Subsidies stop when LLMs improvement plateaued (though they still benchmark higher somehow). At some point, you have to make money or at least break even; and I think they concluded that we reached that point.
Search has become so bad that I also struggled to find Claude Code alternative and made my own tight (not editors, not plugins, not agents, strictly similar to Claude Code CLI) list: https://github.com/omarabid/cli-llm-coding
The list is not long but there are quite a few options. Even Grok has its own CLI!
The reality is, even though a CLI prompt looks very simple, it's a very complex piece of software. I personally use Claude Code (with GLM) and anything else I have tried was significantly inferior (with the exception of opencode).
> Does anyone understand how or why this is happening?
They are drowning in tech debt. Here are two main issues I have with my iPhone/iOS: I can't search for the telegram app. It doesn't show up. It shows fine on the iPad. Also just a few minutes ago, app search decided not to work. I usually use it to pull my Wallet to pull my card. It was an awkward moment as I had no idea where the wallet app actually is.
I have lost count of the minor polish issues. The experience has degraded so much that you no longer care.
Regarding the telegram app I’d check iOS settings->apps->telegram->search and make sure “show app in search” is checked
You can intentionally hide apps from search. If you did this, it’s not very obvious that its hidden from search unless you dig for the setting. Similarly, “hidden” apps refuse to show up in search results anywhere, even in settings.
Market cap should theoretically be determined by profit, interest rates minus liabilities (see legacy auto makers). Though it's future looking, so it might be higher or lower than a simple analyst estimation. Of course, this discount meme stocks (like TSLA) which are valued by the insanity of the crowd.
> This leads me to believe that most people either get lucky and then apply a framework in retrospect to justify their luck
Bingo. It's much easier to get a new product started when there is little or no competition. Clients can be tolerating (like early days of Crypto or now the early days of AI). But once a market is mature, clients are very unlikely to accept your service (even for free!), if it seems risky let alone incomplete.
> or they simply don't tell the whole truth.
You hit another nail. No one is going to tell you what dark/grey/shady actions they took to get where they are. YC call it "naughty" founders.
> but maybe the truth is that it does not take 7 months, but 7 years?
Another nail. Bare some exceptions, most businesses take years to build. A product will take years of polishing to become mature enough to be used.
Because VCs love quantifiable metrics regardless of how reliable they actually are. They raise money from outside investors and are under pressure to deploy it. The metrics give them something concrete to justify their thesis and move on with their life.
As someone running a web app, I can see the appeal. I get tens of thousands of "attacks" per day from bots scanning for WordPress/PHP files and that's not even counting the "legitimate" bot traffic crawling your site for content or AI training data.
Now, tens of thousands of requests probably won't do much if you have basic security, caching, and optimization in place. But if your app is a mess, sometimes it's easier to just slap a Cloudflare gate on it and call it a day.
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