I think these types of projects are really great for developers to exercise their end-to-end skills -- developing all pieces of the product. Kudos for launching it!

As someone who's done this before, the value is all in that experience and finding those gaps that you didn't know existed.

One important gap I originally didn't know about was needing a market for my product idea. I thought just because I had a clever idea that it would sell! Turns out that's not the case most of the time.

And in this case, I don't think there's a market for no-code solutions that simultaneously require HTTP API integration (that's not no-code, that's low-code), when there is a really simple low-code solution that doesn't require a network round-trip.

Again, kudos on completing the exercise of releasing something! It's a step most developers don't take, and absolutely worth the experience no matter where it goes.

uuugh :))

Thank you for eye opener :D You're right that the no-code angle has a gap — if someone's using Zapier they probably want a simple action that doesn't require API knowledge at all.

Genuinely appreciate you pushing on this. I guess I should kill it and build something else. Way more valuable than "this project should be cool :))"

Interesting. Wayne Rosing (Silicon Valley pioneer and early engineering lead at Google) has been working on a global telescope project for a long time now also.

https://lco.global/

Ben you still have code running here.

Ha, thanks for letting me know! I hope it's not causing too many problems out there :-)

I've found the most useful prompt tip is to add to the end of every prompt:

"Ask questions for clarification as needed."

Claude will then present a list of questions I answer, either directly, or sometimes those prompt more thought or questions from myself.

Either way, that statement helps escape the assumption that I just want some slop reaching the goal in the quickest way possible.

I dabbled in Hack and HHVM several (almost 10 now??) years ago but haven't kept up. My understanding was that PHP8+ now includes the improvements that Hack brought, making the leap to Hack less interesting/valuable. Is that not the case?

PHP caught up with Hack's performance, but it still doesn't have many of its features, notably generics and async/await.

Which raises the question: If the productivity gains are realized by the employer, is the employer not paying this subscription?

My day job in talks to do that. I'm partly responsible for that decision, and i'm using my personal $200/m plan to test the idea.

My assessment so far is that it is well worth it, but only if you're invested in using the tool correctly. It can cause as much harm as it can increase productivity and i'm quite fearful of how we'll handle this at day-job.

I also think it's worth saying that imo, this is a very different fear than what drives "butts in seats" arguments. Ie i'm not worried that $Company will not get their value out of the Engineer and instead the bot will do the work for them. I'm concerned that Engineer will use the tool poorly and cause more work for reviewers having to deal with high LOC.

Reviews are difficult and "AI" provides a quick path to slop. I've found my $200 well worth it, but the #1 difficulty i've had is not getting features to work, but in getting the output to be scalable and maintainable code.

Sidenote, one of the things i've found most productive is deterministic tooling wrapping the LLM. Eg robust linters like Rust Clippy set to automatically run after Claude Code (via hooks) helps bend the LLM away from many bad patterns. It's far from perfect of course, but it's the thing i think we need most atm. Determinism around the spaghetti-chaos-monkeys.

Maybe that’s the true destiny of AI all along..

I used to work in the telescope world. Our organization acquired another organization that was working on NGAT: Next Generation Astronomical Telescope. At the time, we were also working on newer telescope models, and I joked about what we would name those…

I guess astronomers, like programmers, are just bad at naming things.

I actually really like names in the astronomy world. NGC 1832-456.382 really knock my socks off.

When they are not using boring names like that, the astro world does have some great names. It lets us know humans were involved in the naming. From the acronyms to the super superlative names, they have a bit of personality to them.

Is the engine available as a package/library (like phpspreadsheet)?

Also, does anyone know of a golang excel engine??

This engine is closed source, it is used to power grid.is where you can make interactive blog posts, embeddable interactive graphs and so on.

I wish Google could have decided to stick with their “Don’t be evil.” ethos.

Instead, I find myself continually extracting their products from my life.

I’ve always referred to those client/server.

I think webhooks are even more misleading because they are server to server.

And the client is actually the sender.