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by raincole 151 days ago
I still think any business that is based on someone else's model is worthless. I know I'm sounding like the 'dropbox is just FTP' guy, but it really feels like that any good idea will just be copied by OpenAI and Anthropic. If AI code review is proven a good idea is there any reason to expect Codex or Claude Code to not implement some commands to do code review?
4 comments
allreduce 150 days ago
The thing is, the "Dropbox is just FTP" guy should be right most of the time when you are selling to experts.

There is no reason to not just ask Claude for a review and then distill this into PR comments. Especially because "every LLM output has to be filtered through a human" is a good policy with the current state of these tools.

However, this industry loves distilling frivolities into web tools and it sells for some unfathomable reason. It is the same with the existing static analyzers etc that some orgs pay for. I do not understand why.

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sthuck 151 days ago
Very very strictly speaking relying on models in it's essence is not the problem I think. There is enough "meat" there you can build a nice small profitable company.

Those tools are better than vanilla agents by dedicating expensive human time on evaluating and fine tuning models. You can also build various integration, management and reporting features to add value. If you freeze model progress today, or 12 months ago when most of those companies started, it's a viable business I think.

But any gains you make on the first part will be lost to newer models, and the 2nd part is not as valuable when llms allow people to build fairly complicated features quickly.

I don't if worthless but all those companies have very limited time to gather customers and at least make themselves valuable for an acquisition

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vrighter 148 days ago
You cannot be profitable unless the service you rely on is also profitable. You might make some profits during their honeymoon period, but then they will squeeze you by the balls pretty soon and force you to enshittify as well.

WinRAR is more profitable than OpenAI...

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bluGill 151 days ago
The shakiest business model is one where you have no competition - if nobody else had the idea already: you are probably wrong - they did but it was a bad idea so they failed.

The real question is how can you compete. There are lots of answers here, but something new and good is rare.

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tokioyoyo 150 days ago
We do our review through Claude github actions. Works well.
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