I like the idea but I think it's going to be hard to put this particular genie back in the bottle. As an engineering leader, I prefer low fidelity designs early on, but practically no one else in my company wants that.

Designers have learned figma and it's the de facto tool for them; doing something else is risky for them.

Product leaders want high fidelity. They love the AI tools that let them produce high fidelity prototypes.

Some (but not all) engineers prefer it because it means less decision making for them.

I'm about to deliver a proposal to a prospect with ascii mocks, we'll see how it goes. I am the product leader.

and tbf I've used low fidelity to engage stakeholders imagination long before ai was making ascii for me.

I feel this way now, but with companies.

I started in this industry before cloud was a thing. I did most of the things RDS does the hard way (except being able to dynamically increase memory on a running instance, that's magic to me). I do not want that responsibility, especially because I know how badly it turns out when it's one of a dozen (or dozens) of responsibilities asked of the team.

We're paying for pyx. Wouldn't have if we didn't enjoy enjoy uv and ruff.

It's definitely a narrow path for them to tread. Feels like the best case is something like Hashicorp, great until the founders don't want to do it anymore.

> Feels like the best case is something like Hashicorp

Wow, that's probably my go-to case of things going south, not "best case scenario". They sold to IBM, a famous graveyard for software, and on the way there changed from FOSS licensing to their own proprietary ones for software the community started to rely on.

You're not wrong, but a) most of the badness happened after the founders checked out and b) it's hard to find examples of developer tool companies doing better.

You however, are. Hashimoto didn't leave until December 2023, Hashicorp announced the license change August 10, 2023. Also way back in September 2021 they started having staffing issues and stopped accepting community contributions, and also made the questionable choice of going public that same year.

You might be on to something with point B, hard to find good examples of developer tool companies that don't eventually turn sour. However, there are countless examples of successful and still very useful developer tools out there, maybe slapping a company on it and sell a "pro" version isn't the way to go?

I actually would argue that Hashimoto "left" earlier. He "stepped down" from the executive team July 2021 and became an individual contributor then. He likely lost interest/power a long time before 2023.

https://www.hashicorp.com/en/blog/mitchell-s-new-role-at-has...

Meh. The end of the company many of us admire was a combination of the founders giving up control to the usual villains and the venture business model failing for developer tools. I don't think the specific departure date matters very much; things started to degrade earlier.

As for "slapping a company on it", I agree, but also I don't think we've developed a viable alternative. Python has been limping along with one toolchain or another for my entire career (multiple decades) and it took Astral's very specific approach to create something better. It's fair to ask why they needed to be venture backed, but they clearly are and the lack of successful alternatives is telling.

I assume they want us to pay for their orchestration and also push customers back to using their compute so everything is stickier.

But nothing they've done in the last few years has demonstrated improvement in this area. As the person with both purchasing and final authority on these things in my org, it's hard to stomach.

I see: a page offering something interesting but vague.

If you tell me more, I might sign up. If I have to create an account first, I'm walking away.

It looks a lot like a CloudFront error we randomly saw today from one of our engineers in South America. I suspect there was a small outage in AWS but can't prove it.

Probably non zero number of companies use cloudfront and other cdns as fallback for cloudflare or running a blended cdn so not surprising to see other cdns hit with a thundering herd when cloudflare went down

I agree. I find LLMs a bit overblown. I don't think most people want to use chat as their primary interface. But writing a few agents was incredibly informative.

As an engineer, I like this framework but can think of approximately zero PMs who could use it to build a product.

Bartleby was right.