It's wild to me that Jetbrains has been making so many top-tier IDEs, languages, runtimes and other developer products for 25 years now and is valued at maybe $5B, meanwhile we have months-old "pre-revenue" startups releasing AI coding wrappers and raising money or being bought out for twice that.
- Generating revenue from customers is about more than just creating a great product. You also have to reach lots of customers and convince them of your value. Many naive idealists think only product matters (or should matter), and neglect distribution. But most people eventually come to understand that both are necessary, and that this is practically a law of physics, not something to moralize about. (FWIW JetBrains is quite good generating revenue, and I'm fairly certain their revenue dwarfs that of Cursor and Windsurf.)
- Whoever is paying you is your customer, no matter what alternative word we use for it. If you're an employee, your customer is your "employer." If you're being acquired, your customer is your "acquirer."
- In most cases, acquirers are playing the role of investor. Investors value returns. If you want to provide value for an acquirer, then, you need to convince them of the future value of your business should it be acquired. That's usually best done through growth trajectories.
- It's perfectly valid to continue generating revenue year after year without being acquired for eye-watering sums. It's a waste of your emotional energy to become jealous or indignant when others get acquired or succeed with less work. Good for them, just keep doing you. That also goes for the rest of us in the peanut gallery. We don't need to attack recent successes to defend the honor of our favorite incumbents.
When analyzing the value of a young, pre revenue company, one of the things you want to look it is how established comparable companies are valued. For AI coding assistants, the field is too young to do that directly. However, they are competing in the space of "developer productivity tool for writing code". That space is an established market that is currently dominated by IDEs.
Seeing young companies which are pre-revenue, which are competing for an unproven yet crowded sub market (AI coding assistant) out value an established incumbent in the larger space does not compute.
Add to this the fact that there is very little moat for AI coding assistants. Assuming the market as a whole proves itself, there is a very good chance that the winners will be the established incumbent IDEs who can add AI assistance as a feature in their established products.
All of that is to say, current AI valuations in this space look a lot like a bubble.
This analysis framework you're providing would've missed YouTube (pre-revenue; no incumbent successes; crowded with competitors like Google Video, Metacafe, Vimeo, etc). It would've missed Instagram (pre-revenue; no massive photo-focused incumbents; tons of competing photo sharing apps in the App Store at the time; no moat against a big social app adding filters). It probably. would've missed WhatsApp. And many others.
Which suggests that your framework is lacking.
Here's where:
1. You're neglecting to look at the differences between the fast-rising stars and the comparable incumbents, and instead you're assuming that the incumbents automatically represent a ceiling. In this particular case, JetBrains obviously isn't the most ambitious company on the planet, and isn't focused on hyper growth. There are plenty of avenues for AI IDEs to grow and expand their revenue that have yet to be explored.
2. You're overestimating the importance of concrete moats. Google had no concrete moat either. Just because people can switch easily doesn't mean they necessarily will.
3. These companies aren't pre-revenue. I believe JetBrains is making something like $400-$500 million dollars a year, after 25 years. Cursor is at half of that in just 2 years. Windsurf is also doing big numbers.
4. Related to #3, you're underestimating growth trajectories.
5. You're leaving out the context. Companies that can afford to make $3B acquisitions (a) have tremendous war chests, and (b) have extremely ambitious goals. They're not looking to build the next JetBrains, they're looking to join the pantheon of $1T companies. Achieving massive 10x or 100x or 1000x growth as an investor/owner requires making asymmetrical bets -- bets where if you lose you're still okay, but if you win, you win big.
Reading a bit between the lines, it seems like the buyers either 1) think that ai assisted coding will get good enough that a lot more people will be doing it - that in the future companies in other fields will spend on it for their employees much the way they are paying for general ai assistants now. Or 2) more likely, they think they will get good enough to completely replace programmers, and the current coding assistant's role is mainly to gather information from developers to eventually replace them completely, by selling a spinoff product at a much higher price. They think they need spyware, and coding assistants are the best version available.
I believe the key thing you are missing here is that there is probably an expectation that AI based coding tools will be more mass market, rather than traditional developer market.
ie it's a mistake to estimate the potential upside by looking at the size of the current developer market.
