alt Hacker NewsThere are many days where I feel like the right thing for my career is to focus on building meaningful software that solves an actual problem. Then there are days like today, especially after seeing this.
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It is like musical one hit wonders, but for software.
Some dumb idea which just hits at the right moment and makes a bunch of money.
It's easy to dismiss as more A.I. FOMO. I mean, Meta's AI has half the IQ of ChatGPT or Gemini. However, a fake social network full of generated content might well be a solution for Meta's problems where their userbase inevitably doesn't measure up to what they wish it would.
I am right there with you. We might lack the language to describe this emotional state; its like the opposite of FAFO? There's also this nuance that they were acquired by meta so yeah they're rich but now they're working for not-serious people and will flame out in 18 months.
In the past ten years I have been frustrated by the tension between working on "interesting" or "important" stuff and working on dumb trendy shit. With the current LLM trend everything has become dumb trendy sshit, which has made the decision simpler.
Ha! I stopped worrying about that when someone got $1m for the "Yo" app.
Maybe not our careers, but probably our souls.
I'm reminded of the potato salad kickstarter.
Could be worse, you could be stuck working at Meta.
Building software is only a small part of any endeavour, be it a website, a PR stunt or a career.
there is no shame in just doing the building software bit. but it does sound like you've built it up to be more than it is
For each of these successes there are many failures, as evidenced by the deluge of “Show HN” slop (which is a small fraction of all vibe-coded slop).
Because these projects are simple, there’s nothing stopping you from working on one alongside your day job building meaningful software. You can vibe-code something that actually tries to solve a real problem. You can vibe-code something interesting to learn how to generally use these tools. Although, don’t expect to get hired by OpenAI or Meta (or make any money off it).
I used to work for IPOs and bonuses. I worked in interesting areas of tech. Now if I could make my mint selling hangers, I wouldn't hesitate.
they are seeking talent, not buying the product. this is a valid strategy for devs - just to attract attention no matter what.
It’s a lesson that what you think “an actual problem” and what people want to pay you for are two different things.
I've said it before, but a mexican line cook who doesn't speak english is contributing more to the world than the average Stanford educated AI engineer at Meta.
This is an awful read on this acquisition.
They didn't acquire Moltbook because of the software. Meta is far behind on the AI front especially as it applies to usage adoption. OpenClaw has begun showing new consumer use cases and Moltbook is directionally down a similar path.
They get the team that built it and have more people on the AI initiative who are consumer-centric.
I've watched Matt Schlicht from the team always experiment with cool new use cases of AI and other technologies and now him and Ben have a bigger lab with resources to potentially spawn out larger initiatives.
The lesson here is to spend less time focused on doing what you think is the right thing and spend more time tinkering.