This makes me think of John Williams, an artist of great renown known for things like the Raiders of the Lost Ark OST and the Star Wars OSTs.

All of his stuff (or most of it) is repurposed and refitted chunks of other classical works. The beautiful part is, he does it so well.

Love the AI format with obvious misunderstanding to this and all your other comments; makes it much easier to find AI bots like yourself.

My argument is strengthened by the fact that they didn’t. There is so much technology between the raw data and the model itself. It’s absurd to suggest LLMs are simply a product of the information.

They were better off because the discomfort of shoehorning was less than the discomfort of in-house software development. The latter has changed radically so the conclusion may no longer hold. SWEs would do well to have at least one side project to calibrate their intuition about the cost of delivering and maintaining a greenfield project so that they can spot the niches which have begun to appear even as others live on borrowed time.

The accounting is very similar. The processes are not. Small businesses continue to be special snowflakes in terms of how they do their work. Both for good and bad reasons.

I’m surprised an open source accounting package hasn’t popped up that handles the accounting well. The backend could largely be the same (or at least modular) while the front legitimately needs to vary based on what type of work, how sales are done, whether they hold inventory, local taxes, etc, etc.

Same here! https://github.com/rush86999/atom

Not parent, but favorite feature of my own harness I haven't seen somewhere else, is the ability for the agent to execute code on different hosts in a transparent and easy way. Fairly simple and probably could prompt the agent + set things up with ssh, but was doing other stuff related to a server<>client model, so figured why not add it as a couple of tools. Now the agent can build cross-platform applications while I'm mostly on Linux and actually verify it works, without me manually switching between three OSes.

This comment is a great example of how large and strange the skills gap in AI is right now.

Curious why your first impulse is not simply to point your favorite agent at a few examples and start brainstorming/planning from there?

Multiple times I’ve built a purpose specific bespoke tool starting this way. In fact, it’s a great way to learn how specialized tools are built.

It's pretty simple nowadays if you know conceptually how they work. Running the LLM calls in a loop with tools is an agent. You only need 10 or so basic tools to accomplish nearly anything, and you can build a dynamic skill system from that. Look at https://github.com/patw/pengy, ignore the app look at the spec.md file, feed that to your current agent of choice and make your own version. Use whatever tech stack or UI you're comfortable with. Change some of the choices in how it works, so it fits what you want to work.

Implementing your own agent is very easy. Here is a minimal agent in 60 lines of Python without dependencies:

https://github.com/99991/MinimalAgent

You only need a single tool to start with. All recent LLMs know how to use bash for reading/writing/editing/executing.

Not the parent commenter, but most of it is surprisingly simple. You basically start with a "chat app" where you have a list of messages, send the whole conversation to an LLM and it replies back, which also gets added to the same list.

And you add a small twist, that instead of a 1-to-1 back and forth, you instead put it into a loop, where the LLM reply can itself "have a turn", e.g. a tool invocation, where your system is the one that replies (e.g. with the tool invocation's result). That's pretty much it, you have a 1 to potentially many "chat".

The harder part is getting all the "soft" parts right, like how to have well-behaving tool calls, timeouts, prevent huge cycles eating up tokens, but there are no one way to solve these, it's a fundamentally heuristic-heavy area.

Why would the language matter? Just use your favorite.

Look at pi coding agent.

I did note $20-300. In particular, domestic employers would surely still spend the upper end of it for each of their engineer staff. If there are 4 million software developers in the US of any job title, and if the employer of each spends $200 per month for the developer, that's $800M per month in revenue.

Actually unless they’ve changed substantially Kimi kind of does this? It’s not as advertised/focused on and the API is a little nonstandard making it hard to plug some things into, but, unlike Claude they’ll actually give you an API key you can use directly as part of your unmetered subscription. I played with it for a month or two out of curiosity, it ls not a bad value though a bit brittle and stuff

The Chinese api prices are already so cheap that that is arguably not needed.

