[jwitchel]

I recently asked Claude to duplicate Google Docs. It practically threw up. I tried to have it write a plan, decompose it, deobfuscate it.

It gave me all sorts of reasons why this was a terrible idea. I've never seen it resist a task so directly and relentlessly.

It knew.

One point worth considering is that tools like Jira and Salesforce have dozens of screens and modals. But you only ever look at one at a time. So the enormity of the ask "duplicate Jira" is hard to see in its totality.

With Google docs, the entirety of the tool is almost one screen. It resists decomposition. So the true gravity of the request is more in your face.

You say you want to duplicate Asana or Service Now or Jira or Zendesk? Great, here's the keys to the car, a tank of gas, and a quarter to call me on a payphone when you get there. Oh wait payphones don't exist anymore...but it doesn't matter because you're never getting there.

These software platforms are built by thousands of engineers over more than a decade of dedicated work. They are they way they are for reasons. To think someone can duplicate them with some clever prompting is to completely fail to understand the scale of the problem at hand.

[elxr]

Jira already has open source clones that companies already use.

Sure if you want your own, it takes a lot more that prompting, but it's not inherently a terrible idea to commit to duplicating something like that. Jira isn't some gargantuan work of art that stands out among its competition.

Cloning Jira is fine and tenable. Especially if your company only needs a tenth of the feature set of Jira, which is a lot of companies. "A tenth" is being generous too.

Regarding the google docs take, that I 100% agree with.

[gobdovan]

I'm not sure I'm following you. What does 'duplicate Google Docs' mean? We already have OSS rich text editor (ProseMirror) and CRDT implementations (yjs, automerge). Are you talking about replicating every single enterprise Docs has? Integration with a large suite of other services you control? Replicating the business model too?

'duplicate Google Docs' spans everything from providing the actual service to replicating the world and becoming Google.

[jwitchel]

I was looking for a dead on feature for feature exact replica including look and feel. You are 100% correct there are some excellent tools and libraries that duplicate most (all?) of the features. But I was playing around with the idea of what it would take for a perfect replica (for science of course). Turns out it's really hard even if you jump start it with those libraries and an existing reference implementation.

That was the point of my comment... Robust commercial software is hard.