As you move you're coding tools towards a less technical customer base - there are two synergistic effects - your potential customer base is much much larger, and they are simultaneously less technically competent on average ( and so less likely to build their own tools if you charge too much ).
Whether those assumptions are true - time will tell - but I definitely see more people thinking software development is now accessible to them.
- Whoever is paying you is your customer, no matter what alternative word we use for it. If you're an employee, your customer is your "employer." If you're being acquired, your customer is your "acquirer."
That is none-sens.
If that were true, all profits would go to the customers. No, you are hired because the company and its owners can extract the profits from your work. Laying you off could mean nothing to customers, but even more profits to them.
> "If that were true, all profits would go to the customers."
Why? What does that mean?
> No, you are hired because the company and its owners can extract the profits from your work. Laying you off could mean nothing to customers, but even more profits to them
Nothing you said here changes the fact that your employer is your customer, paying for your services. If you don't see it that way, it's to your own detriment.
Almost everyone here is providing business value in service of these rules of the universe. Those who aren't in cost centers probably need to reflect on this reality more.
It's not a waste of emotional energy to consider how to convert a company from the $5-billion slow and steady type to the $10-billion instant acquisition type. Indeed the premise of our economic system is that maximum value is created when people continually strive to maximize the values of their companies.
Yes, and what an unstable and cannibalistic system that is! That's why some of us prefer not to sell/go public, instead opting for stable albeit less income. As another comment said, I don't need a third house or car collection. My one house is plenty, and I'm already in a position most of the country can only dream about.
It doesn't matter whether you like the system or not. It is the system, and you will be punished for not following it. In this case, by an opportunity cost of 5 billion dollars and several years. If you think you can change the system, try it and see what happens.
I'm good, thanks. the 5 billion can just stay with whoever wants them. It is this madness of "opportunity cost" that is ruining us, the idea that this is a game and optimal "play" for a single piece is desirable.
"If you show revenue, people will ask how much and it will never be enough. The company that was the 100x or 1000xer becomes the 2x dog. But if you have no revenue, you can say you're pre-revenue; you're a potential pure play. It's not about how much you earn, it's about how much you're worth. And who's worth the most? Companies that lose money."
It's a quote from a character from the TV show Silicon Valley. Russ Hanneman is a SV billionaire who made a lot of money putting "radio on the internet". He's intentionally a wild card character acting as if he has enormous business insight while often being at least partially if not fully wrong in his ideas. It's a parody of SV business ventures not having any real plan to make the business profitable, they're just wanting to show crazy growth in metrics like user counts to justify extreme valuations to sell the company and walk away before the music stops. "I don't want to make a little bit of money every day, I want to make a fuck ton of money all at once."
The next couple of lines:
"Pintrest, Snapchat, no revenue. Amazon has lost money for every fucking quarter for the last 20 fucking years and that Jeff Bezos is the king"
The wildest part is that JetBrains has their own AI coding tools and they seem to be very good.
They also have a pre-built customer base to sell them to.
I do think they have a perception issue with devs whose perspective on their products was crystallized back in the 2010s when they were using some old company laptop with 8GB of RAM when they could feel too heavy. With a modern laptop I just don’t care at all if my IDE takes up a few gigs of RAM.
JetBrains also ranks well on things like low-latency input, which surprises a lot of people. They do seem to care about developer experience.
I have truly loved using Jetbrains IDEs for Java, Go, Typescript and have subscribed to the full toolkit at personal expense for many years (it was the grandfathered pretty cheap price that ends this year). But when trying to use it for Python, the code intelligence was so poor I finally gave VSCode a try. It was much better at Python analysis at the time though I assume Pycharm has improved since then. But I'm not going back - Jetbrains still tends to have better refactoring, good features like running individual Go table tests, etc. But it's a killer feature for me in a team to be able to share a workspace or settings JSON file in a repo to get all developers on the same page. .idea has never worked well and I suspect most people assume it won't work.
If Jetbrains reimagines their settings persistence story, I'd be happy to give that a try since otherwise it's quite great still!
I am using their free product, IntelliJ CE (community edition). I simply couldn’t get used to VS code and its AI derivatives.
