
you don't like the ads, gambling apps, and similar? /s

What might help is non-software-first companies valuing developers and engineers more, enough that we could earn a reasonable living which building actually cool things. Not sure how the economics works out on the other side. Can these companies make enough money to support this vision?

One major obstacle is developers have either encountered or created entire ecosystems of problems they can't solve that get inherited whenever and wherever software is introduced. Proposing to add evergreen issues around security, data entry and retention, connectivity, vendor lock-in, and update cycles is frequently a shitty trade for whatever notional (often fictional) productivity improvement is being proposed by injecting software into a workflow.
loading story #50228127
loading story #50228088
Holy non-sequitur...
loading story #50228063