You can also get $10/month opencode go (which officially can be used with any harness) with basically every major open weight model running inference in a place that I deem more trustworthy than the subject-to-Chinese-law inference options (but research this for yourself, there are some asterisks). This is what I use (in opencode) when I want an agent for personal use. Even if I'm being fairly intense with my usage by my standards anyway), I haven't managed to run out (yet), although I usually use the cheaper models (deepseek v4 is my favorite, and I've used both flash and pro).

From the FAQ:

> The plan is designed primarily for international users, with models hosted in the US, EU, and Singapore for stable global access. Our providers follow a zero-retention policy and do not use your data for model training.

And:

> Yes, you can use Go with any agent. Follow the setup instructions in your preferred coding agent.

I think that pretty much all Chinese providers do that?

And Codex obviously allows that as well. Anthropic is pretty the main exception.

Negative margins to have you hooked on someone else’s software?

> China cloned Amazon and Meta fairly well (but only within their local/captured markets)

Americans order Chinese products from SHEIN and Aliexpress type websites.

So China did penetrate the US ecommerce market, but they are not taking on Amazon directly.

People are buying from the Chinese and reselling on Amazon, which has a good logistics network that Chinese companies can't possibly build in the USA.

> absolutely not Apple

You need to look up Oneplus to see how many people were using their devices till they announced exit from Western markets.

The Chinese Android phones are essentially replacement for a big chunk of Apple ecosystem.

If these cheap mobile devices didn't exist - Apple could possibly be selling many more devices.

> China cloned .... Meta fairly well

TikTok is giving Meta a run for their money in USA.

They had to be restricted via threat of regulation to offload stake in TikTok USA.

> Microsoft

They didn't compete with Microsoft directly as entering Western Enterprise market is hard for the Chinese. Even Google can't beat Microsoft there till now.

Not British, but taking UK out of the definition of pop, is a bit too rough a cut. Also France. Look at the queues outside pop-glamorous stores. And was pop-art a pop artefact? Is TikTok redefining pop? Movies is an old measure, and even US has fallen with just franchise dominating. I think as a globe we are much more integrated and co-dependent, occasionally also in bad ways, than we appreciate.

> Entertainment and culture exports are still effectively zero (like, what, three blockbuster films?) where the US, Japan and Korea define pop across the globe.

And this is really sad, because they have thousands of years of cultural heritage and also plenty of great films. Somehow, they've failed at exporting this completely.

> Heavy industry is mixed, with decent success in consumer vehicles now but little purchase in stuff like heavy equipment or shipbuilding

Uhh, China does over half of the world’s shipbuilding.

China is also responsible for 25% [1] of the world’s heavy equipment manufacturing and is considered to have double[2] the CAGR of the global average for heavy equipment manufacturing.

0: https://www.csis.org/analysis/china-dominates-shipbuilding-i...

1: https://www.grandviewresearch.com/horizon/outlook/constructi...

2: https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/heavy-co...

Xiaomi did a quite good job copying (and surpassing!) Apple.

They even got the car Apple always wanted, but never managed to build.

As a US citizen I have domicile over the data and a legal system that has some claws. We tend to enforce and celebrate IP whereas China openly scoffs at its premise.

Frankly I don’t trust any of them. Certainly not Anthropic after they refused to delete my Cowork session. Certainly not OpenAI with their duplicity. I’m a Google workspace subscriber so I use Gemini, but only with logging disabled and for throwaway searches.

I will go at the pace that hardware I control lets me. That happens to be pretty damn slow ATM… waiting for 45 minutes for my 4090 to pp 30k tokens wasn’t much fun the other day, but it got the job done. If speed were a priority I’d propose be renting time on vast.ai or something.

Apple UI/UX sucks though, but all the other alternatives also suck.

I think it can safely be argued that (only) good UX but also great marketing are the reason of that.

Yes, Apple's UI/UX is good, not great. Like far from great. So he's still correct

They have good UI, it's noticed and appreciated by many.