Possibly an interesting data point is that my company pays for every engineers’ Cursor usage, can’t imagine how much it could cost, but they don’t have any encouraged integration with JetBrains… so while JetBrains products are good, I’m wondering if Cursor simply has a better sales team and hype pushing them to higher valuations
They have such a nice product! But every release comes with almost the same number of bugfixes and new bugs. I wish it was a more stable product and they were more cautious about adding new features. Every new feature comes with the risk of adding more bugs.
I feel that. I have very mixed feelings about updates of products, and Jetbrains is no exception. It's a mix of "maybe this and that has been improved" and "they probably added a bunch of things I really don't want and have to fight for a day to get rid of".
Granted, they're not the worst offenders. When I read that Jira has been updated, I need to work up the courage to look at it because I expect it to just be worse on every level.
You have the option to not update in place. Download the new version and keep the old one too, then test the new version, if they broke your workflow go back to the old version until the bugs are fixed.
I don't agree with your assessment, but I want to encourage you to raise bug tickets on YouTrack (their answer to Jira). In the last 10 years, I have had more than 100 (no joke!) of my bug tickets fixed by JetBrains. If you write a good description with a min-repro, they will fix it.
> I wish it was a more stable product
Can you give a specific example of a bug that you encountered?
I can't get how poetry support problems were introduced. They have made new patch release just before Christmas holidays which introduced major problem (IDE periodically updates package lock file). It took them 3 months to fix it. After a few weeks they reintroduced the bug and said that it is feature and added registry option to revert to old functionality. I still do not understand what is the reason for updating package lock file.
Not the parent, but I have to agree with them. I'm a steadfast IntelliJ user, but every release seems to break something different.
I almost always file a report, many of which remain unresolved. In several cases I've reported bugs that are promptly marked as a duplicate of a years-old bug. For example:
All three relate to what I would call core functionality, rather some rare, niche language feature. They all disproportionately affect my daily use. How can a serious company let bugs like these hang around, not for one week, or two weeks, or a month, but three years?
My guess from the amount of churn in YouTrack is they're churning out too many features creating more bugs at a higher rate than they can fix them, and are simply overwhelmed, and their triage process must be deprioritizing a lot of basic stuff.
My most recent bug: After upgrading to 2025.1, the IDE freezes completely 1-2 times a day, requiring a force quit. I reported the bug 10 days ago, collecting all the output they ask for in such cases, and all I've gotten are crickets. https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-371932/IDE-freezes...
It doesn't usually take a too much code - usually around 20,000 lines - where I personally am not able to think my way through debugging complex failures. Tombstoning code only gets you so far (and is a useful skill). Being able to step through code and jump around symbol references is a huge help for my limited powers.
If you have fully memorized all of Linux and GLibC and all your supporting libraries then yeah, I guess you don't need powerful tools.
> Editors like VS Code even, while have some conveniences built in, update every five minutes it seems.
Since I dont need updates every 5 minutes, I disable the update checker if on Windows, and just don't update my software stack all of the time as it inconveniences me.
> The wildest part is that JetBrains has their own AI coding tools and they seem to be very good.
Which one?
Last time I checked JetBrains' AI tool and it was laughably bad compared to Copilot. My bar was quite low already as I hadn't even used Cursor by the time.
Edit: What I tried is "JetBrains AI Assistant". I haven't tried Junie yet.
I've been using IntelliJ IDEA and similar products for almost 10 years, and I'm not impressed.
Java/Kotlin is their main thing, and yet neither Maven nor Gradle builds are stable. If your build fails or there are some unresolved dependencies, you restart IDE in hope it works...
AI coding tool trial failed for me -- IDE told me it's not activated even after I activated it on billing portal. And doc implied it might take some time. WTF. Does it take some batch processing?..
People who were able to get AI coding tools working said it's way behind Cursor (although improving, apparently).
There's something severely wrong with your setup if you can't get stable maven or gradle builds, and your AI problem... maybe it was really early right after release? Either way, contact their support.
And if "If your build fails or there are some unresolved dependencies" you check your dependencies and config.
I'm tired of people complaining and not trying to understand how their systems (or an IDE for that matter) work.
Because JetBrains products DO have issues, but rest assured, the things you are complaining about are on the main path of basic features they take care of the most.
Source: at first reluctant but now happy IntelliJ user, after thinking for a long time that Eclipse/Netbeans would be better. I was wrong.
