I'm doing the thing w mobile apps.
Yourope
Joined November 2022
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IngoA retweeted
quick question, what the fuck
IngoA retweeted
I asked Opus 5.5 to make a video about whether or not it was conscious. The ending of this video is insane.
IngoA retweeted
The end of software secrecy is almost upon us. The death of closed source, and the final triumph of open source.
I should have realized this a few months ago when I successfully decompiled the game of Firefighter from an ancient DOS shareware binary. My robot friend was able to tell it had been written in Borland Pascal from looking at the data layout; it gave me back very readable Pascal code with sensibly chosen function and variable names. I transpiled it to Rust and now ship it as part of my heritage games collection.
The thing is, I thought of this as a fun stunt but didn't have any confidence that the technique would scale up to large, real programs. I have since learned that people are now doing this sort of thing with entire AAA games, which are among the most complex software artifacts ever to be shipped as a binary. If they can be decompiled, anything can be.
This has implications. Massive implications. We need to think about what the world is like when, in general, there is no longer a secrecy moat around almost any software at all.
1/2
IngoA retweeted
everyone thinks codex computer use only works inside codex
it doesn't, it's a local mcp server in the chatgpt mac app and claude code can just call it, even headless with claude -p
same 8-task test: opus 5.5 on codex's engine got 6/8, codex itself got 6/8, cua driver got 3-4/8 at 4x the cost
cua's background mode on mac only goes through accessibility, so canvases and drags just don't land
codex's engine sends real clicks and drags to the app without touching my cursor
no hover though, and it's unofficial, so enjoy it until a chatgpt update breaks it
give this to your claude:
"Set up Codex's computer use as an MCP server for you on my Mac. Find the "cua_repl" entry in ~/.codex/plugins/cache/openai-bundled/unified-computer-use/<newest version>/.mcp.json and register it as a user MCP server called "codex-cu" with the same command, args and env. Then test it by using Calculator in the background to work out 12 × 12."
IngoA retweeted
100% agree, I see the same around me
There is 2 main things IMO. The economy contracting and the barrier to entry got nuked
Barrier to entry = What I mentioned in a previous post, any moron with 2 neurons can spawn an average SaaS now using AI.
Before AI it took time and knowledge, so you could get away with making a basic product since the supply was limited. But now the market is flooded with people replicating basic SaaS in a one day
ANd in terms of marketing it's kinda similar-ish. Since. there was much less SaaS/etc available, there was less people marketing them = less noise, so even average/ok marketing could works
But now the market is flooded, only exceptional products and marketing stands out.
You can't do "average" anymore.
The exact same thing happened with ecommerce in 2016 btw. Before Shopify/Aliexpress, it was hard to do ecom, you had to import products, use warehouses, do logistic etc (= lots of admin work + knowledge), make an ecom store (= technical knowledge) etc. So there was very few options = you could get away with average.
But when Shopify/Oberlo/etc arrived, everyone could do it in 2 clicks, so the market got flooded by dropshipping slope, and only exceptional brands with great marketing survived overall
Same happening for SaaS now, again, you can't be average anymore.
When the market is empty, average is fine cause you don't have much competition, but when the market is flooded by endless slop you have to differentiate. And no one can tell you how to differentiate btw, by definition there is no playbook, otherwise everyone would do it.
And for the other part, the market shrinking:
A bit technical/economy but IMO very important to understand how the economy works if you plan on being an entrepreneur
I think the SaaS/tech market was HEAVILY pumped by post-covid relief, so it was easy to find buyers cause they got lots of "free money" (0% interest rate = borrow money for free), also why there was lots of bullshit jobs etc
But now economy is shrinking cause
1) massive inflation due to the wars, that increase the cost of energy (gas/oil) = increase the cost of everything, since energy is required for 99% of products = less profit = less risk taking = less investments = less potential buyers
2) interest rates are higher now = more expensive to borrow to invest = less investments = less potential buyers
3) investors/banks/etc are worried about AI nuking the market and companies going out of market in a few years = less investments overall = less potential buyers
So SaaS is right at the intersection between those 2 things where the barrier to entry got nuked + economy is shit, and investors are loosing trust in the future etc.
So atm buying a SaaS is very risky/uncertain and very expensive. It's also very hard to distribute, stand out and make a profit.
