this is a lazy take. all software has bugs and defects.
part of what we do, as developers is to learn. to have an open mind to new tools and technologies.
these tools are… different, they’re changing the world (fast), and worth trying to understand. your mental rigidity to doing things “the right way” will hold you back and limit your growth. the world is changing. are you?
Those tools are massively overhyped and hemorrhaging money by the second. Such a shame so many people are so blind as to not be able to take things with some realism and a non biased POV. They're great, yeah, they help for a lot of things, some people really "vibe" with that kind of workflow, good for them.
Everytime you "prompt" and you "vibe" you're not "changing with the world", you're using copious amounts of energy on very expensive hardware that you would never, in your lifetime, would be able to use if it wasn't backed by trillions in VC funding. Don't believe me? Try to match the performance of a current model with local hardware, report back with how much that costs in hardware and energy.
They're all in the stage A of enshittification, the bait phase. You're willingly making yourself reliant on a tool that eventually will be uncostable for any individual, and only affordable for big orgs.
If the job of a developer is to "learn, and have an open mind to new tools and technologies", and "my mental rigidity to doing things "the right way" will hold me back and limit my growth", then I don't want to be an engineer. Because one thing is to experiment, and another one is to, pardon the expression, suck off any new technology as the new epitome of anything. I don't want to be a "developer" with no criteria. Call me an engineer instead, I do things "the right way", and I don't fall prey to fashion under the guise of "growth".
I have 200 followers on twitter and get barely any like/comments on my posts so X is not my main distribution. Reddit gets decent views but I don't think I get many PAID users from it anyways.
I think honestly 80% of my users come from my domain name giving me a huge SEO boost. I knew people who need my product would search "AEO Check" or "AEO Checker" hence I named my domain aeochecker.ai, a week after I published my site i was already ranking top 5 in this keyword (also because it was very low competition)
IME the competitiveness of results is probably a much bigger factor, considering exact-match domains are a very old SEO trick and Google doesn't reward them (it penalizes them, actually). "AEO" is a brand new concept so congrats on finding a new wave! Double down on SEO if that's working for you. It's hard enough finding 1 channel that works. The fact that you hit $500 MRR on the open web is actually pretty impressive, and you can likely scale significantly if you're aggressive about growth. Good luck!
Oh didn't know about that, perhaps you're right the keyword was just very low competition. Thanks for the advice, will hard focus on growth now trying to find other channels!
My advice was actually the opposite. It's harder to take a new channel from 0-1 than it is to take an existing channel from 1-2. so in my experience it's better to double down on what's working. only branch out to new channels when you have the resources, or you've maxed out your existing channels. FWIW I don't think your channel is just SEO, it's also content marketing like this HN post. Keep it up!
Thanks! I do really wonder though if content marketing like this post, or other posts on reddit actually bring any Paid users, which is what I'm trying to focus on. Because I see my viewership skyrocket when i do posts on reddit yet I get the same amount of Paid users in these days as the days I did 0 posts for like 2 weeks straight...
I want to start doing paid advertisements and maybe try to rank for more competitive keywords with google ads. I'm very new to ads though so I don't know if I'll have much success
thanks for taking the time to care about something that others may find pointless and pursue it to a point where it becomes something new and important. i want to let you know that i find myself inspired!!!
> And what is "real quality" and does that mean "fake quality" exists?
I think there is no real quality or fake quality, just quality. I am referencing the quality that Persig and C. Alexander have written about.
It’s… qualitative, so it’s hard to measure but easy to feel. Humans are really good at perceiving it then making objective decisions. LLMs don’t know what it is (they’ve heard about it and think they know).
Of course they don't, they're probability/prediction machines, they don't "know" anything, not even that Paris is the capital of France. What they do "know" is that once someone writes "The capital of France is", the most likely tokens to come after that, is "Paris". But they don't understand the concept, nor anything else, just that probably 54123 comes after 6723 (or whatever the tokens are).
Once you understand this, I think it's easy to reason about why they don't understand code quality, why they couldn't ever understand it, and how you can make them output quality code regardless.
It is actually funny that current AI+Coding tools benefit a lot from domain context and other information along the lines of Domain-Driven Design (which was inspired by the pattern language of C. Alexander).
A few teams have started incorporating `CONTEXT.MD` into module descriptions to leverage this.
agree that we (users, humans, customers) all are desperately reaching for something steady, well designed, rugged.
something that people thought about for longer than whatever the deadline they had to work on it. something that radiates the care and human compassion they put into their work.
we all want and need this quality. it is harder to pull off these days for a lot of dumb reasons. i wish we all cared enough to not make it so mysterious, and that we could all rally around it, celebrate it, hold it to high regard.
part of what we do, as developers is to learn. to have an open mind to new tools and technologies.
these tools are… different, they’re changing the world (fast), and worth trying to understand. your mental rigidity to doing things “the right way” will hold you back and limit your growth. the world is changing. are you?
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