You should venture outside coding. Just from my last gathering with friends I heard people in Healthcare, Logistics and Construction all mentioning interesting ways in which it improves their productivity.
It was my first movie about prison life in the US and the failures of the American justice and correctional system. I since learned it was realistic in every aspect apart from the escape, and that not much has changed since.
Everything about it is depressing and somehow it’s the best movie ever.
Even capable coders can’t create a Reddit clone in a week. Because it’s not just a glorified CRUD app. And I encourage you to think a bit harder before arguing like that.
Yes you can create a CRUD app in some kind of framework and style it like Reddit. But that’s like putting lines on your lawn and calling it a clone of the Bernabeu.
But even if you were right, the real barrier to building a Reddit clone is getting traction. Even if you went viral and did everything right, you’d still have to wait years before you have the brand recognition and SEO rankings they enjoy.
In what way (that's not related to the difficulty of scaling it, which I already addressed separately)?
The point of my comment was:
"Somebody with AI cloning Reddit in a week is not as special as you make it to be, all things considering. A Reddit clone is not that difficult, it's basically a CRUD app. The difficult part of replicating it, or at least all the basics of it, is its scaling - and even that wouldn't be as difficult for a dev in 2026, the era of widespread elastic cloud backends".
The Bernabeu analogy handwavingly assumes that Reddit is more challenging than a homegrown clone, but doesn't address in what way Reddit differs from a CRUD app, and how my comment doesn't hold.
And even if it did, it would be moot regarding the main point I make, unless the recent AI-clone also handles those differentiating non-CRUD elements and thus also differs from a CRUD app.
>But even if you were right, the real barrier to building a Reddit clone is getting traction.
True, but not relevant to my point, which is about the difficulty of cloning Reddit coding-wise, not business wise, and whether it's or isn't any great feat for someone using AI to do it.
Calling Reddit a CRUD app isn’t wrong, it’s just vacuous.
It strips away every part that actually makes Reddit hard.
What happens when you sign up?
A CRUD app shows a form and inserts a row.
Reddit runs bot detection, rate limits, fingerprinting, shadow restrictions, and abuse heuristics you don’t even see, and you don’t know which ones, because that knowledge is their moat.
What happens when you upvote or downvote?
CRUD says “increment a counter.”
Reddit says “run a ranking algorithm refined over years, with vote fuzzing, decay, abuse detection, and intentional lies in the UI.” As the number you see is not the number stored.
What happens when you add a comment?
CRUD says “insert record.”
Reddit applies subreddit-specific rules, spam filters, block lists, automod logic, visibility rules, notifications, and delayed or conditional propagation.
What happens when you post a URL?
CRUD stores a string.
Reddit fingerprints it, deduplicates it, fetches metadata, detects spam domains, applies subreddit constraints, and feeds it into ranking and moderation systems.
Yes, anyone can scaffold a CRUD app and style it like Reddit.
But calling that a clone is like putting white lines on your lawn and calling it the Bernabeu.
You haven’t cloned the system, only its silhouette.
> Reddit runs bot detection, rate limits, fingerprinting, shadow restrictions, and abuse heuristics you don’t even see, and you don’t know which ones, because that knowledge is their moat.
> Reddit says “run a ranking algorithm refined over years, with vote fuzzing, decay, abuse detection, and intentional lies in the UI.” As the number you see is not the number stored.
> etc...
The question is; is moltbook doing this? That was the original point, it took a week to build a basic reddit clone, as you call it the silhouette, with AI, that should surely be the point of comparison to what a human could do in that time
I think it depends on the tasks you use it for. Bootstrapping or translating projects between languages is amazing. New feature development? Questionable.
I don’t write frontend stuff, but sometimes need to fix a frontend bug.
Yesterday I fed claude very surgical instructions on how the bug happens, and what I want to happen instead, and it oneshot the fix. I had a solution in about 5 minutes, whereas it would have taken me at least an hour, but most likely more time to get to that point.
Literally an hour or two of my day was saved yesterday. I am salaried at around $250/hour, so in that one interaction AI saved my employer $250-500 in wages.
