Yes, it looks similar to XState. When I built it, I didn't know of XState, but of course, I did use a lot of AI to create this, so the configuration is similar to XState.
But my plan is to see if there is opportunity with this elsewhere, orthogonal to what stately seems to be doing.
In my opinion this is a good thing. It's a really well-designed API. It's easily my favourite approach to defining state machines that I've encountered across several languages.
There are many verticals where state machines can be useful, but I think DeFi / Smart Contract is one area where I think they become more valuable, given the time it takes to implement a smart contract. Quite useful for protocol designers in the very early stages in my opinion. I was in fact designing a protocol and wanted a visual way to represent it, that's when I built this tool. I knew about mermaid, state machines, did not know about xstate.
"They suck at their jobs.", "They can't write a single paragraph in English without grammatical errors", "The people they bring over are the bottom of the barrel in India ", " have no interest in Computer Science" - Way too many generalizations IMO. There are over 100,000 employees in each of the companies, and of course some percentage of them might be what you describe, but I do have some some good friends who are good coders working there... and both the companies mentioned have billion dollars in revenues - not without a reason.
Actually I didn't know of XState when I built this, I had built this for my own workflow.
I did use AI to build this, so credits to AI for coming up with the right model, inspired by XState.
My plan is to build a slightly orthogonal version of what stately / xstate offers, even though right now it looks similar.
You can check out eigenarc.com for how I'm thinking of this.