Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49250813

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

One bad cycle and the next Opus 6 or GPT 7 might flop (think what happend to LLama4 or Gemini), and the user quickly switch to the next best thing. So it make sense to build your tooling to be model-agnostic.

alternative is to collect/sell usage data, which is icky, or provide something as a service (token usage, infra, plugins, etc)

The terminal multiplexer / multi-agent coding space is getting very crowded. YC alone has funded many competing startups in this space: herdr, Superset, cmux, Emdash, Orca, Bullet, Conductor (Conductor was in YC before pivoting from chat->coding). I’m probably missing a few, and that’s before counting companies outside YC such as Superlogical and Agentastic.dev (by yours truly).

One thing I find particularly interesting is the role of open source in this market.

A lot of these products started open source (i assume as a tactical way to gain traction and build a community). But after the early traction phase or raise funding, the incentives seem to change.

Being open source by itself is not a product differentiator in this market. The features required for string positioning (orchestration, cloud, custom agents, enterprise features, hosted infrastructure, etc.) often end up either closed source or available only through the hosted product.

That makes me wonder how much developers actually value OSS for this category. How much does it matter to you whether your IDE or coding environment is open source?

Is OSS important because you want to inspect the code, fork it, self-host it, avoid vendor lock-in, or simply because you trust open-source developer tools more? Or, for desktop software like IDEs is open source mostly a nice-to-have rather than a requirement? So I’m curious where HN lands on this

Well, i'm trying to do the later, and it is very hard to position the product and differentiate without vertical integration. When Warp owns both agent and the terminal, they can a) give terminal for free and charge on the agent, and b) lock the user in, so it is a good business but poor user experience.

on the other hand, i have to make sure every agent is working which more surface area to maintain, and i'm also limited to the common subset of features. Also it is much harder to convince folks to switch.

Lets try: I support Wezterm (and ghostty, and others) with 40+ different agents (Claude, Codex, etc) in agentastic.dev, would you give it a try?

OpenAI did not launch any hardware (yet), and I don't think their IPO pricing hinges on them launching an iPhone competitor. To me, it looks like Apple wants to launch a similar AI hardware and is slowing-down the competition to be the first-to-market.

Funny thing: they are barking at the wrong tree here.

Personally i think it's fair. You get to use this model as long as you don't sue Meta because of the model's weights or outputs.

Thank you for keeping the token furnace burning!

IIRC Doom Dark Age sold 3m? copies, so it would cost $10m in Unreal Engine fees. Doom Engine team likely cost more.

Microsoft problem is it is giving away games for free on gamepass, so it sees its engineers as cost center.

Apple M3 Ultra chip 819GB/s memory bandwidth

They have 96, 128, 256, and 512GB variants my friend.

And for a long time (pre-AI) youtube was the biggest load on Google's entire infra. The number i recall was ~30% of all Google's cpu utilization was for youtube, and google spent a lot of effort optimizing it.