I use Claude Code every day and find that it still requires a lot of hand-holding. Maybe codex is better. But just in my last session today, Claude wrote 100 lines of test code that could have been 20, and 30 lines of production code that could have been 5. I'm glad I do not have to maintain 300 kloc of 100% AI-generated code. But at the end of the day, what counts is velocity and quality, and it seems OP is happy. The tools certainly are useful.
On the one hand, this is an impressive technical achievement. But let's face it: the chances that this will be used by many other people are miniscule. Imagine what you could do if you applied your talent in areas with more demand. There are many hard problems and you would learn just as much. But you'd have a much better chance at making the world better, and at the same time of enjoying success. Obviously, what you spend your time on is your decision. But here is my personal plea that you work on things that can realistically have a bigger impact.
I know you intended to be helpful and didn't mean to be unkind.
But, this site is called Hacker News, and it's always been one of the site's most important roles, to feature and celebrate novel and interesting projects that people hack on, for whatever reason they choose.
There are all kinds of things that can be learned by starting with a blank slate and re-implementing something as ubiquitous and foundational as a web browser.
Over the years, many users have enjoyed undertaking a course called "Nand to Tetris" [1]. I hope to find time to do it one day. I don't expect it will make me substantially more employable, but I think I'll enjoy learning about the fundamentals, and I'm sure it will be beneficial in my work somehow.
Please let's remember that the playful exploration that happens through a project like this can lead to all kinds of benefits that might be non-obvious, and that it’s fine to appreciate the effort for its own sake.
Hm, I'm sorry you feel that way. It's not meant to be mean. On the contrary; Instead of encouraging someone who I feel is going down a wrong path, to me it's kinder to express my view that they aren't. I have personally wasted years of my life on technical projects, and would have been better off if someone had told me that it was a bad idea.
I'm of the opinion that these passion projects are incredibly important.
Your passions projects were problably also far more important to your growth than you give them credit for.
Scratching an itch is how we, as programmers/engineers/whatever, grow. It is also how we stumble into solving real problems and make our mark on the world.
Who knows, this could become the next big player in the browsersphere, or maybe it'll pivot into something else, or perhaps it will spark someones imagination. At the very least it has (probably) already been a source of creative bliss and pride for the ones involved, which in my opinion makes it worthwhile.
I understand what you are saying and don't fully disagree. You can allocate time & energy into immediate real world solutions while reaping the personal growth. There is certainly a balance.
The counter-point is that in the case of a web browser you are studying deeply one of the most impactful technologies to exist, and you will learn 80% of the most important lessons with a minimal working build, maybe 0.1% of the real thing. You may learn and execute much faster too because there is a clear blueprint, and you are likely riding a wave of passion that will carry your mind to places you won't have expected.
The perspective gained puts you in a much better place to identify & execute successfully more impactful work. The work may be the seed of something more important, but unseen or unknown yet.
Maybe? I'd say it depends on what you're rendering. We rendered HTML that we created ourselves, filled in with data that we parsed and validated. Styles across the documents generated were also largely the same.
If your job is to render arbitrary user HTML, this could get much more hairy. First of all, print rendering at the time(and probably now) was notoriously finicky. Things like adjusting colors, improper rendering of SVGs, pagination were difficult. It took a lot of effort to get right.
Furthermore, if you're sending arbitrary HTML, you now have a much larger security exploit surface. If someone figures out how to call `addEventListener` within the page context, they can snoop on every PDF generated by that page.
This sums it up well. The hardware is great, the software isn't.
I recently programmed the same app for iOS and Android. iOS took twice as long, simply because Apple's APIs suck. Case in point: The background task APIs (plural, yes, unfortunately) are so bad that Apple felt compelled to publish a video "Background execution demystified" [1]. If a dev creates an API and then has to publish docs "[my API] demystified", then the API sucks. Period.
I value stability and the freedom to configure the OS to my liking. macOS is stable but forces countless things on me that I do not want. Windows offers freedom but comes with many glitches. Linux is extremely stable and puts me first by letting me configure it. I love it.
Absolutely. I did a little bit of iOS development at some point and was genuinely shocked by how bad the documentation was and by how often WWDC videos was the best documentation available.
To give a concrete example: At WWDC20 Apple showed off a new Core Data feature called "derived attributes" [1]. Only many months later did they add the bare minimum of written documentation covering a fraction of what was shown off at WWDC [2].
The title of the session was “Background execution demystified”
Background execution is a computer science topic that many don’t understand well. Much like font antialiasing or other computer science topics that people don’t have to deal with daily.
Note: I’m not saying Apple APIs are great. I was just originally pointing out the context of your post.
I spent an afternoon watching and re-watching this video just to figure out how the otherwise-undocumented behaviors of the API work. It was exclusively about Apple's implementation, and not in any way about the general CS topic.
It's too bad that Linux doesn't come with Apple Silicon. And while 20s me would have loved configuring things, once I had a family and a lot less time, I just want it to work.
I once devoted 2 years of my life to developing a file manager called fman [1]. In total, it generated probably 35,000$ in profits, so my income from the project is somewhere around 10 $/h. As software developers, our opportunity costs are high. I use my file manager to this day and love it. But I regret spending so much time on it.
Congratulations on your launch. I wish you more success than I've had. Failing that, I wish you that you will see earlier than I did when it is time to move on.
I once recorded a video about my experiences developing a file manager [2]. Maybe you'll also find some interesting bits and pieces on fman's blog [3]. Incidentally, an article there is what sparked my current venture, which is much more profitable: consulting services around automatic updates.
If you'd like to have a chat, feel free to reach out. My contact info is on my website. :-)
Hey, thanks! Yes, I know about Fman. I’ve tried pretty much all file explorers on Windows, a fair number on Linux, and fewer on macOS. I watched that video a couple of years ago, it had some nice insights. Thanks for sharing that.
I've been talking about File Pilot since the early days of the project, so I managed to build a following on Twitter and Discord, along with a decent number of email subscribers. I'm hoping that'll be enough to spread the word.
I'm sorry Fman didn't work out for you as a business. But truth be told, you need to deliver something exceptional to compete with established players. While I don't see other file explorer alternatives as direct competition, I do think File Pilot will bring a breath of fresh air. We'll see how it goes!
That's not exceptional IMHO. It's a good effort, but not exceptional. Exceptional apps scream "wow" and are feature rich, with great UI/UX. Example of exceptional apps are Obsidian, TablePlus, Transmit (by panic), Sublime Text, VSCode. File Pilot has that "wow" factor and the features.
Holy heck! I remember fman, and it was amazing! Literally the only file manager I used that could hold a candle to Total Commander. I remember everyone hating on it on linux forums, because it wasn't open source, despite nothing in the linux world coming close.
Good to know, thanks for the insight. I was playing with the idea of creating a similar app, with more features and faster (in C++). I guess there is no much demand for modern NC clones, orthodox file managers. Btw, are the sales still going on?
I put it down to desktop utility apps being a very tough market because 1. they are time-consuming to develop and 2. people hate paying for desktop software. You already have several comments in this very thread from people complaining about the price:
