I think software engineers might be in a echo chamber around Lovable and apps like this. It would have been a surprise to me too, as I also build software for a living, but it just so happens that I also run a company - in the same space as lovable - so I can give you some real examples:
1. Dance school management SaaS
2. Classified sites for Netherlands
3. An old school website hosting service
All of these were built by entrepreneurs who do not have a tech background. And by no tech background, I mean most of them dont know github, some of them dont know reddit and some of them dont know linkedin. The way they 'backup' their work is by taking successive dumps of the entire folder on local.
They already know that the business of software is one of the better businesses out there. Till now the option they had was to outsource to a dev shop - which will set them back to $10k-$50k atleast - but they intutively understand that the business may or may not work. So they were on the fence.
Now they build themselves - each of the three above have spent around $2k-$5k on our platform over the last quarter. Some of the businesses are working, some not so much - some are trodding along. So these guys do some updates here and there - are figuring out marketing over time - but if it seems like its not taking off, they start building the next thing on their mind. And once they 'understand' a platform they stick to it. Couple of grands dropped to build their next idea is the cheapest they have ever paid.
Not at all - how do you build a classified site on Wix/Framer ? Afaik they are for only static/marketing sites - plus a cms to host a blog.
These are all apps with multi-tenancy - database backed - payment integrations - the works. The classified site (marketcity.org) has features like user chats/dms, social media sharing, paid upgrades etc.
Actually now the capabilities are dramatically increasing - you can now vibecode like a python based image/video processing pipeline directly - all through a webapp. And very soon - something more ambitious, like finetune an LLM - again all through a simple chat webapp.
Lovable is effectively "next gen Wix", which itself was "next gen Wordpress", which was "next gen Dreamweaver". It's simply the natural evolution of products that solve the problem "build a website without being a coder".
Every generation is hailed as the end of all things, because it's always better than the previous one, but the core need they serve are the same.
I am coming around to the view that for somethings it is better to not use AI at all. Writing and Strategic thought are those things for me.
The problem with writing, and something I am noticing lately, is that AI robs your ability to create prose in your style. Even if you use AI just a little bit to touch up your writing - you start being influenced - And over time it adds up - you start writing like AI just a little bit every now and then. It seems to be robbing me of my ability to create original prose.
Strategic thought is the other thing - like if I am deciding what we, as a company should focus on long term, it is easy for LLM's to give you a wrong direction. I think this is more because Strategic directions require a ton of context - and it is almost impossible for you to feed the ai EVERYTHING. There might be some things which are easy to miss out, which might make all the difference, and the LLM would assume that the 'requirements' are complete and would go to town with it. I suspect, this is largely because the current SOTA LLM's are being optimised for code and there isnt enough data in the training set for them to learn long term thought.
Coding is I think fine for me. But even there, I dont let the agent use memory at all. I create the context - and it runs from that only. The biggest unlock here is that I can now program in any language. And it frees up sometime to think in systems and come up with more robust architectures.
> The problem with writing, and something I am noticing lately, is that AI robs your ability to create prose in your style. Even if you use AI just a little bit to touch up your writing - you start being influenced - And over time it adds up - you start writing like AI just a little bit every now and then. It seems to be robbing me of my ability to create original prose.
IMHO the fix is to read more books. Obviously I mean human-written books, and specifically with prose that you appreciate.
After a hiatus of a few years, when the internet had me, I've gone back to prioritising reading books once more. It's not only great for my writing, it's also just good for the soul. And it's the absolute antithesis of the infinite scroll.
"What you read and how deeply you read matters almost as much as how you love, work, exercise, vote, practice charity, strive for social justice, cultivate kindness and courtesy, worship if you are capable of worship. The mind is an activity and will decay into dark inertia if not sustained by the sustenance of reading.
The great poems, plays, novels, stories teach us how to go on living, even when submerged under forty fathoms of bother and distress. If you live ninety years you will be a battered survivor. Your own mistakes, accidents, failures at otherness beat you down. Rise up at dawn and read something that matters as soon as you can."
Not too sure - I never read that many books - and it wasnt an issue at all. I think writing more, without AI, is helping me get back to my pre-AI-stink self.
Sure, but if you’re influenced by how AI writes, it stands to reason that you’d be influenced by a great author too, and that may help improve your writing.
I may be misreading, but I think the earlier post was about the LLM being used to edit (clean up) their writing.
