Is “this could have been one-shotted with Sonnet” the new “I could build this in a weekend?”

You'd think any one of these great LLMs that claim coding is over would take a non-trivial app and just clone it while fully documenting the process.

If it's so great, why is there so little viscera documenting it's greatness? Just lots and lots of words.

To be fair I've followed ente for a while and they seem to let their teams have side projects if it falls in line with the overall ente ethos.

Same with Kagi. Thats where Kagi news was born.

I quite like the ethos, but this Ensu definitely seems underbaked.

Wanted to share a message here with the CEO not to feel too bad because little is more common than getting caught by this tech

But where are they! https://ente.com/about

Small team, rooting for them

Counter position (not sure it's better than yours): what are the chances that device makers would actually offer seriously local, and not just something that does work in airplane mode, but then still connects to their cloud later, if not for post-sale monetization then at least for features providing better brand lock-in? I mean just look at how well the market for TV sets that don't try to shove "services" down buyers' throats is developing...

But sure, making money with standalone "local first is our headline feature" will be incredibly hard against those, no doubt about that. In light of the limited quality of what local models can achieve, the privacy bonus just won't compel many to pay. But that only means that this "morning with Claude" you are suggesting might be just the right amount of investment for the result you'd realistically expect. But is that so bad? I'd argue the reverse: bundling up the low hanging fruit but not by some hobbyist who will lose interest two weeks on but by a company big enough the keep it going while small enough to not be a VC furnace that will inevitably turn on users once the runway runs out (*), that's an opportunity to fill a niche few others can. Valuable for users who don't want to roll their own deployment of open source models (can't, or unwilling to commit to keeping them up to date, assuming that Ente does keep that ball rolling), and also valuable for the company of the investment actually is so low that it pays by raising awareness for their other products that apparently do earn them money.

(*) I was googling around a little wondering if they actually are as close to bootstrapped as they seem on the surface, and yes, that's supposedly the core idea [0], but despite that they also took 100 kUSD in "non-diluting" (basically a gift then?) from Mozilla with the explicit goal "to promote independent AI and machine learning" [1]. So not a CEO whim but following up to a promise made earlier. If they actually did avoid spending all that money on a one-off but went smaller planning to keep it current for a longer time horizon, I'd congratulate them on an excellent choice.

[0] https://ente.com/blog/5-years-of-ente/

[1] https://ente.io/blog/mozilla-builders/

The hn discussion for [1] seems to be completely missing the point, that Mozilla program isn't about funding an image host (yeah, I'd also prefer if Mozilla focused on the Browser and perhaps Thunderbird, but the foundation is what it is): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41681666

> We have not seen a tidal wave of untechnical people vibe coding up their own software solutions.

When my little brother who is a drummer, and has never even looked at "code" before, had claude on-shot a python app that let him download songs on youtube, extract the stems, collect tempo/key/etc information, then feed that into his DAW, all without ever looking at code, knowing what any of it did, etc., I knew that we were about to see a LOT of single-use applications.

I'm not against it, honestly. I have always written little one-off scripts and apps that accomplished something faster than manually, now that those one-shots are possible with an LLM in seconds sometimes, it makes all my personal scripts so much easier... that said, I definitely read the scripts that are output, and attempt to step through them in a debugger before assuming it is all good.

To add to this, the value that ente or someone like that can bring to the table here is a firm pledge to improve it and maintain it going forward.

That to me is more valuable than code vibe coded by Claude in one afternoon.

edit: nevermind I misread a word and made a social faux pas

I do agree that more local LLM options are always better.

Defunct? I just switched to it a couple months ago, and it seems actively developed.

(Though I think this announcement is sufficiently unpleasant I'm starting to reconsider)

Ente has a killer feature of supporting actual end-to-end encryption for photos. That alone puts them above many other competitors.

How is Ente Photos defunct? It's getting new features all the time and it works extremely well for me.

What do you when you say defunct photos platform?

All about immich now right?