> There's something severely wrong with your setup if you can't get stable maven or gradle builds
To be fair with OP, I had a similar experience in the previous company. Sometimes after bumping a dependency or something, even if you asked IntelliJ to "Reload All Gradle Projects" something wouldn't work and I needed to restart the IDE. Not saying it was common, but it did happen. This was a Kotlin codebase.
Now working in a company using Scala, I had a few cases where IntelliJ failed to resolve a dependency correctly so it was saying that the class I just created didn't exist (this was in shared library and two different dependencies pulled it, but we did pin the dependency directly and sbt was building it correctly, it was only IntelliJ that was becoming confused). Cleaning up the build sometimes worked, sometimes didn't, but even when it worked it would go back after a while. Eventually we updated all dependencies in all projects and it now always works, but it was painful for a while.
Look, I understand that IntelliJ is better than Eclipse. Eclipse is just bad. (E.g. if you open existing workspace with a newer version of Eclipse it crashes - a problem they haven't fixed for 20 years!!!)
But I can tell you IntelliJ has way more issues than e.g. Visual Studio I used 20+ years ago.
Counterpoint from me: I've been using Jetbrains tools for over 10 years as well. Mostly Webstorm and Rider and it's all working well. Sometimes there are bugs, yes, but I had plenty those in VSCode and Visual Studio as well.
Aside from their initial AI plugin rollout fiasco it has been smooth sailing for me.
Integrate it over time and you'll get a different result: JetBrains will still be with us 20 years from now, while these "AI" startups will go the way of NFTs and blockchain long before that.
I believe that's why the comment author put "AI" in quotation marks. There's a massive amount of fraud around "AI" right now, as there always is in the startup scene with a hot new technology.
there is still a distinction as the field itself is not a hoax, which I can't say the same about NFT.
Unless you prefer to think of the AI field as representable by a bunch of Indians actually behind software, as the sibling (insincerely and again lazily) reduces it to.
Where am I reducing an entire field to anything? If one truthfully says there's a bunch of companies doing this or that, that associate AI with fraud, that's not the same as reducing an entire field to fraud.
Engineers that want to run startups need to stop denouncing fields they don't like as "fraud". Some people made more money than you. Learn from them and it could be you next time.
Nobody in Russia who valued their business chose to incorporate it—or at least its parent company—in Russia. After Yukos, the writing was on the wall. (And now, of course, everybody who values their business takes pains to point out their chosen country of incorporation as though it wasn’t originally just a saner jurisdiction. As you’ve shown, everybody does it because it works.) JetBrains specifically did employ a fair number of both Russians and Ukrainians, though, and unlike Yandex or mobile carriers, was not prominent enough to be forced to split immediately after 2014, so it was inevitable they would have to move out of Russia (and they did so pretty gracefully).
There are no native Czech speakers in their management. It's a similar story as the Yandex guys going off to Nebius Group in the Netherlands after the invasion.
Sure, but they're not a Russian legal entity and as far as I can see never have been (unlike Yandex). So, to the point that their being a Russian entity might be a problem for investors, it's moot, as they are not one.
Presumably, if you wanted to stick the boot in on Russia, a decent way to do that is to encourage smart, economically productive Russians to incorporate outside Russia and attract as many young capable Russians to come with them as possible.
It's not us lumping AI together with fraud. It's the companies employing, for example, Actually Indians to do things they claim are done by machine. Or the ones marketing ChatGPT with various agentic hookups as a replacement for developers. Or...
The hundreds of AI startups desperately trying to convince management that they can replace entire teams of skilled humans with AI are, by definition, a scam. Maybe a different type of scam than crypto rugpullers, but still a scam.
No, that's fraud. A scam can be legal. Timeshares, "Winter Wonderlands", many extended warranties, planned obsolescence, weaselly technically-correct advertising (overpromising to investors is sort of this) pretty much everything hidden in ToC screeds, some MLM schemes, basically all cryptocurrency (and a lot of normal finance to be fair), etc etc.
Many graduate into criminality, but it's not required.
Most "AI" startups aren't building coding tools, and the utility of this tech goes down dramatically in industries that are less legible on the open internet than software is.
