There are enthusiasts and early adopters using this in small businesses already. In terms of "practical niche" the use case I've seen so far is "n8n but you create workflows by talking to it" aka business glue to automate idiosyncratic things.
I think HN being mostly quite technical under estimate the latent demand for ad-hoc business automation by people who know what they want to happen but aren't comfortable writing code.
You could look at it as a generic replacement for many types of AI SaaS harness. Previously if you wanted to reduce the workload of an office worker say reading work orders (that arrive in 50 different formats via email, sometimes as pdfs or behind portal links) and entering them into job control, you would need to write a custom agent harness or use a SaaS. Now you can sort of "mold" this thing like clay and get it to do the job. Instead of writing an API integration for the job control system you can just give it the openapi spec. Instead of writing your business logic in code, you can describe it in English. If you are technical, you can work with it to turn parts of the workflow into code to reduce token spend or make them more deterministic.
Naturally, it has all the disadvantages of home built automation (typically limited reproducibility, less secure, not generalised).
There's a lot of jank and risk but, hiring people can be pretty hit and miss in that regard also so for small businesses it's not as "out of distribution" as you might think.
Mostly it seems people are excited about sending a whatsapp message to it and it will turn off all the lights in their office for example. Do similarly for emails, calendars, etc. that is, of course, you’re willing to accept the Faustian bargain it presents you.
The idea of writing down all the steps required, aka way too many steps, some people love to tell you all the ways things are impossible and "you will need to do X too". When after the fact you discover X wasn't important.
The best project manager I ever had was a young woman from Russia. She came over as a student shortly after the wall fell. She was extremely hard working, very sharp, and spotted bullshit from miles away.
Legit. I think people spend too much on planning instead of focusing on getting to work and closer to the finished output. If you are fixated on a plan... good luck dealing with situations that throw you off piste.
> Salesforce acquired them and just let it die, baffling.
This is a common misconception, but it's actually not true. The reality is even more bizarre.
Most of Heroku's successful years came after the acquisition, not before. Heroku was acquired extremely early in its lifecycle, and Salesforce does actually bear responsibility for investing in it and making it the powerhouse it became. Most of what people remember as the glory days of Heroku came long after the acquisition. And in fact, at the time of acquisiton, Heroku was nowhere near as competitive as a product as it later became.
It was only much later on that Salesforce began to pull the supports out from underneath it, leaving it to fall behind and become what it is today.
The narrative of "BigCo™ acquires startup, then leaves it to wither and die" is a trope because it is very commonly true, but it's actually not what happened in this particular case.
Nothing to study. A common scenario when a mega corp acquires an incredibly successful startup and then lets it die. Happens more often than not. This is why I chuckle when I see an acquisition and the founders claim "Nothing is changing. We are not going anywhere" . There may be exceptions but the moment a hugely successful company like heroku gets acquired, you know it's most likely game over. To their credit, they survived 15 years after acquisition but barely.
Often "nothing is changing" ends up being more literal than the founders realize or intend. Acquisitions by big companies tend to slow the development to a crawl as development bureaucracy takes over. When a great product is practically frozen in time it stops being great in 5-15 years as the rest of the world passes them by.
They had lightning in a bottle because they had an amazing developer experience… and gave everyone free compute and data transfer.
So much of the value was already delivered in that simple `git push heroku master` which gave you a container + load balancer + a database. The vast majority of people didn’t need more. And of those that were left that did far too few of them were willing to suddenly start paying $32/mo per dyno (you just gave me one for free! I only want one more!) or make the jump to multiple hundreds of dollars for a database.
Read any of the threads about Heroku over the years. The biggest complaint is always “it’s too expensive”. Even when a large percentage of what was on people’s bills were add-ons like databases, new relic, redis, logging, etc (i.e., not Heroku).
And the company I worked for hired a full devops team to save us like 5 grand per month on Heroku, only to end up with a much worse developer experience.
This problem one doesn't have, if one pays attention to devops from the start, maybe keeping 1 or 2 capable devops people, who keep things lean. Problem is of course finding the capable ones with the right mindset to keep things as simple and lean as possible.
The result of suddenly needing to hire devops should be to get a convenient setup, but then do you really still need the whole devops team? And if you don't, then hiring them for limited time might come at a cost (hiring freelancers or consultants).
I remember feeling the same way about Slicehost back in the day after Rackspace acquired them. Loved Slicehost. Not too long after though, Digital Ocean appeared with everything I loved about Slicehost and has kept getting better ever since.
I feel like that's Fly.io now. They took all of the great things about Heroku but also dramatically improved and added new capabilities...while improving on pricing, particularly for lower traffic stuff. Love Fly.
I was working for Slicehost at the time, we were a tiny team working our butts off in a loft office in downtown St. Louis, with a few remote employees.
To my understanding there was a runway-growth problem. Could the founders raise and spend (efficiently) enough money quickly enough to keep the business viable? It would be a big gamble and the alternatives were to shut down (no way!) or sell. So they sold.
Rackspace wanted to take Matt’s and Jason’s know how (plus customer base) and go big, really big! That defocused our efforts a bit, plus there were corporate integration headaches (though not too bad). Eventually Linode, already a competitor, and later Digital Ocean filled the void.
All I can say is thank you. I learned to manage servers because of Slicehost and the articles on it back then.
I remember being excited by the merger because well, Rackspace had such a fantastic reputation at the time. People still tell stories about their service. The Rackspace Cloud was just up against an absolute monster in AWS and never really became competitive.
