dbuxton (u/dbuxton) - Readit News

dbuxton commented on AI is killing B2B SaaS nmn.gl/blog/ai-killing-b2... · Posted by u/namanyayg

What the authors of this kind of doomer-type articles do not realize is that B2B software companies have the data that their customers pay for, and they also have access to the AI tools themselves, meaning they can accelerate in adding new features to their products, making them more competitive.

It's a fallacy to consider the bad performance of software stocks as a definite sign that AI is going to replace them. One needs to factor financials into the equation to explain a downtrend. Take Figma for example, spending 109 mil on AWS bills, cutting through their margins. Investors know that such costs do not simply go down due to the vendor lock-in companies experience when using cloud services.

Claude Code is good, but definitely far away from being able to vibe code Figma.

dbuxton · a month ago

I think the corrective to this is that many of these incumbents will fail to re-conceive their product stack from a user-centric perspective, and as a result they will be reduce to just a dumb data layer which is easily swappable.

Sure, they could do that, but the cultural change required is an order of magnitude harder than just sticking an agent on top of their source-of-truth and believing that the problem is solved.

Maybe it works for areas where the application is a relatively self-contained island of productivity. Figma is somewhere that a designer spends a lot of their day, so it's going to be less vulnerable, but most pieces of softare fit into broader workflows. So for Figma the disruptor is less likely to be "AI-powered designer" and more "AI-powered web builder" - e.g. Lovable or even Claude Code itself that just generates great designs.

dbuxton commented on Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native theregister.com/2026/01/3... · Posted by u/jamesblonde

deaux · 2 months ago

Everyone talking about rules and regulations being a blocker to EU software sovereignty is completely clueless. Unfortunately a lot of these people are actually European but they've drank the decades of US koolaid.

There are about 200 countries in this world. 195 of them are as of today reliant on foreign-controlled software to a similar degree, which is "completely and utterly in every facet, across consumer, business and government levels".

Let's talk about the other 4 then (excluding the US), with varying degrees. One of them has magnitudes more government interference than the EU. Another one also has both more government interference and stricter rules and regulations, both in terms of labor laws and things like data privacy - even stricter than GDPR. The third one has less of this, but still much more of it than the US, and has the lowest sovereignty level out of the four.

I've talked about three, that leaves the fourth. The fourth one is Russia.

dbuxton · 2 months ago

I played this in my head a few times and don’t get it.

I assume we are talking

- China - maybe South Korea? - US (or is US not one of the 4?) - Russia (ok this is explicit)

I think there might be an interesting idea in here but there is some confusion that’s stopping it coming out

Can someone enlighten me?

dbuxton commented on Model Market Fit nicolasbustamante.com/p/m... · Posted by u/nbstme

dbuxton · 2 months ago

The flip side of this is that if model capabilities are extremely strong such that they are able to saturate the benchmarks, the differentiation and defensibility of a wrapper solution built on top are significantly reduced.

IANAL but e.g. Claude Cowork is already good enough that it's hard to see how the legal tech startups are going to differentiate except around access controls, visual presentation of workflows, etc. And that's in a heavily enterprise/compliance-aware/security-focused context.

Don't get me wrong, that's still a big "except" - big enough for massive companies to be built. Personally the anxiety of being so close to being squashed by the foundation models would make me unhappy as an entrepreneur but looking at the market it seems like many people have a higher risk tolerance.

dbuxton commented on EU–INC – A new pan-European legal entity eu-inc.org/... · Posted by u/tilt

dbuxton · 2 months ago

Of all the challenges you face as a startup, the legal entity you choose is possibly the least consequential. Just choose a jurisdiction where investors understand how the legals work (Delaware C-corp, UK Ltd is OK too) and there's a finite administrative burden and/or commoditized tooling in place to help you handle it.

Now, that may not work in all jurisdictions for reasons of local taxation etc (and you'll have to work out payroll tax, benefits etc) but that's almost never anything to do with the legal entity type!

dbuxton commented on De-dollarization: Is the US dollar losing its dominance? (2025) jpmorgan.com/insights/glo... · Posted by u/andsoitis

omgJustTest · 2 months ago

Currencies fundamentally relate to some trust.

I believe that the near-term de-dollarization isn't as much trust erosion as it is a tool to provide monetary penalty for behaving in unpredictable ways.