I didn't say I blindly trust generated code, it needs to be read through and covered by tests, but tasks like generate boilerplate code for some lib I never used before and which would take time to locate and read through documentation now are 10x faster.
There is huge utility in LLM outside generating complete working code.
What kills me more is originally when they released Kotlin, and I saw Kotlin Native, I assumed they would go all in on Kotlin Native, and allow you to produce fully native JRE based apps (JRE based in the sense that it can take full advantage of those libraries the JRE provides, or any plain old Java Object) and produce native and highly performant binaries.
It seems .NET already has a really mature AOT, I'm really hoping .NETs AOT reaches the point where all .NET code can be AOT'd someday.
I feel like Kotlin could do so much more, but its stuck in standstill. There's even some language features that are still missing such as Inline Classes, Pattern Matching, and even Reflection, all things that Java supports directly.
Programming languages are high-cost, low-revenue beasts. When Kotlin was first released, JB was hoping it would replace Java in the enterprise. And as the sole providers of Kotlin tools, they'd have a greatly expanded market.
Kotlin did not replace Java, except on Android. So JB now has a beast they have to feed without an enterprise revenue stream. They do get secondary benefits: they use it internally, etc.
We examined Kotlin in detail for a CLI app and based on conversations with Kotlin developers concluded that it was not sufficient of a Java replacement for us to evaluate further. For those in a similar situation, the greatly increased cadence of Java releases has probably permanently foreclosed Kotlin-qua-enterprise language.
The irony is that there are a lot of "XYZ Native" solution, such as Flutter, Kotlin Multiplatform, Xaramin, etc. But somehow only React Native, something based on a web framework, seems to reach the critical mass.
I don't really see any cross platform framework hitting "critical mass". React Native is very accessible to web developers. Are you sure that is not just information bias from your own situation? For me, most cross platform solutions are a race down to the lowest common denominator (and this is from someone who has used Xamarin Forms and MAUI in production apps.) Sure, you get to use your favourite tech stack (for us it was .Net) and you get familiar tools and metaphors, but the overall results are very uncanny valley unless you put a lot of effort in to styling for each platform.
What did you mean by "inline classes" here? My only understanding of that term applies to something like what Java is still developing for Valhalla but has not delivered yet, whereas Kotlin is arguably a little farther along with its own feature with that exact name.
Would it be the classes Java has always had that sit inside a parent class and can access the instance fields/properties of the parent? These are very Java, and hard to recreate in a language that doesn't support that type of embedding. C# really struggles with it. Using the Android API via Xamarin was always very much harder to do anything with because of this symbiotic relationship. I have done a little Kotlin, but I don't remember if it support that or not.
There are fundamental restrictions where NativeAOT will never work or be desirable. For example, runtime-compiled regex patterns or any other feature which relies on emitting IL at runtime and creating new members or even assembles and then loading them. Similar applies to compiled expression trees - they are supported in NativeAOT but in the form of falling back onto interpreting them, which has worse performance. Or unbound reflection with patterns that cannot be statically proven and/or analyzed.
Reflection analysis can (and will) be improved but there are hard constraints - a correctly working expression like 'someAssembly.GetType(Console.ReadLine())' by definition would have to root (and force compilation for) every type in the assembly, which is highly undesirable or even sometimes unfeasible for AOT compilation. And there is a lot of code which does exactly this.
The main challenge are packages and frameworks. ASP.NET Core is largely compatible (via minimal API) and so is AvaloniaUI, EF Core has some compatibility assurances and DapperAOT is tailor-made as the name implies, serialization is also a solved problem although you may need to use a different API.
At the end of the day, NativeAOT is not something "to be fully migrated to" because it has fundamental restrictions (some of which also affect other languages like Rust or Go) and having JIT around is a feature for patterns which specifically exploit it but is also a performance optimization (DynamicPGO, better instruction selection especially around SIMD paths, turning static readonly's into JIT constants and apply subsequent optimizations on top of that, this is what makes C# port of Mimalloc so good as it elides dead code with assertions impossible to remove dynamically in C/C++). NativeAOT has its own optimizations, and it will continue to diverge with JIT (e.g. there's a toggle in .NET compiler to repeat some optimization phases, usually it's too expensive for JIT but for AOT it's a good fit, AFAIK there is work to productize this).
