SupererDuperer

It works. It does its job. It doesn't pester me with popups. It didn't get bloated. It didn't get rewritten using Electron to support New Enterprise Features. It didn't get a built-in sync client for my pictures and videos so that I can share them with my team. It didn't get ads. It didn't get enshittified in any of the hundreds of possible ways that other apps did.

I find it ridiculous that all I paid for this experience was… $27.95 back in 2006 (I just checked the receipt). That's $1.40/year. I have no idea how Dave can make a living this way, and if he ever introduces subscription pricing, I'll be happy to subscribe (cue the HN hater crowd with their knee-jerk reaction "subscriptions BAD!" and downvotes).

If you don't like the enshittification of everything around you, support software that doesn't do that.

Thank you for the fantastic app, Dave. I will happily pay for the upgrade and will happily keep paying, because good apps are worth paying for!

It’s also very likely that most copy will be at least edited, if not completely written, by an LLM. There’s just too much upside. Some people may pass every comment they make, on every venue, through an LLM.

Some folks are likely to write agents to be their entire public persona, but that’s just silly (however, I guarantee it’s already happening -people are silly).

For myself, I’m in the middle. I use an LLM to assist in my development, but without resorting to a full agentic “write me a Facebook” methodology.

I will also often use an LLM to edit copy that I use in my apps, or in things like the App Store page for my apps. In some cases, the edit may be a full rewrite, and I’ll choose the rewrite, over my original copy. Usually, I will just use suggested minor edits, and grammar corrections.

I’m not [yet] confident in using LLMs for main translation, but they have been useful for very small “patch” translations.

Overall, LLMs have been a huge help, and I’ve been coding for over 40 years. I’ve been writing, for much longer. I’m not going to use a quill pen, just because it’s fashionable. I’m retired, and only have so much time left, to get a lot done. I appreciate these new tools.

If the bar is that all code and copy must be hand-written, artisanal prose, then it’s unlikely most modern, production-oriented venues will be satisfactory. I assume that new venues will appear, catering to that demographic. I doubt HN will be that.

One of the things I realized is that backups are about as “critical” a function as you can get in personal computing. I ultimately decided to stick with Carbon Copy Cloner because, in this case, it just made sense to use something battle-tested.

I’m happy the developer of SuperDuper got the chance to build the version he wanted to build. But from the outside, reading the blog on mobile, it’s hard to ignore that the website is broken and appears to have been generated with an LLM.

The fact that AI was used to create the website isn’t a problem in itself. It’s the lack of attention to detail in shipping the website broken. It makes me wonder about the state of the application itself.

In the case of SuperDuper 4. The application could be extremely well tested. But as a potential customer, I have no way of knowing that, and the presentation doesn’t inspire the confidence I’d want before handing it my backups.

Cases like this are where I really appreciate open source projects. Having the ability to look at the source directly gives me confidence. In this case, all I have to go off is a broken LLM generated website.

> In this case, all I have to go off [...]

Well if you're looking for evidence that SuperDuper is good (and if you accept appeals to authority from internet strangers), SuperDuper is part of John Siracusa's backup strategy: https://atp.fm/703 John Siracusa reviewed macOS for ten years for Ars Technica (these _reviews_ are magisterial), and is an authority on the Mac.