It's quite different than just reading a lot of text from other authors and passively absorbing diction and style. Instead, it means getting detailed reinforcement signals in the context of your own active writing effort.
This can start an ironic reinforcement learning pattern where the writer gets tuned to write in the LLM's "corrected" form. Imagine a traditional professional writer, in a long-term partnership with a particular copy editor who gates their output.
I feel like LLMs can be very helpful to double-check a bunch of stuff here, and evaluate alternative-paths and so on, but the "direction" really has to come from you, then you can use the LLM to double-check and what not.
But if you let the LLM set the "direction", then all bets are off, as they don't have a single care about anything in the world, so they'll just do whatever essentially.
"Direction" is what I mean by strategic thought - but even if the high level direction came from you - the tactical approach might fall prey to the same over confidence which destroys direction setting in the first place.
I use it very sparingly for stuff like this - and even when I do - I discount its outputs heavily and maybe just use it let me see some blind spots and sanity testing.
I've tried teaching AI to copy a writer's style and it fails miserably. And the output out of it always have the same writing style - LLMesque. I agree!
If i were to compare it to relying on SO for your code, then would SO be a better fit because its multiple people. Are models inherently worse than a human community? maybe my question is too generic to answet
> Prose? Don't care, I'm not writing literature, I'm delivering a message. If AI helps that be more clear and faster, great.
What you've probably just never noticed is that voice is a critical part of communication in written form just as much as in speech. And this is especially true when communicating in a crowded public environment like the internet.
Voice helps the receiver cohere your message as a distinct signal to pay attention to and draws it out from the noise of competing communication in their day, on their screen, etc. It helps them hear you -- and what you mean to say -- in your prose. It also gives the receiver subtle but meaningful insight into where you're thoughts are coming from culturally, experientially, and ideologically as your voice leaks that background information about you as subtext.
Because LLM's are a compression/decompression technology, letting you draw a lot of content out from a small leading prompt, they infill that output content with a voice that has characteristic and common phrasing, characteristic and common tics, characteristic and common structures, etc. So output from any given LLM, and from most LLM's trained in similar ways, ends up tending towards the same voice. i.e. they just to contribute to the noise.
It's deceptive, because your English teacher probably would grade their prose more highly than yours and so of course there's a part of you that thinks that's what you want. But impressing your English teacher is only part of communicating. The other part is making yourself heard.
LLM's make your prose easier to analyze or evaluate but much harder to hear.
> Prose? Don't care, I'm not writing literature, I'm delivering a message. If AI helps that be more clear and faster, great.
Writing well is not easy. PG has written many essays about this very topic.
LLMs do not write well.
> Strategic thinking? The LLM has more context than you. Sure, you know more about your company, but AI knows more about the rest.
This is a mistake, and untrue. The LLM has more general knowledge, yes. But it’s the specific knowledge (aka “context”) that makes all the difference. It’s the same reason management consultants are, by and large, useless; they aren’t dumb, but they lack context.
So no, the LLM doesn’t have more context than you. In fact, its context window is literally limited. You have decades of experience and knowledge and patterns you’ve matched, and the LLM has none of that.
Do not fool yourself into thinking it has more context than you. It doesn’t. It has more knowledge. Those are very different.
(Incidentally, the same is true of humans; the most knowledgeable ones are not always the ones making discoveries or changing the world. Often, it is specific context that matters more, as the application of a solution to a problem requires seeing the right problem. LLMs are a solution engine, but they have no metric for what is a “right problem”)
I didn’t say that. But when he’s right, he’s right.
> Think you could beat it in a specialized version of "business strategy jeopardy?"
> It would crush you. Thinking you know more about "business strategy" is laughable. What sort of guru are you? Let's see the great business strategy you've implemented.
This is no longer a productive conversation. I never said I would make a better consultant than an LLM. I said that consultants are useless without context, as are LLMs.
> If AI helps that be more clear and faster, great.
As a recipient of AI-enhanced texts I must say: AI is not good at making things clearer. Good communication requires that the sender makes the message as simple as possible. AI is anti-simple, because it likes to produce more words, not less.
Its a bit wild to me that there hasnt been a pushback against enabling memories by frontier AI companies. This data is something advertisers could only dream off. Before AI, most of this data was approximated by whatever little information could be gleaned from the websites we visit. But now people are handing over their deepest darkest secrets and pretty much EVERYTHING to AI on a platter.
