YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Yeah, if we're done working on it, why are we continuing to work on it? That makes no sense.

Whiteboarding is the main thing I do in my AI build processes outside of Claude - if they can do it native + multiplayer, it's going to be a huge UX improvement for a lot of users.

Why does it show that? Maybe they have tens of billions of dollars and the bandwidth to do more.

I expect that Anthropic will have success in some of their side hustles if they're reinforced by the model ecosystem and double down on them, but you should also expect that at some point in the future we will talk about the "Anthropic Graveyard".

Nobody is replacing excel anywhere.

They are shifting to building stuff for agents, not for humans.

Now it'll be harder to do the same for word and harder still for excel, but word is doable, and claude can build one off tools better than excel can, so I definitely think that MS should be wary.

Omarchy? yep.

Figma is the default for teams but is losing a lot of stickiness.

I don't see people switching to Claude sheets overnight & the messaging from anthropic will likely become less effusive over time (short-/medium-term). But I'd be surprised if this doesn't make significant inroads in the long-term.

I don't think there is a reasonable expectation that these new tools will simply end Google Workspace. Google are going to be just fine to do whatever they want with their stuff, and they have the customers.

Anthropic can just do this for a new generation of people and businesses, and establish themselves here over time.

So yes, not dead and clearly good for people who want that additional layer of control, but also nowhere where it used to be.

What these tools are generally missing is a way for the user to "fix stuff" that isnt just prompting. Once they add things like that, added to model improvements... it's just going to be a cost story: which one is cheaper.

For me, this is simply a first-party UI for Claude. So they have better control over the presentation layer + some extra features on top.

It's not meant to be equivalent to Google Sheets or Excel.

Initially they were adopted by customers with the simplest use cases and the products grew over time to what they are.

The next set of startups might just have a Claude sub when they are small and grow with the product

I don’t see myself ever using an off-the-shelf analytics package again.

OpenAI did something similar with Sales Assistant last year. Haven't heard of anyone using it.

A typical workflow is: connect via MCP to some data source. Do some stats, transformations, etc. Put the data in a format that Claude understands or will understand better later. Make a UI/story out of it. Keep track of your "things" through visualizations.

Been using this worlflow extensively now. This is their easy wall garden.

They absolutely are. Maybe not quickly (let's face it, Excel users are not sprightly), but this is absolutely going to displace Gsuite, and any Excel users who were thinking of moving to it.

I expect Google will respond.

And the story repeats. Google had a 20-year lead in search and LLM definitely has threatened it.

Reality is, the crazy valuation given to frontier labs will push them to capture more of the value chain, to make it harder for customers to switch models. Having a best-in-class model is not defensible, long term.

No company that need that level of data ingest and analysis is using Anthropic's tooling over something that is used industry wide.

The rest of the world moves on using LLMs as tools.

Anthropic is eventually bought and stripped for parts.

“Please remove this page break I can’t figure out how to get rid of and someone else added”

Co-pilot: “Sorry I’m unable to do that but you can follows these same instructions you can find on the Internet to accomplish that”.

Claude: “I will literally rebuild Word from the ground up to solve this problem if that’s what it takes (but here is how to actually solve your problem), oh and do you want this exported in the best format for this software, this other software, or in these 15 file formats? Oh I don’t have native capabilities for that format - ok let’s build a script and convert….”

You get the picture. Competition is here, and it will get even better. Many SaaS companies will die. Good. Many of them only delivered short-term value solving artificial constrains or gaps in software.

I suspect the goal is partly starting a walled garden.

"Llms are interchangeable? Our harness/toolset isn't".

It's a way to get a moat I guess.

It doesn't sound like a business for the scale they're aiming for though. Taking a bite of the MS office's pie doesn't seem to me like a trillion dollar company move.

Dots in particular display some insidious methodology, they've hidden the "programmable" portions of an agent. They want to make it 'magic' (all your work goes through a single tool) but... that's pretty much exactly what businesses DON'T want. We need to see what it's doing, accessing, working with, underlying data, etc... It's an explicit business requirement for us.

The more they can 'hide' what the backend does, the harder it is to get away from the product.

Buuuuut, I don't think it's going to work. I can still export it somehow if I want to, and it would probably take 10-15 minutes... The whole point of these agents is that they're 'plug and play' with whatever technology you want.

And if they don't build them this way, someone will whip up an open source version that does it cheaper and more transparently in a couple of weeks.

Software being free now hits both of these companies exactly where they want protection.

Well, isn't that the natural end result of an AGI?

No more software, no more deciding what apps you need. It's all just Claude. Except now you're pulling 10kW to add up a column of numbers.

I think thats more like: "We'll build anything and everything into Claude eventually with the statistical median level of vibe-coded features."

That might work for some use cases but I doubt serious Excel nerds are going to drop it because Claude has a spreadsheet like tool.

And why share data when you can own it?