The wide perception that JIT-compiled code has to be slower stems from other sources of performance overhead that are typical to languages which happen to use JIT (many of which have "weaker" compilers too), not from the JIT compilation itself. There are technicalities like certain calls have to be indirect in order to support patching the callee address, or inter-procedural analysis which is trivial to prove under AOT may not be so under JIT where new callers/callees may be constructed dynamically or a reJIT invoked which would invalidate the analysis results. JIT also costs additional memory. But it's not a source of worse performance.
This is the norm. The gaming industry glaringly works that way since it came into existence. There are a lot of privately owned companies creating awesome stuff that stay awesome until/if they decide to IPO or sellout to a public company. Public company owners mostly have terrible incentives and time preference which makes everything turn to shit.
I gave them a year of subscriptions before cancelling recently, the devcontainer implementation in their Ultimate versions is laughably bad, bugs upon bugs and tickets where their support staff just bounces it up with "still no fix" messages and customers are finding workarounds, i.e. downgrading docker installs.
Remote SSH is terrible too, handles network latency spikes by repeating keystrokes. I remember spending an evening trying to fix something in the
integrated shell and giving up, but sadly forgot what. I like what they do with Go though. Anyway, back to nvim here, not for me.
+1, the Remote SSH is horrible. Takes forever to connect and is extremely laggy once you have connected. Feels like they’re practically streaming video of the UI back to you instead of VSCode’s Remote SSH which feels indistinguishable from running locally.
Yeah I'm a big fan of the JetBrains IDEs but I tried it out a few days ago and couldn't even get it to stay connected. Gave up after reading a few recent forum posts about how much trouble people are still having with the feature (which does have a big purple "Beta" label in the IDE at least).
Jetbrains has "AI Assistant" and "Junie" (the latter is much like "Claude Code"). Junie is a great AI coding assistant, seems to be on par with Claude Code (and can use Anthropic models e.g. Claude Sonnet, or other models).
Also, Claude Desktop can be configured to serve Jetbrains MCP Server, which will let Claude Desktop (or any other coding AI/LLM) connect and control Jetbrains IDEs, including changing project configuration, listing / finding files, editing files, looking at VCS diffs.
So I believe Jetbrains is addressing the AI coding assistant market, they're not making as much noise and perhaps they should be ... feature-wise I think Jetbrains IDEs + AI integrations will be as good, in the long term, as other systems. At least I hope so, because I can't let go of PyCharm, Webstorm, IntelliJ IDEA, Goland, et al
> they're not making as much noise and perhaps they should be
Jetbrains isn't a silicon valley startup and isn't raising money, so no VC is going to make a 10x return by hyping them. That sadly usually means that you are shut out from the conversation no matter how good your product is.
They are a big company that has taken a lot of investment over the years. They make good stuff and their audience (a lot of them developers) LOVE the product - willing to pay their own money for them. Rather than complain that they're shut out of the system we all apparently don't like, shouldn't we celebrate that they're making it with an alternative approach?
I've had a Jetbrains license for years. I barely use their stuff now. Cursor is much less capable IDE but better coding environment. At first I'd use them both on the same thing but now it's all Cursor.
Exact same here. I love PHPStorm for Laravel dev, but I’ve barely used it in months. Meanwhile I’m paying $100+ per month to Cursor for subscription + premium model usage. And honestly I kinda hate Cursor as an editor / IDE. I really hope Junie is good enough to switch back, but I won’t give up integrated AI agentic coding in my editor if it’s not.
That's pretty much the comparison between Tesla and old-time car manufacturers. Most people who are trading Tesla stock don't even look at other car stocks.
Because the products being good isn't what investors look for. Investors look for good business. And, assuming they can actually make it work, putting together AI coding apps that get software "engineers" to outsource enough of their thinking to a machine that they can then jack the price through the ceiling on and make bank via enterprise billing is incredibly good business.
This does seem very unfair, but don't believe any of the numbers being used to value these OpenAI acquisitions. If it's not cash, it's just a lottery ticket.
It's the difference between bootstrapped companies and VC backed or public ones. Bootstrapped companies don't have any growth expectations whereas the funded ones do and are priced based entirely on speculation.