Do you really care about events 30 years ago that were blown out of proportions? Right now US is waging an unprovoked war of aggression against Iran, killing civillians every single day and deliberately destroying civilian infrastructure (like bombing universities). Yet there is zero condemnation or any real action from any Western states. All the major media outlets downplay war crimes committed by the US forces and American llms just copy the narrative of the western media.

And yet you treat a 30 years old event like it would be the most pressing problem at the moment.

[dead]

Yes I’m saying a question answered deceptively should not be one of the four featured questions on your product page.

> Looking through their privacy policy, it looks like the bigger issue is that they are (or refuse to refute) training on your data/prompts.

You’re making my entire point. They’ve designed an ingestion engine that is not private by design. Any sort of privacy posturing is wrong.

Sorry, I meant that’s not desirable behavior that the user might expect. I understand that coding agent tools tend to play fast and loose with access because it’s not their own privacy/security at stake.

It gets tricky when you want to say “allow this particular tool to have a little more access.” Like allow the codex client to access the GPT API but not some random other site the LLM learned about. Or like letting git write to .git to commit changes but don’t let something install git hooks. Or allow downloading certain packages/versions from a site like PyPI, or allow certain operations on certain GitHub repos in a way that doesn’t line up with how you can configure an access token.

As opposed to all the shameless copying of all the training data without any respect for its licenses or attribution?

"You're trying to kidnap what I've rightfully stolen!"

As opposed to the "state backed" OpenAI and Anthropic that were caught stealing IP in order to develop their products, that also take data and IP from American citizens? Does being less-state-backed make the theft more okay? Or is it okay because they're not Chinese?

Yes China has companies that compete with existing companies, to the point they are copying. Our companies do the same thing (you're gonna tell me no American AI company has stolen the interface of another? or "borrowed" code?). Yes some of China's companies break laws. Our companies also break laws. YCombinator's funded companies have repeatedly bent and broken laws for over 15 years, to the point it's surprising when they don't break a law to gain unfair advantage.

The anti-Chinese rhetoric needs to be reigned in a bit. Yes the Chinese government is culpable in crimes against humanity and abuses of power - but so is the US government and US corporations. People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. You wanna call out Chinese companies/government? Fine, but don't pretend it's just China.

The UIs of these systems are pretty natural to come up with. I had a prior program that was not dissimilar. Any IP system that disallows this will likely consider almost all GUI free software to be in violation as well.

In fact, it would be pretty hard to come up with non-infringing software. Did ChatGPT infringe on MSN Messenger? Or Arc Browser?

No, this kind of trivial UI element is not an acceptable use of intellectual property protection. As much as I believe China’s dominance is a threat to the present world order I cannot imagine that attempting this style of IP regime will make us more competitive.

> Says who.

Says everyone who's not using this stuff. It's an empirical argument. Is anyone actually using this for work? How long has it been since Cowork was released?

It's such an inadequate tool for work it reeks of SF hubris to think you can just slap a chat input box onto a PC and replace 90% of white collar jobs.

it's pretty great for coding because the CLI provides the model with all the context it needs and with a way to verify the result of its actions via linting, compiler messages and program output

the rest of "work" doesn't have that luxury

Copying a block of multi-line text out of the agent doesn't work over ssh, for instance.

Models need richer context to do well. They also generally need a verifier, but better context is already an improvement. So to fix it, you need to rethink UIs to be agent-first.

I'm not saying Kimi Work and its peers are entirely useless. I'm just saying they're a hack that puts a pretty low upper limit on agent capabilities and speed.

Why do you trust Sam Altman?

> Why are they charging 1000x more for the exact same business?

The implication they want to avoid, I'm suggesting, is because the CCP isn't plugged into and funding those entities' activities at a loss. Or they're lying about ZDR, etc. etc.

This is already happening.

Firms aren’t going to wait - their valuations are driven by it. So too is the compensation of those running them.

For fear that the data they're entrusted with will be copied or that there is some nefarious reason like state sponsorship that makes the activity economical?