Plenty of apps do this - looking at the first browser tab I have open I see gmail which does exactly this.

For a pure client app like an iphone app, you don't have any real "per user" costs, so there are no concerns about going under from the costs of attempting this. It would be very different if you had to pay for server capacity.

Since they were old even then, and NZ was something of a computing backwater (on a training course I met a guy who's territory of 3 or 4 floors of the world trade center had more machines than my territory of half of the North Island) there were no formal training courses on them, and I was on my own with the manuals and the insights of the gray beards in the company lunch room.

It wasn't until I found Ken Shirrif's magnificent animated explainer https://ibm-1401.info/KenShirriff-1403Animation.html many decades later that I really understood how the machines I had been fixing worked.

The first one gets him because he's unfamiliar with their flight paths.

After that he does better but it clearly shows that you'd have to be an expert to take down a drone with a shotgun.

Also there's a lot of air inside a shotgun spread, so even an on target shot may fail to disable a drone.

It disgusts me that now, at all times, I can see strings of man made objects polluting the skies.

Perhaps true, but meaningless except as a vanity metric if fossil fuel usage rises as well.

This whole thing shrieks out that Anthropic is at the head of the pack, with the most capable models.

It hardly matters in the customer's mind that today they can't buy this specific model.

Some people are probably fine, even happy, immersing themselves in an all-bot world that panders to their worldview and strokes their virtual needs.

While others are looking for thought provoking interactions with humans.

Reddit needs to pick one or the other as their target audience. Trying to satisfy both will kill them.

Solving their bot problem would obviously nuke their audience and engagement metrics, but reddit is in a unique position to take that hit - at this time anyway.

There are prowling bots trying to strike up engagement with stupid open ended questions "do you find that using a golf simulator improved your golf?"

And some subs seem infested with submarine advertising, posts that mention a single product name almost in passing.

Nearly always these people have their posts hidden. Reddit has always been looser, people can edit and delete their comments and entire posts, and enjoy some frothy conversation while hiding their old rants.

There are plenty of signals that reddit could use to push out bots but they just don't seem to prioritize it.

When you find your self wasting time responding to a bot it's a bit of a sucker punch. Too many of them and Reddit will be on the ropes as a wasteland.

But I did want to mention something that I think would work well for SaaS companies which is related, and that is empowering customers to make their own changes to the core product.

We tried at one stage having a council of customers, but it's simply wasn't practical to implement all of the ideas that they came up with. That's changed now.

I think an interesting product would bundle the communications, voting (if necessary), updates, screen captures / video demos, feedback loops and so on that are involved in a decent sized group of customers consolidating their requirements/ideas.

A true mark of success might be when the product becomes self-stewarding, with customers driving a lot of the requirements.

I'll admit it's not clear cut - but I feel it deliberately pushes the boundaries, as marketing often does.

But as far as the idea goes, it sounds like a fantastic direction. That should have been my primary message.

That gives off a bad signal to someone visiting your site.

Everyone's faking it till they make it but at the same time using a logo like that, which universally implies that you have some kind of relationship with that company or they are using your product, is not even faking it.

And that's ignoring the legal challenges you are up for if that company spots you doing it.

BTW this sounds like a genius offering

It looked damned impressive, and it kind of worked to demo, but he is in no way a programmer, though he understood the problem domain very well. I asked a few basic questions:

- where is the data stored?

- How would you recover from a database failure?

- does it consume tokens at runtime?

- what is the runtime used at the back end?

- why are the web pages 3M in size and take forever to load?

He had no idea.

It's a typical vibe coding scenario, and people like to paint this as why vibe sucks.

I think however that all that is needed to bridge the gap is some very simple feedback from an expert at the right time.

For example to someone who knows about databases, its pretty easy to look at a database schema and spot stuff that looks off - denormalised data, weird columns. That takes 10 minutes, and the feedback could be given directly to the LLM.

Likewise someone who knows a little about systems architecture could make sure at the outset that some good practices are followed, e.g.:

- "I want your help to build this system but at runtime I do not want to consume any tokens."

- "I want the system to store its data in Postgres (or whatever) and I want documented recovery plans if the database craps itself".

- "I want web pages to, as much as possible, load and render as quickly as possible, and then pull data in from the back end, with loading indicators showing where the UI was not yet up to date".