Lots of ppl try to cope with that by becoming SaaSfluencers, but again, everyone is doing the same thing now ("quitting my job to make a SaaS in Asia" is a meme now), so no one really stand out anymore, cause again, doing the same thing as everyone else does will just give you the same result (nothing).
it also means you become a posting monkey and fully algo-pilled, so you basically become an entertainer that optimize everything for attention, not a SaaS founder. Which is ok of course, but you have to be aware of it, you're not playing the same game anymore.
But IMO the next few years might be rough. AI bubble is either gonna burst suddenly or go down slowly, but in both case it will be bad cause there is so much investment going into it that it will impact more than just the tech bubble
(this is why Anthropic/OpenAI are desperate and try to make ppl afraid of AI btw, to push for regulations and block competition from open source models, which would nuke investments they depend on since they make 0 profit yet. Same reason why they do rug pulls and keep launching random products)
So yeah, idk, I don't have tips/solutions or anything lol
Obviously I'm not an economist and my understand is limited to what I see and I might be wrong on many stuff, happy to be corrected where I'm wrong!
Lots of founders are crashing out
A year ago AI felt like an incredible opportunity.
Most of us were able to ship faster, remove admin, and get time back.
Lots of engineering founders were even able to explore marketing for the first time: SEO, organic social, outbound.
Building complex systems that felt extremely productive.
But since then, a lot has happened.
Here’s some of the themes I’m seeing:
AI marketing isn’t working. At first it feels impressive and it looks good but for most it’s not driving results. This is made worse by the fact everyone has access to the same tools. Inboxes are flooded, buyers are fatigued, the economy is flat.
Engineers are fried. Yes you can ship more but for many the flow state has gone. It’s a new way of working and it’s not for everyone. The speed leaves many of us exhausted before 11am.
There’s a feeling of what’s the point? Is my product’s next feature going to be redundant in a year, or a month? Can’t AI do what my business does, better?
SaaS valuations have collapsed. From 3-4x revenue to 1x. There’s a sinking realisation that a large number of SaaS companies will go to 0 in the next few years. Building to exit seems almost crazy right now.
There’s far fewer buyers and far more sellers. These include vibe coders cloning products without the care or craft, contributing to the distribution challenges from people doing it the right way.
Lots of people are trying to make money by selling shovels. This just adds to the frenzied energy.
Build in public stopped being fun. A few makers realised that the new game is attention, and now everything feels insincere and stunt-driven. They are influencers not founders. Changes to the X timeline compounded the issues.
There are exceptions and there are still moats remaining, but the challenges feel existential
IngoA retweeted
Singapore's govt dating app runs on a Nobel Prize-winning game theory algorithm 👏
FirstDate uses Gale-Shapley, the 1962 stable marriage algorithm that won the 2012 Economics Nobel and still runs hospital residency matches and kidney exchanges today.
how it works:
1 | your preferences and dealbreakers build a ranked priority list
2 | proposers offer to their top pick. receivers hold their best offer and reject the rest. rejected proposers move down their list. rinse and repeat until locked
3 | the result is mathematically stable: no two people exist who would both prefer each other over their assigned matches. "the app never showed us each other" becomes impossible by design
the UX:
• one match per cycle, zero infinite scroll
• 72-hour decision window
• contact info revealed only on mutual yes
• Singpass-verified, so everyone is exactly who they claim (told my husband I'm annoyed I can't test it. his response: most people sneak onto dating apps, and here you are openly filing a product research request 🤣 )
commercial apps need you to keep swiping but this app is designed to get you off the platform. Singapore built the first dating app whose success metric is deleting its own users 💀
(fun game theory note: Gale-Shapley yields proposer-optimal outcomes - meaning proposers get their best possible stable match, receivers their worst 👀)
public servants aged 21-35 only for now. interesting to see if state-sponsored game theory beats the free market (or rather, all the tinders and hinges out there) 🍿
IngoA retweeted
for the past few months i've been asking our models to paint. opus 5.5 is very skilled at emulating different styles
every image here is a python program generated pixel by pixel. there is no image model, and no off-the-shelf art software. instead, it's about 7,500 lines of code using standard libraries to emulate different brush styles. the agents don't use any pictures as reference, instead working only from what they know about each painter
IngoA retweeted
a quick tip that may surprise some folks
an uncached prompt to fable at 500k context window will directly cost you over $5 for A SINGLE REQUEST. that's a cup of coffee or a cheese burger gone. even with subscription quota, this hits like a truck
the most common way to fall into that case is when you walk away from a long session and come back after a while when cache expired (claude is 1 hr, codex is 30 mins by default)
in particular, when you come back to a long idle session, don't run "/compact" there thinking it'll reduce your cost, because the compaction request is still a real request and it will cost $5 by itself right there
the best thing to do is to /compact BEFORE you walk away
the next best thing is when you come back and see a large context window, just start a new session, and ask your agent to look for the last session's transcript if it needs context
IngoA retweeted
adaptive_platform_ui is out, and iPhone Duo support has landed in Flutter 🎉
Your toolbar and tab bar move into the side bar as native Liquid Glass. Open or folded, every rotation, zero setup.
