The most anyone could realistically ask you to do was please fill out the survey positively to try and support the company if you believe it's a best place to work and remind more people to complete the surveys. I don't think companies are really out here trying to game the more reputable surveys, and it would be pretty easily for single employees to defect/report if they were. They also required some level of basic written comments from employees.

Probably a mild green flag for quality of life / general happiness from current employees for the past year.

Not really? To someone who doesn't care about software, software is a means to an end of actually doing something, and everything between idea <> execution of value is basically overhead. This has always been true and the overhead is getting carved further and further down over time.

> Since when did "average" people have time to set up a CI pipeline, agents, MCPs, and all the rest needed to get vibe coded apps to work become the "simple" way for non-programmers to use computers to mush some data together for their small businesses and neighbors and stuff?

You don't need all of this. You can basically just download Cursor, the Claude app, Claude code, opencode, whatever today and run something locally. I do think "deployment and productionization" is a bit of a gap but stuff like Replit or even Vercel + Supabase is pretty far along towards agents just being able to do most of infra for you for anything small scale, or at least tell you the buttons to press to hook things up.

> Did spreadsheets, embedded databases, and visual form builders stop working or are lacking in some way?

Pretty much all the LLM/agent products are obviously way ahead of form builders at this point. Take Retool for example, you could spend minutes to hours plugging together "programming-lite" concepts. A single prompt and a few minutes, and maybe 1-2 back and forths can basically get you to the same place with probably less overall jank in a lot of situations. Form-builder stuff is totally dead outside of maybe being an escape-hatch for some LLM situations, or letting users do higher-level scaffolding, but even then I think stuff like Cursor's "select the part of the app you want to change and prompt" is going to be a better UX.

> maybe there's an opportunity for better, local, lower-tech tooling that doesn't require such a huge tech stack

I think you are viewing this from the "tech" angle rather than the deliver value to the end user angle. The tech stack can be arbitrarily complex as long as it works to reduce end user friction and provide value with as much ease as possible. This might as well be the core idea of all consumer tech.

I think your core theses are basically "people care about the underlying tech" and "people want to learn programming or programming-adjacent" and those are both wrong for the vast vast majority of people.

I've done this blinded with colas, and it's pretty easy to tell the difference between Coke, Diet Coke, Coke Zero, Pepsi, and Diet Pepsi. You might not know which is which without some history drinking them, but they all taste very distinct by themselves.

Really disagree that these are indistinguishable parity products, or that most people would not be obviously able to tell the difference between them.

Have people had any/good experiences running Granian in prod?

I've been leaning on pyright + django-stubs, but wondering if I'm missing something better with fewer gaps and pain points.

> If you made your songs while subscribed to a Pro or Premier plan, those songs are covered by a commercial use license.

More info here: https://help.suno.com/en/articles/2410177

For example I was trying to steer a melodic techno prompt recently in a better direction by putting stuff like this upfront:

    [intro - dramatic synths, pulsing techno bass]
    [organic percussive samples]
    [rolling galloping pulsing gritty bassline]
    [soaring experimental synths, modulation heavy, echos, sound design, 3d sound]
    [lush atmosphere, variation]
    [hypnotic groovy arppegiation arps]
    [sampled repetitive trippy vocal]

I also often use them to structure things around song structure like [intro], [break], [chorus], and even get more descriptive with these describing things or moments I'd like to happen. Again adherence is not perfect, but seems to help steer things.

One of my favorite tags I've seen is [Suck the entire song through vacuum] and well... I choose to believe, check out 1:29 https://suno.com/s/xdIDhlKQUed0Dp1I

Worth playing around with a bunch, especially if you're not quite getting something interesting or in the direction you want.

We can do better on user instruction for sure, duly noted. In my experience a lot of different stuff works (emotions, some musical direction sometimes, describing parts/layers of the track you want to exist, music-production-ish terminology, genres, stuff like intro/outro/chorus), but I think of it more as steering the space of the generated output rather than working 100% of the time. This can go in the style tags or in [brackets] in the lyrics. Definitely makes a difference in the outputs to be more descriptive with 4.5.

Still not totally adherent, but if you can steer it with genre, detailed descriptions of genre, and elements of the genre it's way better than v4. Some descriptions work better than others so there's some experimentation to figure out what works for what you're trying to achieve.

You can also provide descriptions in [brackets] in the lyrics that work reasonably well in my experience.

Disclaimer: I work there as a SWE.