Not to mention that JetBrains is implementing AI agents into their current products -- if I'm already a user of IntelliJ, PyCharm or CLion, etc., why would I switch to Cursor or Windsurf?
The only good investment in crypto has been to buy and hold BTC. So while it has worked well as an asset (like gold or paintings or baseball cards), the crypto industry itself – thousands of startups in the space, all the altcoins, blockchains, smart contracts, web3, NFTs, ICOs, DeFi, "stable" coins – have all either fizzled out or just been outright fraud.
The actual value of bitcoin is that you can use it to buy illegal counter-cultural things like drugs, fake IDs, etc. Except you can't, because more anonymous cryptocurrencies were invented and the markets migrated to those. Now Bitcoin is mostly used for more "serious", "wall-streety" crimes, like bypassing international sanctions. Either one can hold up the value of an investment asset.
If price of gold was according to its "actual value", it wouldn't be $3300/oz right now. Nor would anyone hold it if they expected its price to ever get down to such "actual value". Bitcoin really isn't any different in that regard - it has value because people are willing to trade it. Although it does have practical uses, as well - black markets, for example.
I don't know how anyone can still say Crypto was "hype". Sure the vast majority of it is but USDC alone market cap is north of 60 Billion, there is nothing speculative about USDC. You can't make money by someone else losing etc etc. Tether stablecoin is ~150 Billion. Just those two, means the value of Crypto minus rug pulls, scams or anything else is over 200 Billion - more than the value of OpenAI
I for a while was completely into crypto and really hoped it would replace a few mega corporations and enable easy convenient transactions… but that never happened. I can’t buy groceries or pay rent with any crypto. Infact In fact I regret spending the crypto I did have on the very few things or places I could spend it. Crypto(at least imo) went from something new and exciting and limitless to now being only something you buy and then hope the value goes up. It’s useless as anything else. It’s now all snake oil salespeople trying to pump up some shitty crypto that has 0 new features and was created to pump and dump.
Aw shit, I guess I should stop doing actual products and just go where the fad is. That's what the "smart money" does, I guess. I mean, isn't it smart to pursue maximal profit? Max payoff - you can use it to fund other things!!!
You're being sarcastic but yes. If your intention is to take large sums of cash from investors and run off with a fat check then that is exactly what you should do.
No I'm actually not being sarcastic. I know it might sound like that - it's hard to grok tone from text and I'm not particularly concerned. But I'm seriously considering it, I mean -- the goal of most startups is to solve (as PG puts it) "the money problem". So what am I doing building products, when I could be chasing these fads and possibly banking huge? I mean, that's smart, right?
I'm not being sarcastic at all. I feel I need to reiterate that because you got it wrong.
If enough of the market participants act stupid, or at least in predictably irrational ways, it may be profitable to capitalize on that behavior.
If you look at previous fads, all the way to be dotcom boom of late 1990s, this very approach seemed to work well for a number of buzzword-compliant pre-revenue "businesses", and their founders / owners. There was a crash after that, but the wisest were able to shield some of the money from it.
I think there’s that side to it, it may be correct to swoop in and profit, if you can outsmart them.
But then there’s another side where the fad has real value and the people investing have money because they’re smart and they recognize the value. And you have to be to make value in the fad.
But on some level, it’s also stupid to pursue the fad because it’s so hyper competitive and effect of luck is going to be magnified.
Some people might say there is more to life than making money but if you just want to hopefully get some naive investors to give you a large pile of money for your vaporware then go for it, it's where the money is.
Thanks, I appreciate your answer. Not sure it’s me tho. I guess another side I’d there’s probably real value in the fad, too. On some level, if you can figure that out.
All these people with money didn’t all get it by being stupid or fddy or vaporware so they’re responding to signals of value and their responses are reliable indicators in general.
There is more luck involved with getting rich than you might think. Mark Cuban once said if he had to start over he would have no problem becoming a millionaire but becoming a billionaire is completely dependent on luck.
But on some level, it’s also stupid to pursue the fad because it’s so hyper competitive and effect of luck is going to be magnified.
- but 'luck's meaning is nuanced and depends on how you define it.
