As an aside, I'm starting to get annoyed with the "we moved fast and broke things, we're smol indie hackers" defense that has been popping up more lately in various contexts. The whole incident started because they got venture capital for their fork and were in a startup accelerator for several months: that's not moving fast or being indie.
> I'm starting to get annoyed with the "we moved fast and broke things, we're smol indie hackers" defense
It's worse than that; this whole kerfuffle came to people's attention after the founder posted a brag tweet about leaving a $300k job at Coinbase to go YC. Only to claim ignorance about the license and everything else later.
"Sorry officer I didn't know I couldn't just rewrite a license to whatever I wanted despite having ample access to legal resources. Yes officer I am a CEO. No officer I will not remain silent."
Terrifying, always afraid to touch unlicensed code. Tried to give most of my public code extremely open licenses because I’d assume some guy crawling the internet for a piece of code probably has enough stress in his life.
No no who says we're smal indide hackers. It has to be that we're the genius god gifted visionaries fixated on a future for humanity that is invisible to mere mortal peasants hence mistakes are inevitable.
> PearAI evidently forked an OSS code editor, then later got funding from Y Combinator for it.
More specifically PearAI forked the OSS code editor Continue, which was itself funded by YC, and got YC funding for it. Also the editor they forked is itself a fork of VS Code, but is not to be confused with Void Editor, which is a third YC funded VS Code fork with AI features. It's YC funded VS Code forks with AI all the way down.
This is crazy. And then I hear about solid products/companies that don’t get any/very little funding at all because it has no “AI” and it baffles the mind.
Funders are betting on founders. They see somebody willing to take shortcuts and ride hype trains, turn good faith projects and pass them off as their own innovation, and the see the kind of sociopathic organization that has the potential to "become the next Uber."
They aren't funding the viability of the product, they are funding for a take of future earnings of the morally bankrupt or the righteous will of the hopelessly naive. In either case, it's all about how effectively they can affix a leash.
YC filters for companies for gorillion dollar missions / solve gorillion dollar problems.
A mission that is, "I have an AI, input is business plan, output is entire IT infrastructure" is what YC sees here. i.e. programming as a field (quite a cost center) is no longer needed, ironically. Because of that the bar is low. Honestly if anyone is reading this, if you find a very clever novel way to go after this, surely you would be funded
My mistake, I haven't used Continue and was led to believe they have their own VS Code distro. PearAI forked VS Code and forked Continues VS Code extension and smushed them together then. They also just wired Continues code up to Claude/GPT4 so the models aren't novel either.
Which I suppose isn't necessarily a gotcha, it's totally possible to be a user of software and figure out ways it could be improved. But the way they pitched themselves was they're building an AI code editor, whereas it seems like they're just making some changes to a free, open-source project.
If I had any guess, the reason they got accepted is from their YouTube followings, and this was essentially a marketing experiment. These guys have audiences of young aspiring developers who could be potential customers if their favorite youtuber were to start claiming they "built" an AI code editor. Not a crazy idea but certainly doesn't smell of an attempt to make an honest and good product.
This is an interesting business model. Continue building on top of YC-funded forks, and you basically end up with a product that was funded by billions, but your own contribution to it was minimal.
I wonder if it's possible to get funding for a fork of an already funded fork that you launched recently.
Might even be an easy money glitch: every couple of years or so you fork your YC funded code editor, get YC funding for the new fork, and cruise on that money for a while.
> ...an interesting business model. Continue building on top of YC-funded forks, and you basically end up with a product that was funded by billions, but your own contribution to it was minimal
I just forked the vs code repo and didn't screw up statements on a license for a business model. I'm clearly the superior hedge and I'll be waiting for my check.
But seriously, this has got to feel pretty shite for continue. What is their impetus to roll out new features when they know that pear can focus on only the icing on top of that milestone, inherently making continue look like a less polished version of pear, when in fact they were the innovators?
I think what we have here is an antisynergy of the incentives baked into open-source and capital speculation. It’s a recursion bug that undermines the incentive structure, and YC was foolish to be so disloyal to their partners.
I don't see many AI companies reaching billion dollar valuations and I don't see any AI company retaining billion dollar valuations in the next five to ten years.
you're obviously joking, but it'd be interesting if you actually tried :)
people seem so caught up in founders' particular ideas at the pre-seed stage and forget that YC is investing in people - specifically: people who try. you can jokingly quip that you'd be better at forking vs code, but at the end of the day they're doing it - not "waiting for their check" - and you're making fun of them on the internet ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> people seem so caught up in founders' particular ideas at the pre-seed stage and forget that YC is investing in people - specifically: people who try.
Are they? Seems like based on this YC alum [0], the reality these days is otherwise.
You're right, I am joking. I have my own ventures that carry some dignity. It's also premature for a claim that they are "people who try" as they have not produced anything except mistakes and apologies.
Also, maybe consider you're spending your time baselessly defending strangers on the internet. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It does dispel the myth that YC is simply investing in founders. They are really investing in the ideas that the partners like and then finding teams who are capable of delivering on it.
Which is of course fine but you see Dalton's Request for Startups and I've not seen only a tiny handful in the last two batches.
Due to YC's large batch sizes and the consolidation of industries such as AI, increasing numbers of YC startups are now directly competing with each other.
