Independent founders

WasStart with Opus. I'd say start with Opus. It's the best frontier model.

NowBut to answer your question, the best model in general right now is Fable. The second-best model, in my opinion, is Opus 5.

On changing their mindWhen I was instructing the agent, I was like, "Oh my God, Kimi's just as good as these other models."

On changing their mindI thought all the ideas would originate with the humans. They would tell their agents what to build, and off they went.

WasI think I've been coding almost solely on my VPS with Claude Code for almost a year now

NowI won't use SnekAI but I'll probably switch to @xAI soon

WasI think the challenge is that everyone can now build apps But 1) almost nobody has distribution (like an audience), or 2) the money to pay for distribution (ads or UGC), or 3) the creative genius to get distribution for free (classically called guerilla marketing)

NowI thought it'd be distribution but who knows, obviously creativity and ideas, but if you can copy a successful app in an hour, then how does that differentiating work?

WasI know this from experience because I've been trying to build a lot of other businesses since. And some of them have been moderate successes, even good successes, none of them have been Basecamp. It's really difficult to do that twice.

NowAnd I have no shame in saying that Base Camp was the best idea objectively in terms of a business that we've ever had.

WasBut I have come to realize that as a web developer, Linux is just better. Linux is just better. It's closer to what I deploy on. The tooling is actually phenomenal.

Nowanyone who's working with the web, who's working with Ruby, who's doing DevOps, they should be on Linux because first of all, that's closer to what we deploy.

WasMojito Island is a mirage. It always was. There is no retirement for ambitious people. There is no just sitting back on the beach and sipping a mojito for what? For two weeks before you go damn crazy and wanna get back into the action?

NowI think that's the other big misconception that some people have about wealth is that they conceive of it as some sort of checkpoint. Like once you've made it, then you can just kick back in leisure as though that was happiness.

WasIt may no longer have as much economic value as it once did. I think that I'm quite convinced is true that we perhaps have seen the peak.

NowSo, I do think it is correct for the average programmer to think maybe we've seen the best of the golden days.

WasThe joy of a programmer, of me as a programmer, is to type the code myself. If I elevate myself, if I promote myself out of programming, I turn myself into a project manager. A project manager of a murder of AI crows as I wrote the other day.

NowI have been hyper accelerated as a programmer. It's a different kind of programmer, but it still has the same affinity to aesthetics, at least when I'm producing Ruby code.