AI allows me to be a T shaped developer, I have over a decade of deep experience in infrastructure, but know fuck all about front end stuff. But having access to AI allows me as an individual who generally knows how computers work to fix a simple problem which is not in my domain.
Maybe this is a gray area, but that's kind of my experience with it too. I understand what I want to happen, but don't understand the language and it produces a language specific result that is close enough, maybe even one-shot, for me to use. I categorize this under translation.
My process, which probably wouldn't work with concurrent agents because I'm keeping an eye on it, is basically:
- "Read these files and write some documentation on how they work - put the documentation in the docs folder" (putting relevant files into the context and giving it something to refer to later on)
- "We need to make change X, give me some options on how to do it" (making it plan based on that context)
- "I like option 2 - but we also need to take account of Y - look at these other files and give me some more options" (make sure it hasn't missed anything important)
- "Revised option 4 is great - write a detailed to-do list in the docs/tasks folder" (I choose the actual design, instead of blindly accepting what it proposes)
- I read the to-do list and get it rewritten if there's anything I'm not happy with
- I clear the context window
- "Read the document in the docs folder and then this to-do list in the docs/tasks folder - then start on phase 1"
- I watch what it's doing and stop if it goes off on one (rare, because the context window should be almost empty)
- Once done, I give the git diffs a quick review - mainly the tests to make sure it's checking the right things
- Then I give it feedback and ask it to fix the bits I'm not happy with
- Finally commit, clear context and repeat until all phases are done
Most of the time this works really well.
Yesterday I gave it a deep task, that touched many aspects of the app. This was a Rails app with a comprehensive test suite - so it had lots of example code to read, plus it could give itself definite end points (they often don't know when to stop). I estimated it would take me 3-4 days for me complete the feature by hand. It made a right mess of the UI but it completed the task in about 6 hours, and I spent another 2 hours tidying it up and making it consistent with the visuals elsewhere (the logic and back-end code was fine).
So either my original estimate is way off, or it has saved me a good amount of time there.
New feature development in web and mobile apps is absolutely 10% more productive with these tools, and anyone who says otherwise is coping. That's a large fraction of software development.
Yes, the research is wrong. And in science, it's not taboo to call that out.
It's outdated, doesn't differentiate between people trying to incorporate it in their current workflow and the people who apply themselves to entirely new ones. It doesn't represent me in any way and I am releasing features to my platform daily now, instead of weekly. So I can wholeheartedly disagree with its conclusion.
The earth is either flat of it isn't. It's easy to proof it's not flat. It's not easy to conclude that the results of a study in a field that changes daily represents all people working in it, including the ones who did not participate.
If it is so self-evident that the research is wrong, that means there should be some research that supports the opposite conclusion then? Maybe you can link it?
The reason we don’t see any other research is because it’s neigh impossible to study a moving field. Especially at this pace.
If you have any ideas on how to measure objectively while this landscape changes daily, please share them with us. Maybe a researcher will jump on this bandwagon and proof you right.
I proposed a logically consistent perspective where both my experience and the study are true at the same time? What is your response to that other than comparing me to a flat earther? Do you have something useful to contribute?
I use a MIG welder but with flux-core wire and no gas, I got it about 12 years ago for £200 (new), it is a perfectly good machine and I am not a good enough welder to get the most out of it.
It's much cheaper than the laser stuff. It gets expensive if you want to use gas, but if you stick to flux-core you don't have to.
You might want to look up the max thickness and other common issues hobbyist level laser welders have before purchasing, or at a minimum wait for the laser welders to mature a bit more. You'll spend less than half and be far better served with a cheap tig welder at this point in time.
I’m mostly concerned about the learning curve. The laser welders I saw can be used blindfolded and offer enough penetration. I noticed a lot of negative comments but mostly from people who spent years honing their craft and feel obligated to gatekeep it a bit.
I only use claude through the chat ui because it’s faster and it gives me more control. I read most of it and the code is almost always better than what I would do, simply because lazy ass me likes to take shortcuts way too often.
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