I would bet money that most people who use CF now are already hosting their endpoints at a single provider. I don't think most people care until it actually becomes enough of a problem.
It's working too. All my friends stopped using Facebook for similar reasons. My feed went from a 24/7 pleasant reunion to a fetid swamp and now I also have stopped using it.
> I will find this often-repeated argument compelling only when someone can prove to me that the human mind works in a way that isn't 'combining stuff it learned in the past'.
I do care about it; kind of my duty as a co-founder. Which is why I'm spending double digit percentages of my time doing this stuff. But I absolutely could use some tools to cut down on a lot of the drudgery that is involved with this. And me reading through 40 pages of dense legal German isn't one of my strengths since I 1) do not speak German 2) am not a lawyer and 3) am not necessarily deeply familiar with all the bureaucracy, laws, etc.
But I can ask intelligent questions about that contract from an LLM (in English) and shoot back and forth a few things, come up with some kind of action plan, and then run it by our laywers and other advisors.
That's not some kind of hypothetical thing. That's something that happened multiple times in our company in the last few months. LLMs are very empowering for dealing with this sort of thing. You still need experts for some stuff. But you can do a lot more yourself now. And as we've found out, some of the "experts" that we relied on in the past actually did a pretty shoddy job. A lot of this stuff was about picking apart the mess they made and fixing it.
As soon as you start drafting contracts, it gets a lot harder. I just went through a process like that as well. It involves a lot of manual work that is basically about formatting documents, drafting text, running pdfs and text snippets through chat gpt for feedback, sparring, criticism, etc. and iterating on that. This is not about vibe coding some contract but making sure every letter of a contract is right. That ultimately involves lawyers and negotiating with other stakeholders but it helps if you come prepared with a more or less ready to sign off on document.
It's not about handing stuff off but about making LLMs work for you. Just like with coding tools. I care about code quality as well. But I still use the tools to save me a lot of time.
One of the lessons I learned running a startup is that it doesn't matter how good the professionals you hire are for things like legal and accounting, you still need to put work in yourself.
Everyone makes mistakes and misses things, and as the co-founder you have to care more about the details than anyone else does.
I would have loved to have weird-unreliable-paralegal-Claude available back when I was doing that!
> what they're saying is that it has gotten so bad now that the crimes are being committed constantly and in the open with no fear or worry that anything bad will ever happen.
this is all false and coming from your own echochamber. it has always been this way, just now you read to much shit on your social media feed and getting all upset how sky is falling, democracy is dying, shit real bad now…
For all my criticisms of it, I built two commercial apps in it. I worked around the issues and it was fine.
I've also built commercial apps in other stacks and they also have their warts.
What I've noticed from the other stacks, however, is that the frequency of entirely unnecessary issues is simply lower. React and NextJS aren't going anywhere and one can hope that these things will improve over time.
Ultimately, it's also a great employment guarantee, as companies will need people to maintain the apps that are constantly changing.
I think applying scepticism to Vercel and its motives is healthy, still.
