I credit containerization, k8s, and terraform for preventing vendor lock in. Compute like EC2 or GCE are effectively interoperable. Ditto for managed services for k8s or Postgres. The new products Anthropic is shipping is more like Lambda. Vendor kool-aid lots of people will buy into.
What grinds my gears is how Anthropic is actively avoiding standards. Like being the only harness that doesn't read AGENTS.md. I work on AI infra and use different models all the time, Opus is really good, but the competition is very close. There's just enough friction to testing those out though, and that's the point.
I think there is lock-in, despite those things - for containerization, you're still a lot of the times beholden to the particular runtime that provider prefers, and whatever weird quirks exist there. Migrating can have some surprises. K8s, usually you will go managed there, and while they provide the same functionality, AKS != EKS != GKE at all, at least in terms of managing them and how they plug into everything else. In terraform, migrating from AWS provider to GCP provider will hold a lot of surprises for you for what looks like it should be the exact same thing.
My point was, I don't think it mattered much, and it feels like an ok comparison - cloud offerings are mostly the exact same things, at least at their core, but the ecosystem around them is the moat, and how expensive it is to migrate off of them. I would not be surprised at all if frontier AI model providers go much the same way. I'm pretty much there already with how much I prefer claude code CLI, even if half the time I'm using it as a harness for OpenAI calls.
There's a tiny amount of friction. Enough that I'll be honest and say that I spend the majority of my time with one vendor's system, but compared the to the fiction of moving from one cloud to another, eg AWS to GCP, the friction between opening Claude code vs codex is basically zero. Have an active subscription and have Claude.md say "read Agents.md".
Claude Code routines sounds useful, but at the same time, under AI-codepocalypse, my guess is it would take an afternoon to have codex reimplement it using some existing freemium SaaS Cron platform, assuming I didn't want to roll my own (because of the maintenance overhead vs paying someone else to deal with that).
you're spot on. I use both Claude Code + OpenCode with many different models and friction is minimal as long as I'm deliberate about it. Hell, even symlinking AGENTS.md to CLAUDE.md is like 80% there.
It's just portability v convenience. But unlike ~15 years ago with cloud compute, it _feels_ like more people are skeptical of convenience, which is interesting.
it's not that; it's awareness of inevitability of enshittification. they've released convenient tools, realized there's value to milk and are firing on all cylinders to capture 120% of it. great for IPO, not so great for customers in the long run.
> The new products Anthropic is shipping is more like Lambda. Vendor kool-aid lots of people will buy into.
Counterpoint: there are probably tons of people out there who were hacking together lousy versions of these same tools to somehow spin up Claude to generate the release notes for their PRs or analyze their Github Issues every week. This is a smarter, faster, easier, and likely far more secure way of implementing the same thing, which will make the people using those things much better.
In the meantime, it wouldn't be surprising if other AI companies started doing similar things; I could see Cursor, for example, adding a similar sort of hosted cursor 'Do Github Things' option for enterprises, and if they do then that means more variety and less lock-in (assuming the competitors have similar features).
From my perspective it's no different than writing a Claude skill, which is something it seems like everyone is doing these days; it's just that in this case the 'skill' is hosted somewhere else, on (likely) more reliable architecture and at cheaper scale.
Get out of here with this nonsense. We tell people when we’re a bad option all the time. Do you really think we have a desire (or time) to punish somebody for doing the same?
> Do you really think we have a desire (or time) to punish somebody for doing the same?
idk man, there's these awfully convenient disappearing forum threads too. The benefit of the doubt is starting to expire.
I see you're a co-founder, so presumably you have some sway on priorities and skin in the game. I think you should take the reputational damage you're accruing here much more seriously than you apparently are. A few more incidents like this and it won't just be you telling people you're a bad option.
* edited to tone down the forum thread disappearance angle. FWIW I do believe that it likely wasn't deliberate. My main point was that these things add up and "of course we wouldn't do that!" starts to ring a little hollow the 10th time you hear it...
> you've just been caught hiding inconvenient forum threads too
FWIW, I do believe them when they say this wasn't intentional. Considering how the Internet operates, they would be incredibly stupid to do something like that on purpose.
That being said, the way the entire affair was handled certainly leaves a lot to be desired.
I actually believe them on that too, FWIW. This time. It's just too dumb. I hope, for their sake, it's the truth.
I was really just trying to point out that this kind of good faith benefit-of-the-doubt has a limit, and fear of reaching that limit should be keeping people at fly up at night a lot more than it apparently is. I don't know how many colossal public fuckups a company can endure before its reputation is permanently ruined, but it's definitely not infinite.
Why is anyone on HN "dunking" on Fly.IO of all companies?
Michael - Don't take the bait.
As someone who has zero affiliation with Fly.IO other than a few PR's to their OSS(I don't even know Michael), I greatly appreciate the contributions they have given back to the community.
There are a lot of great hosting companies. Fly.IO stands out due to their revolutionary architecture and contributions back to the OSS community. I wish more companies operated like this.
It's understandable some are upset about an outage. But Fly is doing really interesting and game-changing things, not copying a traditional vmware, cpanel or k8s route.
Just as a reminder to what this company has offered back to everyone.
Their architecture is beautiful and revolutionary. They're probably the first or second ones to find a lot of the new edge cases as they grow.
It's a lot harder to be the first one over the wall than it is to copy. They've literally given the average developer a blueprint to build scalable businesses that compete with their own.
That category was added after one of our support folks replied, likely for tracking. I don't know why it's private. They may not even know this category is private. Hiding negative shit wasn't a deliberate decision... we're aware of google cache and we don't need to give HN another reason to dunk on us.
> That category was added after one of our support folks replied
FYI, this doesn't appear to be strictly accurate. The OP commented at 23:52 UTC saying that the thread had been made private, and the reply from "Sam-Fly" was not posted until 02:36 UTC.
My point was that the app-not-working category is used in conjunction with support/our team getting involved. I assume this is what Sam meant by "flagged it internally", which was followed by investigation, then a post. I don't see how the timestamps uncover something nefarious.
My understanding is that it was causing support problems, because people were Googling for solutions to problems with their apps (because of the Heroku diaspora, we have a lot of first-time Docker users), finding old stale threads on our forum that looked related, and then reviving them.
I think we can just `noindex` the category instead of making it private?
We do hire entry level people, in fact we're wrapping up our first cohort of interns right now. Exclusively hiring experienced dudes from the tech bubble is a failure mode in the long run. We're invested in hiring folks with diverse backgrounds and experience levels, and we need to talk about that more for sure.
Our jobs page is sparse right now because we’re focusing on hiring EMs to help grow a healthy eng org. We’ll have more openings before long, and you should absolutely apply when something sounds right. Feel free to hunt me down online in the mean time!
Thanks, and right... I don't expect maliciousness on fly's part. But you'd be surprised (or not) how many goog products phone home with anything they can find. In fact it might be called a "business model" of some sort.
Google's SSO can't really phone home. You're either using SAML or OAuth; in either scenario, the information flow is Google --> the app you're SSOing into; name, email, and user group information.
If you're SSOing into, say, AWS, Google doesn't get any access or private info out of AWS in the flow.
What grinds my gears is how Anthropic is actively avoiding standards. Like being the only harness that doesn't read AGENTS.md. I work on AI infra and use different models all the time, Opus is really good, but the competition is very close. There's just enough friction to testing those out though, and that's the point.
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