Maybe its just me who is paranoid because I happen to spend a fair bit of time in the advertising world, but the first thing I did when memory was launched on Claude/Chatgpt - was to switch them off. And it helps that they are not even useful, and would actually downgrade your experience by polluting the context of irrelevant details. I go one step ahead - if there is a personal discussion you want to have - maybe use another account like provided by the likes of companies like openrouter etc.
I would argue that we should have regulation that should prohibit the storage of user profile information by AI companies, and any such memories feature should exclusively reside on the users servers. Infact, maybe go one step ahead, that 'memory' firms cannot be owned by AI firms and vice versa.
I've found memory somewhat useful as i don't need to give it all the context for everything, that said it's equally as annoying when it latches onto something I said in a different chat and derails the conversation because of that.
Data harvesting is one of the core value propositions for many of these companies (from the investor's perspective).
Companies that built their models on public data and illegal scraping/copyrighted works, amassing massive datasets on the most private aspects of countless individuals, and creating a huge bubble with potentially humongous implications upon implosion. Oh, and, increasing wealth concentration and inequality by an incredible amount.
I think there will eventually be pushback from companies that want to keep their IP secrets. The current standard of "we dont train on your data"
but we summarize all your input and output, meaning its not your data anymore and we can train on that.
while I agree with the sentiment in general, I think it's safe to say that people have been giving up their darkest secrets to google and social media companies for many years.
Some people feel there is nothing they can do about it. Many people do not know / understand just how much they can know about people, so seeing it that way, yes it can be surprising to see so many giving the data right on the screen; as opposed to giving data passively / not understanding the value of combining or that they are even collecting passive data like location or what you type and delete, or what you hover / keep on screen..
I don't have hope that there will be any laws stopping the collecting and combining of data by any of these companies.
I do like the idea of an every year reminder sent to users showing what they can see with the data that has been collected and stored.
That is doable, and possible to get people to change some of what they share if the portals are honest in what they collect and how it can be combined with other data to paint more intimate / detailed pictures of you and those connected to you in some way.
I dont get it either - I was going to ask the same question but found this.
We have been doing the exact opposite - instead of micro VM's we are giving agents larger VMs.
Previously we were giving them 1GB RAM VM's - now we have upped to 4 GB RAM VM's. When the agent is working - the real cost is in the inference. There is no reason to keep the agent waiting because your VM is too damn slow. So we moved to larger and faster VMs.
The agent might install a package, or run a script - and now it moves along just faster. Not to mention that if the agent is installing a 'fat' SDK, like maybe android sdk, a thicker RAM just moves along everything smoothly without breakages. The incremental amount we pay for the bigger VM is more than justified by the increase in agent performance.
And all the tooling that has already been built up for standard human operated VM's just works pretty well out of the box. We are able to spin up VM's pretty much on demand and purge them clean once the work is done.
We are moving to 8 GB RAMs/4CPUs sometime this year, and GPU's hopefully sometime next.
FYI, a microVM isn't a small VM, nor necessarily one that has been allocated little RAM.
The term comes from the fact that a microVM is launched with Firecracker (a Virtual Machine Monitor), and Firecracker itself, as far as Virtual Machine Monitors go, doesn't consume many resources per VM and can start them relatively fast.
Given this, an 8GB agent VM started with Firecracker would still be a microVM. Firecracker doesn't place restrictions on how much memory you can assign it.
There is an assumption that everyone is making here - that China will not do the same. It is entirely possible, that China restricts their frontier models - as and when they are developed - to only Chinese citizens. And India follows along.
IMO AI is different from everything else. It is a weapon as potent as nuclear. It is only natural that it be treated as one.
I see a lot of skepticism in Dario's position in this forum. But allow me to argue the opposite.
I think the key argument that this skepticism lies on is that he himself gained from AI - specifically building Frontier AI models - and this is basically regulatory capture disguised as doomerism.
Fair points - but I think this is a more charitable version of this. Dario is building Anthropic because that is the most valuable thing he can build, or at least that is what his conviction has been. The success of Anthropic and the impending IPO is proof that this conviction has not only been correct but has largely played out very successfully. Dario understands the true nature of AI and he has welded that power to immense personal benefit.
But maybe he also sees the potential danger to AI which he is trying to address through these posts and regulatory initiatives. There are three reasons why I would support the charitable version:
Firstly, personal gain and societal benefit can coexist in the same individual. And both of them might drive towards opposite agendas. But that doesn't necessarily have to mean that the impulse driving the societal benefit is not earnest. In fact if you would look at Dario’s proposal - like closing the data broker loophole - several of them could constrain Anthropic instead of benefitting them.
