These guys are gonna get a ton of business because of this publicity. Any press is good press.
Developer tooling, especially AI powered, has historically not been the most forgiving industry.
YC criticized for backing AI startup that simply cloned another AI startup
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Re: YC criticized for backing AI startup that simply cloned another AI startup
#42I watched the video promoting Continue.dev and just think to myself, these AI editors don’t actually add much value. EMacs and Treesitter is much faster way to “find all references to X” in the codebase. Other questions can be answered with the naive grep implementation and marginal brain power. If all they’re investing in here is to write boilerplate code, well, that takes not much time in the grand scheme of things…
> Am I missing something?
Yes, you are basically posting a modern equivalent of the famous "Dropbox reply". "EMacs and Treesitter...naive grep implementation".
There's value in these tools, that's why GitHub, JetBrains, Cursor all built businesses on top of AI coding extensions. Personally I don't use the "Write this full function for me"-features but use it as a way smarter auto-complete. People don't really use them to jump to "find all references to X" as that's perfectly well solved.
Re: YC criticized for backing AI startup that simply cloned another AI startup
#43Isn't this how open-source works. Sure it sucks. However creators can pick a different license, like AGPL, if they don't want something like this to happen. I saw someone on x/twitter post this: Neovim is a fork of Vim which is a fork of Vi. They were pretty clear in their repo that they were forked from Continue. I get that they were rather lackadaisical about the licensing, but that's kind of their brand, and they…
Vim is not a fork of Vi.
Re: YC criticized for backing AI startup that simply cloned another AI startup
#44Why do you have to clone the thing when we have super powerful LLMs now? Aren't they supposed to make us all 10x devs and also extremely good with business? At the very least, isn't your chatbot supposed to give you good and new ideas? Because thats why you are selling it?
Re: YC criticized for backing AI startup that simply cloned another AI startup
#45Isn't this how open-source works. Sure it sucks. However creators can pick a different license, like AGPL, if they don't want something like this to happen. I saw someone on x/twitter post this: Neovim is a fork of Vim which is a fork of Vi. They were pretty clear in their repo that they were forked from Continue. I get that they were rather lackadaisical about the licensing, but that's kind of their brand, and they…
neovim didn’t seek VC funding and advertise as if they built their own editor.
The first text on neovims page is ”Vim-fork focused on extensibility and usability”
Re: YC criticized for backing AI startup that simply cloned another AI startup
#46This article reads like gossip/drama creation Techcrunch article on BuzzFeed level
Yeah I noticed some pretty obvious spelling/grammatical errors too. I wonder what's going over there? "...Continue as well as the original project that Continued used, VSCode."
Perhaps spelling/grammatical errors are how you know a human wrote it.
Or at least a human went through the trouble of editing a few errors in.
Re: YC criticized for backing AI startup that simply cloned another AI startup
#47This is completely allowed under the apache open source license. I'm not sure why people are so upset about it. If you don't want this to happen, release software under a different licensing model.
> I'm not sure why people are so upset about it. 1. It reflects poorly on YC. 2. Something can be legal without being moral or ethical.
A startup repackaging an open source project and selling it as a paid service doesn't "reflect poorly" on whoever is funding them. In fact it will be touted as a massive success story.
Re: YC criticized for backing AI startup that simply cloned another AI startup
#48People look at the top 5 YC success stories and think every company they fund is of that standard. In reality they "graduate" 500-1000 startups every year . They aren't all winners. In fact I'd wager Pear AI is a lot closer to the norm in terms of quality and competency than, say, Stripe or Airbnb. If you look at their recent batches there is an endless parade of thin ChatGPT wrappers.
It’s game theory. AWS would do the same thing by pitting teams against each other internally. Often times, we would have multiple products doing the same exact thing but slightly differentiated. Of course AWS claims to not deprecate services but they would resource the successful service team and PIP everyone out of the unsuccessful team and bring it back to a skeleton crew. If you wonder why the AWS Product offerings are so F'd and inconsistent it's because of them using management techniques like this.
Re: YC criticized for backing AI startup that simply cloned another AI startup
#49We all know YC may be super random. Just invest on solid teams regardless of product
Re: YC criticized for backing AI startup that simply cloned another AI startup
#50Everything is getting en-shittified, even YC itself. This has been a trend for my cohort of college graduates. Graduated right in time for a housing crisis, inflation, layoffs, etc. Can't help but feel at least a little bitter about folks who pulled the ladder up behind them.
The word enshittified has been enshittified.