When 98% of your "product" is a thin wrapper around chatGPT, you will of course end up competing against every other product that is a thin wrapper around chatGPT.
Not really. The medical ChatGPT wrappers don't compete with the legal ChatGPT wrappers or the code editor ChatGPT wrappers. It has been argued (ad nauseam) that ChatGPT itself competes with all the wrappers, not that the wrappers compete with each other.
They don't compete right now, but surely the architecture of the system will be quite similar, or solve very similar types of challenges. So it should become easier to jump domains when these solutions mature.
A legal wrapper will use domain specific legal expertise to structure and develop their product and functionality. It will likely have many functions that are specifically optimized for the legal use case.
If a wrapper can easily move across many domains, then the wrapper likely adds little value to the base model.
Seems like YC should pair more of these smaller companies together, I honestly don’t know if that would help or not. Most YC funded projects aren’t really profitable to begin with.
It’s like somewhere in between getting grant funding for a university project and real corporate work.
I mean, this was precisely PG's genius - taking the right set of unwashed nerds, pairing them up appropriately and then mentoring the end result. That model gave birth to Reddit and Auctomatic.
I don't get it either - why spend $2m on 4 YC companies under different group partners, creating a hunger games of sorts, instead of convincing all of them to combine their talent for $500k. Sure, egos will be bruised and they might fight over who's boss, but the chances of the final product succeeding would be much higher.
To that I say “fork yeah”, the old GitHub slogan. I haven’t seen Continue complaining about it. It’s far less toxic than Sentry or Hashicorp which are on the other side of the issue. Pear could have been a bit less blatant I guess, but I think it’s fine that they took advantage of the license.
Edit: I just realized the old t-shirt slogan of GitHub was “Fork you.” Even better.
It was open source for about 10 years. They built themselves a name by being open source. Then they went and changed their license to a non-OSI-approved license. https://blog.sentry.io/relicensing-sentry/ Not everyone went along with it, but a lot did.
i agree with your sentiment, and them botching the license was clearly a problem, but at the same time i think a dev waives their right to be indignant about someone forking and commercializing their code when they provide a perpetual, irrevocable, commercial license to do so. if continue was GPL’d or something i would respect the uproar more
They appear to be 2 people. I kinda of think folks should cut two people, one of whom just publicly apologized, a little slack re: how buttoned up they are about licensing. Particularly when they appear to have started sharing source code before YC's investment, and the last time I spoke to an attorney who advises on open source licensing he was expensive.
I'd take you up on that bet. The AI can get as good as you want, but the reason you get a human to write and verify legal documents is so there's someone accountable. Their own job and reputation is on the line if they're doing bad work. Unless the company providing LawyerBot As A Service and writing everyone's legal documents is going to take all accountability, but that's a massive liability.
> They appear to be 2 people. I kinda of think folks should cut two people, one of whom just publicly apologized, a little slack
Reading the room, people are upset about grifters, scams and fakery in general. The outrage is obviously built up over seeing our industry decline to buzzwords, bait and switch, and general enshittification. This is just one particularly clear-cut instance of opportunistic grift caught in the act. It’s like that IoT juice press – it’s not that harmful, but it’s a symbol of what people hate.
imo, the way you first do something + your first responses to serious criticism are the most telling regarding character. because afterwards, you can just play the act of "we're sorry because the backlash was really big and we have to clean up".
They are experienced software developers coming from $300K jobs at Coinbase. As experienced developers they know the requirements in the Apache License 2.0. As former employees at highly regulated Fintech companies like Coinbase they know better than letting ChatGPT make up new legal texts.
They are cynical manipulators hiding behind a made up fictive "careless Gen Z tech bros" image.
I mean... crypto companies are well known for being chock full of decent and honest employees who aren’t zealots or bandwagon jumpers in any way, shape or form.
Just like a lot of recently created “AI” companies.
Coinbase internally had the `oh anyone who wants to work on crypto would want to work at Coinbase, you are already at Coinbase, wow, look at you, such a good place you have for yourself` speech given out relatively often. Even after employees commented on how they think they are being underpaid.
The compensation is on the low-end when it comes to what Coinbase pays to its employees. They wronged their hires on multiple occasions with dilutions too. Many of these employees had strike prices that were above what Coinbase IPO'd at. They were relying on their options, otherwise their base pay was undermarket.
> As experienced developers they know the requirements in the Apache License 2.0.
I’ve worked at a company with hundreds of devs where I caught an obvious error (a reference to a section that did not exist) in the pre-employment agreement. To imply that most devs are carefully reading documentation in general, much less legalese, is laughable.
But when you're starting or running a business, carefully reading contracts is a critical activity for the success of the business. If the founders can't do this themselves, they should have their attorney do it for them. And if they don't have an attorney, that's a critical error as well and they need one ASAP.
This outrage talk is ridiculous, you don’t have the morale high ground to judge people, they didn’t break anything, taking VC money isn’t bad, the incident was caused by sore losers looking for drama, etc etc
As an aside, I'm starting to get annoyed with the "we moved fast and broke things, we're smol indie hackers" defense that has been popping up more lately in various contexts. The whole incident started because they got venture capital for their fork and were in a startup accelerator for several months: that's not moving fast or being indie.