Try it now. Found a bug? Open an issue 🙏
#Flutter #FlutterDev
IngoA retweeted
I made an audiobook app.
My late #shipaton entry: Stori
A premium audiobook app for kids:
• A collection of storis narrated by me.
• Or, generate your own storis with AI.
Apple review gods, look kindly upon me 🤞
thestori.app
IngoA retweeted
I hate to say it, but if you’re running more than 2 sub agents at time, you’re almost certainly burning tokens for 0 quality gain.
Agents don’t trust each other enough to avoid double-checking everyone’s homework.
IngoA retweeted
My upscaler made "computer, enhance" real
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Generative AI upscalers synthesize invented details rather than recovering lost information from low-res sources, unlike the fictional "enhance" trope.
x.com/wombey12/statu…
pict.ai/blog/how-do-ai…
arxiv.org/abs/2507.14367
letsenhance.io/blog/all/ai-up…
IngoA retweeted
I've written down my thoughts about Astra & Friends after one week of use. Included some tips & workflows on how I integrate it in my daily work.
IngoA retweeted
I think he's right
With regulatory capture we will speedrun to a new feudalist time
Regulatory capture is where you pass regulation, or create government agencies to "protect the people" but in the end it helps protect companies because you stop new companies from being able to enter the market, because the cost of following regulation is too much compete for a startup
Neo feudalism will mean AI companies at the top and the rest of us as serfs paying them to use AI for literally everything
Next in regulatory capture will be banning open source and/or Chinese models, mark my words
That's a very dangerous thing because then there will never be new AI frontier companies being able to compete again and with exponential self improving AI that means essentially no competitors in any industry ever again as they will slowly suck up money in all industries
Safety concerns of AI are scary but the neo feudalism of AI with regulatory capture is a way more scary for me
Get ready for all of the investors in frontier model companies to suddenly flip to regulatory capture mode today
Their investments in frontier model companies are currently at risk/capped because the biggest buyers of tokens are embracing open-source models: vertical AI companies, the government and enterprises
That’s all this is about: stopping open source — which I’ve been saying on the pod for two years
If you want safety, you want disclosure — and open source is the ultimate disclosure process
IngoA retweeted
My big learning for anyone struggling with Astra quotas: use Astra as a subagent, NOT the main agent. Saves 80-90% of your quota, but still gets great results.
Specifically:
- Use a cheap model like Luna xhigh
- Tell it to use Astra subagents for coding
- Be clear that it should not fork the thread, always fresh contexts
- Tell it to tell Astra to stop after implementation, then have Luna do the testing and validation
Large Astra inputs destroy quota, despite caching. My Astra-only demo used ~50% of weekly Plus quota, while the equivalent Luna+Astra one used 7%.
Astra orchestrator + Luna subagents was more expensive and produced worse results. Luna writing code and Astra critiquing it produced even worse results than that. Luna with Astra subagents is the winning formula.
I optimized my Dream Loop skill to give you Astra's 3D magic for 80% cheaper!
This demo was one-shot, in 25 minutes, for 7% quota on ChatGPT Plus. Yes, the $20/mo one.
3 days of banging my head on the wall and burning Astra tokens. Sharing it for free. Y'all better build some cool stuff with this
Link: github.com/achimala/dream-lo…
Details, demo prompt, and cost breakdown are in replies.
To be clear: It's not perfect. The demo is a small interactive scene, not a full game. For full games, your best bet is to build it with smaller models, then use this skill to improve the graphics. This is the best I could do, but it's not going to fix the fact that Astra is expensive and Plus quotas are tiny