Thank you for the kind words, brought back some fun and interesting memories. I spent a lot of time helping to write and edit those articles, as did my coworkers, glad they helped you!
Not sure why people love fly.io over all the other competitors so much. I myself prefer render.com, for the simplicity and predictability of their billing, and their deployment model is so intuitive
> They took all of the great things about Heroku but also dramatically improved and added new capabilities
I also love Fly, but they were missing easy managed databases (which always seemed like the main reason to use Heroku to me). And now they have them they're very expensive (even compared to Heroku). Which is a shame because their compute is very cheap.
If there was one thing we would all decide differently here at Fly.io, like if you gave us a time machine, is how we did databases. Someday Kurt and I will write the post about how those decisions came to pass and how they played out.
We're doing Managed Postgres now (MPG), which is what we should have done to begin with, but it took us for-ev-er to get here.
What is there to be studied? Once a company is acquired you bounce. There is usually a two year grace period before you start feeling the pain as a customer, which should give you the time to migrate.
Then what do i move to? No linux laptop feels as good to touch as the aluminum macbooks, and in terms of phones it can't get any worse than the ads-and-trackers shitshow that is android...
CachyOS on a 200-300 USD Intel n100 tablet with a wired or wireless keyboard of your choice is my go-to recommendation these days. I have one connected to a 4k display and it handles 4k YouTube just fine. It handles Windsurf as well. By comparison, Debian 13 could not handle 4k video and Windsurf overtaxed the system, causing write access errors.
I know that Windows 11 doesn't get a ton of love on HN, but I have successfully replaced my M1 MacBook Air with a Surface Laptop 7. The build quality is great, and I even think that the Surface's haptic trackpad is superior. However, I don't think anything on the market beats the Macbook's speaker quality.
Not only that but it's also quite difficult to find a laptop with an ANSI keyboard in an ISO country. My choices are basically an overpriced new Macbook (MacOS is the main con here), an overpriced new Thinkpad (brand new ones are horrible value since it tanks just a year after purchase), a Clevo (much worse build quality and questionable Linux support), or a Framework (worse build quality and mediocre battery life). As much as I hate MacOS, my M1 Macbook is still better at just being a light machine I can take anywhere and be working with immediately, while still lasting over an entire workday regardless of what I do. I really wish that Lenovo would fix their X9 Gen1 Linux support as those laptops are basically what I'd run if I could have proper support.
my goodness we lived with plastic thinkpads for decades and many of us still happily do. this fetish for "premium" hardware to be replaced every two years by the newest hottest thing (if that's not you: great, the planet thanks you) is just plain weird from the outside.
"We" didn't do anything. Nobody is replacing their MacBooks every two years; those machines are tanks and are profoundly overspecced for most users' needs.
I don't know about you but I really don't want my laptop to be the hottest thing, it sits on my lap.
My thinkpad is from 2017, but I bought it in 2022, it's still working fine - I upgraded the memory to 32G (£70) and I've replaced the battery twice (once when I bought it, once a couple of months ago). When I replace it it will likely be because of hardware failure (droppping it etc).
I love my plastic ThinkPad, but it's also nice to use good-feeling hardware with a good haptic trackpad. It doesn't need to be replaced every two years. To each their own!
I would recommend fighting the 'oh it needs to FEEL premium' feeling. It doesn't, you're just spoile by companies who know exactly how to sell you crap specially designed to just feel nice. You're being played like a fiddle by marketing departments.
MacBooks are nice but: priorities. If the choice is between avoiding selling out your brain to adtech, tracking and AI slop baked into the OS or having something that feels good to touch then bring me the e-waste bin and let me fish out some creaky plastic garbage with a 768p TN panel that I can slap Debian on. I care about nice hardware, but I don't care that much.
It doesn't even feel good. My recollection (having used a Macbook for work for a few years) is that they have aluminium shells with sharp edges that would irritate my wrists. That never happens with a soft plastic shell like a Thinkpad.
They'll look good, work well (from hardware perspective), and you can replace their built-in Windows OS with the Linux flavor/edition of your choice.
By the way, if ultraportable is your idea of laptop nirvana, you can try...
Samsung made awesome AI-powered laptops (the Samsung Galaxy Book5 and Book6), I got the Book5 few months back for my friend's son. It is sleek, lightweight and powerful.
> Samsung Book5 - Internal Speakers not working on linux
Also, it caps out at 32GiB of ram, I feel like these days that's pretty low for anyone who uses javascript heavy webpages. Like, my firefox on linux is currently using 42GiB of memory, and that's with under 200 tabs open, and then when I build my nixos config, that usually takes another 10-20GiB of memory
Don't get any gaming laptop. Some of them are truly bottom of the barrel slop and it really matters that you do your research. (See, for instance, NuclearNotebook reviews on YouTube)
Maybe in current era of skyrocketing prices of memory & storage components (due to mindboggling demand by AI-driven tech industry), I would agree that budget gaming laptops are not worth the value.
But for decades, I have found that gaming laptops (decent brands and popular models) gave best bang for buck, especially with AMD hardware.
My 12+ years old Lenovo gaming laptop is still going strong, and my 15+ years old Sony Viao netbook is also doing well (with SATA SSD and RAM upgrades few years ago).
But yeah, read/check up on the reviews (from reputed reviewers) before splurging for an expensive laptop.
One nifty trick to identify VFM(value for money) laptops is to check Amazon site/app for "Smartchoice" laptops. It is a special keyword that Amazon adds to listings of popular laptops that are VFM (best deals) and having good reviews.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
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