Just so you know, your comment was automatically hidden (“dead”) until I vouched for it now. Same for most of your recent submissions. Actually it’s probably because of your (exclusively self-promotional) submissions that your comments and submissions get hidden.
Folks, in your launch posts remember to describe what you're launching and what it's for. Ideally in the opening paragraph.
- Intro: Explains problem but not what is Neki or what it's for.
- Why Neki: Explains alternatives and why they suck but not what is Neki or what it's for.
- How does Neki work: Describes the technical components but not what is Neki or what it's for.
- What you get beyond sharding: Explains how to run/deploy but not what is Neki or what it's for.
- What is a platform preview + Try Neki today: 140 words on the definition of "preview" and links to get started... but not what is Neki or what it's for.
Edit: The landing page has 100x more useful information up front -> https://neki.dev/
Edit #2: They've since added a "What is Neki" section. Good reaction time.
I scrolled through the landing page and even the "Get started" page and I have still no idea what is this. Is this a managed db? Something I can run myself? No idea.
The landing page which is linked at the start of the second sentence of this page…? I don’t completely disagree with you, but this is mostly hypertext working as intended, is it not?
Yeah this meta commentary on HN is very confusing for me. The structure of the article is literally
- short paragraph saying "we launched neki"
- short paragraph saying why neki was needed
- paragraphs about what neki is (with a header)
That seems like a very reasonable structure for a blog post like this one. Not being able to get to the third paragraph of a blog post seems like a "you" problem, not a blog problem.
Why "sadly"? The person writing a link should provide enough detail for readers to figure out whether they should follow the link. I rolled my eyes the first time I saw this entry on HN because it just said "Neki" and the (generic) target domain name. A two-word description got added, and that makes it interesting instead.
It's sad because I think links are the best thing about the web, and it's increasingly clear to me that many internet users either misunderstand or actively avoid them.
Why do people post screenshots of an article on social media instead of linking to it?
Sometimes ignorance, but often because the web is such a hostile experience these days - paywalls and subscribe banners and cookie warnings and slow pages.
Unfortunately not all deals go through. Like Wiz + Google, or Figma + Adobe. A lot can go wrong between “in talks to acquire” and “acquired.” The official announcement is less surprising but still newsworthy.
Happy for the hugging face team. Many great folks there who’ve waited patiently for HF to find a business model, and finally they get something even better.
Slack wants to be primary place people do their work. And they're almost there... It's certainly where you "work" (communicate) with people, it's where many engage with and/or control other platform like project trackers, and it's increasingly the place you interact with whatever AI agents your company uses. It makes perfect send they want to bring the coding agent into the fold (into their UI) as well. And, given Anthropic's release of Claude Tag, they're probably not wrong about that.
Stripe isn’t exactly a dumb company. When someone smart does something seemingly super dumb, more likely than not you’re the one missing something, not them. It’s an opportunity to ask, “what am I missing?”, and learn from it.
> I didn't say it was super dumb, it was more of a reflection on that's how much a wrapper is worth today.
Are you sure that the value is in the wrapper and not rather in the fact that investors who invested into OpenRouter also invested into companies that can buy OpenRouter? ;-)
It is not just the software. Let's not forget the existing customer base, an opportunity cost to build something as mature as openrouter (even with LLMs). Perhaps it is worth it for them.
I guess hardly anybody claims that. I think the suspicion is rather about whether there exist some other "puppetmasters" (e.g. venture capitalists) who pressured Stripe into buying OpenRouter.
You're facing competition from both the incumbents who can ship these capabilites to their massive userbase, and emerging startups like Runlayer who are running away with the AI-native segment.
What are you offering that people want yet neither of those classes of solutions offer?
Runlayer can be a fit once you know what you want to put behind an MCP gateway.
The challenge we hear from customers is that they don't know what AI apps, MCPs, or tools their employees are actually using. And new things just keep popping up everyday. Without that visibility, it's difficult to know where to apply controls.
There's also Bluerock, as yet another example. I've worked with both companies though I get nothing from mentioning them here. My point is this is a (suddenly) crowded market - perhaps more so than you realized - so you should consider what exactly is different about your product and why that matters, and then make that obvious to prospective buyers.
I will definitely checkout Runlayer Watch in depth. It seems that it works with coding agents but not web-based agents yet. We've had customers comparing the two solutions. They liked the depth of discovery and the open-source security scanning capabilities.
And I know Harold well at Bluerock. I totally agree that the market is crowded and will only get more crowded which is a good sign that the problem is real.
And yes I totally agree with you that differentiation is the key. I can't say that we have figured this out 100% but our approach is always community first, open-source first. I hope that is the right direction in the long run.
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