Secondly, he expects that his concerns on the negative potential of AI will be taken seriously, if he is actually running the Frontier AI company. And there is some truth to this argument. The only reason we are discussing this is because he is the CEO of Anthropic. He is probably the most influential figure outside of the government who has to be taken seriously when he claims something like this.
Thirdly, and most importantly, Dario has previously demonstrated that he is willing to sacrifice personal/corporate gains for societal benefits. The proof is the classification by the US DoD of Anthropic as a supply chain risk when Anthropic refused to completely cooperate with the military to develop fully Autonomous AI weapons and enable mass surveillance. It would have been only too easy for Dario to accept if personal benefit was his only concern - and OpenAI was more than ready to step in their place.
Even with Mythos - Anthropic could have released the model to the public broadly. But they took their time to reduce the potential danger - as best as they could. Despite the fact that GPT-5.5 was nipping in the buds in what is becoming a very competitive market.
That being said, just because Dario is acting in good faith, does not mean that this will all result in good outcomes. The FAA-styled regulation could still end up favoring incumbents - some of whom might choose to not act in good faith. A more diversified capability can potentially limit that power ending up in a small number of wrong hands. Just because Anthropic is the leader right now, doesn't mean that they will always be. Maybe someone else tomorrow benefits from this regulatory capture at the expense of everyone else - and Dario might have a hand in driving it.
Broadly agree to this position - I think there are some people skeptical that Anthropic is doing this for regulatory capture - but I think there are being honest about they are seeing and how regulation should catch up.
I for one, believe that we should pause all work on AI for the forseeable future. This is almost impossible to orchestrate - but we should still try nevertheless. Maybe we are not able to pause, but we are able to slow down. That might give us more room, to maybe able to pause in the future. But going ahead is too dangerous.
And its not just Anthropic which is saying this. Even Geoffry Hinton has said the same thing. If there is a non-zero chance that AI can kill all of humanity, and both Geoffry and Anthropic have the same position, then it makes sense for us to be hundred percent sure before we move ahead. Dario/Anthropic have already made their money from AI, maybe they are just being honest about what they think lies ahead.
the end of humanity has a strong case for banning all burning of fossil fuels immediately
the end of humanity as a sales tactic to increase your stock price does not
these are companies working on their IPO to make sure they can get the best price, not people being honest about what they think lies ahead.
if they were being honest about what lies ahead, they'd unilaterally stop training, and put all of their money into FPV drone bombs to destroy datacenters being used for training or inference
if you actually believe the thing is gonna kill everyone, you're not gonna worry about how you stop it, and certainly not keep building and operating the thing
that they arent buying anti-tank mines to drop on data centers says they arent in the slightest serious about it
The same bozo who claimed radiologists would be out of a job by now.
The data does not support what you nor others say. Jesus christ. Cant believe people are this dumb. Has LLMs infested the minds of people to the extent they can't critically analyse whats happening infront of their eyes?
I think you are missing the most important part - forgetting. The missing "memory" layers is consolidation, prioritization AND forgetting (what is not important).
Also not too sure about provenance and inspectability - it is part of memory. If the source is deemed 'important' it will survive forgetting. If not, then maybe not. And its ok. I am sure you dont know the exact source who told you that the capital of France is Paris. You forgot, and its no big deal.
1. Dance school management SaaS
2. Classified sites for Netherlands
3. An old school website hosting service
All of these were built by entrepreneurs who do not have a tech background. And by no tech background, I mean most of them dont know github, some of them dont know reddit and some of them dont know linkedin. The way they 'backup' their work is by taking successive dumps of the entire folder on local.
They already know that the business of software is one of the better businesses out there. Till now the option they had was to outsource to a dev shop - which will set them back to $10k-$50k atleast - but they intutively understand that the business may or may not work. So they were on the fence.
Now they build themselves - each of the three above have spent around $2k-$5k on our platform over the last quarter. Some of the businesses are working, some not so much - some are trodding along. So these guys do some updates here and there - are figuring out marketing over time - but if it seems like its not taking off, they start building the next thing on their mind. And once they 'understand' a platform they stick to it. Couple of grands dropped to build their next idea is the cheapest they have ever paid.