The problem they're trying to solve is to find out what functions of their software are most useful for people and what to invest in, and to make directions on product direction.

Yes, vendors can, do, and should talk to users, but then a lot of users don't like receiving cold messages from vendors (and some users go so far as to say that cold messages should _never_ be sent).

So, the alternative is to collect some soft telemetry to get usage metrics. As long as a company is upfront about it and provides an opt-out mechanism, I don't see a problem with it. Software projects (and the businesses around them) die if they don't make the right decisions.

As an open source author and maintainer, I very rarely hear from my users unless I put in the legwork to reach out to them so I completely identify with this.

If you have an existing financial relationship with someone it is by definition not a "cold message." People who think they should never, ever be contacted by a company they are paying to use a service of are in the extreme minority. That's "cabin in the woods with no electricity" territory.

Great article, thanks for sharing. How much does it run you a month roughly?

I recently switched to Codex using my ChatGPT Plus subscription, so only $20 a month or so. Before that, using Opus 4.5/6 it was like $100-150.

Opus was by far the best at the job, but Codex with GPT 5.4 is decent.

> You could look at your denigrators and decide: "fuck you"

That escalated quickly and I enjoyed this comment a lot

Happy to oblige.

I wonder what college freshman-level writing classes are teaching about writing voice and AI. The tell-tale patterns are pretty frustrating to read.

The solution to every software problem is another layer of indirection :-)

I sure hope so. The way companies are pressured to hit growth numbers, I really hope messaging in general doesn’t all get sloppified along with code lol.

I think AI writing makes humanities and writing courses more important, and I hope people maintain their sense of taste with writing, but tbh I’m not optimistic here.

My favorite part is how pg says how kids made him less ambitious, but then:

“On the other hand, what kind of wimpy ambition do you have if it won't survive having kids? Do you have so little to spare?”

It’s called having kid while rich so you can hire nannies, tho

This. Don't forget that HN is extremely biased towards High income/net worth viewpoints. The reality for a lot of parents is much worse than most commenters here

100%. I had to drop about half my interests and hobbies after having kids, to remain sane (trying to continue juggling all of them was plainly just going to lead to never doing anything, really), and adjust all the others to fit better with kid-having.

If you can't hire "help", it's like losing 20 waking hours from your week, at least, just for the not-at-all fun or "quality time" parts of having a kid (extra housekeeping [so... very much more], extra shopping, taxiing the kids places, extra household planning, basic hygiene stuff, et c). And on top of that you need to spend "fun" time with them, too, like that part may be more enjoyable but it's non-optional and a lot of stuff an adult might want to do or accomplish doesn't integrate well with it.

Slice ~30-40 hours off the waking hours of both adults in the household, on top of 45-50 hours of work and other stuff necessary for work (commute, et c.) and... yeah this is just bullshit if you can't hire help.

[EDIT] Oh, this reminds me of a certain genre of LinkedIn post that I especially hate: the CEO bragging about how they find time for family despite having five jobs. The real answer to this mystery is that zero of those jobs are actually full-time work, and, the part they never mention, is that they pay others to do tens of hours of work per week that normal people have to do themselves, like lawn care, housekeeping, fixing broken shit in their house, shopping, keeping track of and making appointments and such, et c.

Relevancy is a big point here. HN readers work in tech or are super interested in tech, YC companies do very technical things so hiring posts or launches tend to blend right in for the most part.

I think this overstates the “betrayal” angle.

A lot of great open source comes out of startups because startups are really good at shipping fast and getting distribution (open source is part of this strategy). Users can try the tool immediately, and VC funding can put a lot of talent behind building something great very quickly.

The startup model absolutely creates incentive risk, but that’s true of any project that becomes important while depending on a relatively small set of maintainers or funders.

I’m not sure an acquisition is categorically different from a maintainer eventually moving on or burning out. In all of those cases, users who depend on the project take on some risk. That’s not unique to startups; it’s true of basically any software that becomes important.

There’s no perfect structure for open source here - public funding, nonprofit support, and startups all suck in their own ways.

And on the point you make about public funding being slow: yeah, talented people can’t work full-time on important things unless there’s serious funding behind it. uv got as good as it is because the funding let exceptional people work on it full-time with a level of intensity that public funding usually does not.

That's fair, and I don't really blame anyone for taking the startup route. It's often the only realistic path to working full-time on something you care about. My point is more that it shouldn't have to be. The more public funding flows into open source infrastructure, the less that tradeoff becomes necessary in the first place. Korea being almost entirely absent from that picture is part of why I feel this so keenly.

I cannot agree more though I have little experience in open source. I knew that Korean environment for open source software would be touch before coming back from Europe, it seems much easier to target international traction rather than focusing on domestic interest.

Personally, I'd like to know, since you have been active in Korea, if there is any groups that I can attend to.

I think UV and Ruff showed us how much better Python tooling could be. Just setting a higher bar has move. OS forward

Seems like in this new AI world that the word sandbox is used to describe a system that asks "are you sure".

I'm used to a different usage of that word: from malware analysis, a sandbox is a contained system that is difficult to impossible to break out of so that the malware can be observed safely.

Applying this to AI, I think there are many companies trying to build technical boundaries stronger than just "are you sure" prompts. Interesting space to watch.

Yeah, this is also a group of people who refer to gentle suggestions as “guardrails.” It’s not clear they’ve ever read a single security paper.

Less guardrails, more like highway lane dividers. The only thing stopping you from crossing a yellow divided line is that someone once told you not to.

and fear of death