The problem with 'luck' is it's a rough model. A hypothesis based on incomplete information or insufficient analysis or non-comprehensive insight. Was it luck? Or was it something else? It's too easy to falsely ascribe significance to mere randomness (both mistaking randomness for coordination, and mistaking coordination for randomness), as I think many people consider luck. Almost as if "luck is a lottery". The wrong view of luck can confuse one's view of agency.
Also, because in the common conception 'luck' deals with the unknown as well as achievement, debates on luck conjure political and religious conflict that can be super contentious and feel intensely personal - essentially intolerable differences for many!
I don't see luck that way - but I agree that luck, in how I view it, is needed!
People entrusted with investing billions of dollars are very much not rational, as we can observe every day.
Additionally, network effects and experience input and VC concentration in Silicon Valley are very real and very rational. For VCs, why go anywhere else if the best of the world are flocking towards you already?
This might change in the near future, but I doubt it.
People love to crap on VC but it's a great transfer of wealth from the rich that have so much money they can give it to other people to gamble for them by paying people to drop out of school to build things that will never make a return on investment. \s
Not a direct fork but VS Code was built on the foundation of Atom, and heavily inspired by it. People generally consider VS Code to be the successor of Atom, especially after Microsoft bought out the creator of Atom/Electron (Github) and shut down the project.
VS Code is built on the foundation of Monaco. And when you run it in a browser it has nothing common with Atom. And on desktop the only thing from Atom is the runtime Atom shell now called Electron and it is essentially Chrome with some glue for integrating with OS.
Microsoft built several key tools on top of Electron (VSCode being the relevant one here) and became very interested in maintaining control of it... and so bought GitHub when it was up for sale.
> Atom has not had significant feature development for the past several years, though we’ve conducted maintenance and security updates during this period to ensure we’re being good stewards of the project and product. As new cloud-based tools have emerged and evolved over the years, Atom community involvement has declined significantly. As a result, we’ve decided to sunset Atom so we can focus on enhancing the developer experience in the cloud with GitHub Codespaces.
> This is a tough goodbye. It’s worth reflecting that Atom has served as the foundation for the Electron framework, which paved the way for the creation of thousands of apps, including Microsoft Visual Studio Code, Slack, and our very own GitHub Desktop. However, reliability, security, and performance are core to GitHub, and in order to best serve the developer community, we are archiving Atom to prioritize technologies that enable the future of software development.
JetBrains AI now does essentially the same thing as Windsurf and Cursor. My prediction: JeBrains IDEs will be around in 5 years, Windsurf and Cursor won't.
As someone with decades of software engineering under my belt, my opinion is they are the best IDEs out there by a comfortable margin. It's possible the issue you're encountering when accidentally opening them is due to index updates which would occur disproportionately often on startup for people who otherwise never use them. Other than that, performance is more than satisfactory 90+% of the time in my experience.
That's what I would have said about Eclipse about 15 years ago.
I rarely have performance issues with Jetbrains IDEs, and even rarer still that they bog down the whole machine. Get a properly specced computer (32+GB RAM, 10+ core chip) if you don't already have one. Also try adjusting memory settings - https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/increasing-memory-heap.h...
That's just it. In my company there are basically three sets of developers. The very experienced ones prefer vim/emacs. The experienced ones tend to like these more established IDEs, and the younger developers absolutely hate these IDEs and find them to be slow and bloated.
I can't really comment on whether they are good or not since from my perspective I see people who are productive and unproductive using both of these tools, so to me it just looks like mostly a matter of preference. But newer developers don't seem to like these established IDEs and see them as you said: big, slow and laggy.
Intellij is an IDE where VS Code is a bit mroe then a text editor.
When you open a project for the first time it takes time because it is indexed , maybe it will index your dependencies if you did not bother to disable that.
IWhen i open a file /project from a collegue that uses VS Code is filled with errors and warnings because their VS code text editor is not actually understanding the code they are editing.
People that say this are completely out of touch. You know there are VSCode extensions for Java (made by Oracle and Redhat themselves), right? Once you install that you get Intellisense, debugging, etc. Same with C#, Python, etc.
I know that, once but once you install that you will not be able to praise VS Code performance anymore, you just get an inferior Intellij IDE in all dimensions.
It seems like JetBrains may be giving up on Fleet. Honestly though, I think their established IDEs are good enough to be worth a few bugs and performance issues.
