Comment by simonw

2 hours ago

If you want an example of a project that condensed 5 years into 6 months and exploded past the competition I suggest looking at OpenClaw.

The first line of code was written on November 25th. It achieved adoption in the "personal agents" space that far exceeded the other companies that had tried the same thing.

(Whether or not you trust the quality of the software you can't deny the impact it had in such a short time. It defined a new category of software.)

7 comments

simonw

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mlsu  2 hours ago

Ideally, the given example would be something not ajacent to the presently white-hot category of "AI agents".

Like, look at e.g. YC minus the AI and AI ajacent companies. Are those startups meaningfully more impressive or feature-rich as compared to a couple years ago?

demorro  1 hour ago

> It defined a new category of software

Which is exactly why you can't use it as an example, there is no control. This is basic stuff.

mjr00  2 hours ago

OpenClaw is definitely not a "5 years" project pre-AI though. That was more like a month of greenfield work compressed into a weekend -- which is still really impressive, don't get me wrong! -- but I think the point is we're not seeing mature, legacy codebases get outcompeted by new, agile, AI-driven codebases; we're seeing greenfield projects get spun up faster. Which, again, is still impressive and valuable.

If agents could really compress 10 years of development into 1 year, you'd see people making e.g. HFT platforms and becoming obscenely rich, not making a fun open-source project and getting hired by OpenAI as an employee.

  • thunky  1 hour ago

    You're framing it like the only barrier to writing wildly successful money printing software is software development skills.

    If that were true, all of these anti-AI greybeards who have been in the game for 30 years would all own their own jets.

retinaros  2 hours ago

Its trash vibecoded markdown files around pi. This exemplifies well what op’is saying. We are at the ICO stage of llms. Hopefully there wont be an nft one

  • mschuster91  1 hour ago

    As much as I love to hate on AI: even the bad apples still produce something that one can reasonably work with.

    Cryptocurrencies? Barely any other use than money laundering, buying drugs and betting on the outcome of battles in war. And NFTs? No use at all other than money laundering and setting money ablaze.