However it will provide incentive to move away from the dollar in the long-term, ie as Fareed Zakaria says "recent actions are accelerating the world to the multipolar future".

dbuxton · 2 months ago

> I believe that the near-term de-dollarization isn't as much trust erosion as it is a tool to provide monetary penalty for behaving in unpredictable ways.

How is that different from trust erosion?

dbuxton commented on Ask HN: What did you read in 2025? · Posted by u/kwar13

dbuxton · 3 months ago

Loved “The Winds of War” and “War and Remembrance” by Herman Wouk - middlebrow from the 70s but no less good for that.

Re-read “The Art of Not Being Governed” by James C Scott which is really mind-expanding stuff.

dbuxton commented on OpenSCAD is kinda neat nuxx.net/blog/2025/12/20/... · Posted by u/c0nsumer

cpeth · 3 months ago

Check out https://zoo.dev/

I went from OpenSCAD -> cadquery/build123d -> Zoo/KCL

It still is early days, and it needs some more helper functions but it's really nice having two-way capabilities (not just code -> model, but also the reverse).

Of course having Text-to-model as a first class citizen is also nice.

dbuxton · 3 months ago

I have played with this but been underwhelmed. However I do think probably on the right track.

I know the ecosystem not-at-all (sum total knowledge of the CAD ecosystem is that my kids got a Bambu printer for Hanukkah) but it feels to me that current LLMs should be able to generate specs for something like https://partcad.readthedocs.io/en/latest/, which can then be sliced etc.

Curious to know what others think? I come at this from the position of zero interest in developing the fine design skills needed to master but wanting to be able to build and tweak basic functional designs.

dbuxton commented on Ask HN: How are you LLM-coding in an established code base? · Posted by u/adam_gyroscope

giancarlostoro · 3 months ago

> AFAICT, there’s no service that lets me: give a prompt, write the code, spin up all this infra, run Playwright, handle database migrations, and let me manually poke at the system. We approximate this with GitHub Actions, but that doesn’t help with manual verification or DB work.

What you want is CI/CD that deploys to rotating stating or dev environments per PR before code is merged.

If deployment fails you do not allow the PR to be approved. Did this for a primarily React project we had before but you can do all your projects, you just need temporary environments that rotate per PR.

dbuxton · 3 months ago

I used to love Heroku review apps!

dbuxton commented on Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration ankursethi.com/blog/gemin... · Posted by u/speckx

asim · 3 months ago

Unfortunately Google's problem is the product is dictated by the architecture of the APIs and this is an issue for anything they do. At one point long ago every Google product was disjointed and Larry Page told everyone they needed to be unified under a single theme and login. Then over time with the scale of the company you become entirely dependent on the current workflows. To work around it, all of a sudden there's a new UI for a new product and it looks super clean right until you try do something with that login or roles or an API key that has to effectively jailbreak the flow you're in. Painful. It's why startups win. Small, nimble, none of that legacy cruft to deal with. Whoever is working hard to fix these problems at Google KUDOS TO YOU because it's not easy. It's not easy to wrangle these systems across hundreds of teams, products and infrastructure. The unification and seamless workflow at that scale is painfully hard to achieve and the issue is entirely about operating within the limitations of the system but for good reason.

I hope they figure out a lot of the issues but at the same time, I hope Gemini just disappears back into products rather than being at the forefront, because I think that's when Google does it's best work.

dbuxton · 3 months ago

> The unification and seamless workflow at that scale is painfully hard to achieve

It does make you wonder, why not just be a lot smaller? It's not like most of these teams actually generate any revenue. It seems like a weird structural decision which maybe made sense when hoovering up available talent was its own defensive moat but now that strategy is no longer plausible should be rethought?

dbuxton commented on Manual: Spaces type.today/en/journal/spa... · Posted by u/doener

dbuxton · 3 months ago

One thing I find interesting about discussions of typography in Cyrillic is how poor the overall readability of text is in most fonts compared to Latin because of the relative scarcity of risers and descenders (e.g. pqlt etc)

One of my tutors at university claimed that she was able to read 9th century manuscript Cyrillic faster than modern printed books because the orthography was more varied and easier to scan/speed-read.

(That wasn't something I found to be true)