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by dist-epoch 129 days ago
Opportunity cost.

Cloning Slack and wasting ultra-expensive engineers on that might be more expensive, and it's not your core mission.

2 comments

Why do you have to waste ultra-expensive engineers on it? You have agents. And verifying your product works as it is claimed should absolutely be part of your mission. How can you possibly claim that your models are revolutionising software development if you haven't even used them to revolutionise your own software development in-house? Not only that, it would produce a huge marketing coup that would immediately lead to a flood of enterprise spending if you could demonstrate that your agents actually do what you constantly claim them to do.

PS. If you're claiming that coding an application is ultra-expensive, you are already entering the argument on the side of the comment you're arguing against, which is making a counterpoint to the article, which claims in the first sentence:

> The math is simple: if it costs almost nothing to build an app, it costs almost nothing to clone an app. And if cloning is free, subscription pricing dies.

They did revolutionise software development in-house. Both Codex/Claude Code are 90% agent written these days, and bring in billions of dollars of revenue.

Cloning Slack would bring in $0 dollars.

Billions of dollars of revenue on trillions of dollars of investment is not a revolutionary feat. I promise you I could turn trillions into billions too.

Neither of those software are primarily responsible for the revenue, either. The actual models underlying them are, not the trivial CLI chat interface (which, despite being trivial software, still manages to be full of bugs that go unfixed for months). I also don't even think it's true that Codex is primarily agent-written. OpenAI specifically cited using Electron in their recent Codex desktop application for "agent orchestration" to save human developer time on porting it across platforms, which does not sound like a successful exercise in eating their dog food.

If you could turns trillions into billions, why haven’t you yet?
>Both Codex/Claude Code are 90% agent written these days, and bring in billions of dollars of revenue.

So they say.

Yeah this got a chuckle from me.
If you have tools that allow superior efficiency shouldn't you be hiring every possible just expensive engineer you can get your hands on and put them to produce massive amounts of products to out compete everyone else in the world.

Shouldn't they be in place to replace absolutely every other tech company? That is tens of trillions of valuation in short few years.