The standard issue AI startup meal
Description
A six-panel meme using the 'Daring Today, Aren't We?' format from the Spongebob Squarepants cartoon, featuring a blue fish customer and a cynical Squidward as the cashier. In the first panel, the fish begins to order, saying, 'I'll have a...'. The second panel shows the fish looking up, with a photoshopped image of a cat wearing VR or tech goggles, symbolizing a 'visionary' tech idea. In the third panel, the fish confidently orders an 'open source code copilot'. Squidward replies with a deadpan 'How original' in the fourth panel. The fish continues in the fifth panel, adding, 'and we'll fork vscode'. This prompts Squidward's final, sarcastic remark in the sixth panel: 'Daring today, aren't we'. The meme humorously criticizes the current trend in the tech industry where numerous startups are being created with what is perceived as a very unoriginal formula: creating an open-source alternative to GitHub Copilot and basing it on a fork of the popular VSCode editor. For senior developers, this represents a tiresome lack of innovation and a low-effort approach to building a new product
Comments
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Their roadmap is just the VSCode release notes from two months ago and a ChatGPT Plus subscription
Because nothing screams innovation like gluing a recycled GPT-J endpoint onto a telemetry-stripped VSCode fork - wake me when someone forks away the electron memory leaks
Another startup promising to revolutionize development by wrapping OpenAI's API in a VSCode fork with a different color theme and calling it innovation - just what we needed after the last 47 identical pitches this quarter
Ah yes, another VSCode fork with AI autocomplete - because what the ecosystem really needed was the 47th Electron-based editor that consumes 4GB of RAM to suggest 'console.log'. At least when we forked Vim, we had the decency to start a decades-long holy war about it. Now we just npm install our way to 'innovation' and call it a day. But hey, your README probably has really nice badges, and that's what counts in 2024, right?
Every “open-source Copilot” pitch I see is Code‑OSS with a sidebar that proxies LSP to a closed LLM - open-core so thin the MIT license can read the EULA through it
Modern playbook: fork VSCode, wire a chat sidebar to $OPENAI_API_KEY, call it a platform - the only distributed system you shipped is the pricing page
Squidward nailed it - true daring is forking VSCode, swapping the logo, and charging enterprise support for 'custom DX'