Show HN: FablePool – pool money behind a prompt, and Fable builds it in public
fablepool.comIn other words, once people got on it, it was too late.
I doubt an LLM would estimate an AWS rewrite to cost $500.
If users posted ideas, voted on them and then other people built them then that would be the same. But kickstarter is the producer posting an idea for presale
One interesting aspect of LLMs is that each one, weights frozen, can be thought of as a single developer whose work you have already evaluated.
The cost of finding, evaluating, and negotiating with a new human is tremenous.
expertsexchange.com was a site from the before times.
Was the dashless domain really a site (or the site) at one point?
"A grimoire is a textbook of magic and sorcery. Traditionally, it contains instructions for casting spells, performing divination, creating magical objects like talismans, and summoning supernatural entities such as angels or spirits."
Seems to fit.
This bot is almost as bad as I am at estimating projects.
> est. total target $516.00
Lol
Now, you might be able to make a version of some small subset of aws services that runs works ok for a small scale for with relatively simple needs, for that many tokens, but I don't think that's what they were going for.
If we swapped out the IAM backend for something extremely simple like just private keys (one per allowed service or JWT-style list all services in the key), then we could have something that looks/feels pretty similar. With a 2$ token spend.
Not at all the same but it would look/feel pretty close.
lol, you’ve got that goblet of koolaid with me! Equal parts horrifying and interesting that it might not be impossible
“In a television studio, theatre or concert hall, the room where performers await their entrance.” https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/green_room
There are lots of projects, software that shouldn't be SaaS subscriptions that Fable can build in public that can be free for everyone and also OSS.
One feature request: In addition to high-level milestones, it would be cool if a partially-funded project would generate a public, highly detailed implementation plan.
Also, IANAL but MIT is still a license with a copyright holder. I don't think saying "it's MIT, we all own it" is defensible. The courts might view all this code as public domain.
If I hired a bunch of people to build me a house, and I drafted the architectural plans with the help of a paid architect, neither the architect nor the builders have ownership over the home.
So if a collection of people design something together maybe that has merit, they collectively paid for Anthropic to build it for them…
> As described above, in many circumstances these outputs will be copyrightable in whole or in part—where AI is used as a tool, and where a human has been able to determine the expressive elements they contain. Prompts alone, however, at this stage are unlikely to satisfy those requirements.
https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...
And even then they can change their mind.
Does not hurt to backstop with an explicit license.
I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such an assertion.
With apologies to Mr. Charles Babbage.
In a few years most saas will have 95 percent or even more AI coded code.
Could I steal it and put it on git?
If you buy a text of me, I cannot sign away my authorship, and there’s certain limitations on what you can do with my text regardless of contract.
If you buy a text of me, I cannot sign away my authorship, and there’s certain limitations on what you can do with my text regardless of contract. I can only sell you usage rights - which may or may not be exclusive. If the text I wrote is trivial, neither you nor me can limit when it is reproduced. The effort of collecting data is not sufficient, if the data itself is declared trivial. See rulings about phone books.
When an AI provider produces data that is deemed not copyrightable, it cannot legally sell you exclusive usage rights. It can give it to you exclusively, but since you cannot yourself claim copyright, the moment you publish it it becomes available for others to use as well. One may argue that an LLM is similar to a phone book, with its entries being “trivial“ and its composition not artistic enough.
At least that’s the line of argument.
The other line of argument is the "Claude Code is to coding like a photo camera is to painting". The image is generated automatically, but the input in how you point the camera is enough to still make it a creative work protected by copyright. Under that interpretation, you are not hiring AI, you are using it like a tool
The US Copyright Office holds the former opinion. I'm sure once this goes to court, lots of companies will vehemently argue the latter. I would not be surprised if we even end up changing the law over this
That's news to me. I (along with many hundreds of others) was paid to develop Minecraft, candy crush and battlefield, yet last I checked, they all retain their copyright.
The other line of argument avoids that issue by arguing that you personally created the code with the help of a tool (like a compiler or camera), not just commissioned it
I don't think that necessarily anthropomorphizes it. We speak of monkeys as authors without calling them human. And really the legally important fact is that there was no human author. You can also treat it like CCTV footage which is generally not under copyright because there is no human author (even though most would hesitate to call the camera the author either)
Which market is even left after since the sasspocaloypse?
I think it might be beneficial to use blockchain, so that the donor can audit which prompts the token-pool they donated too performed. Perhaps donating tokens can also give you votes on which prompts are entered.
Not sure how it'd work, but there's absolutely a niche for a privacy focused data cooperative out there.
Any income from what? The code is free, right? X% of your company's total revenue? Might as well just say "companies can't use this".
Personally I like the idea of a "free as in freedom but not free as in beer" license. You have to pay for a copy of the software, but after that you're free to use and modify it as you please, and share/sell your modifications under the same license.
To turn that into a cooperative you could have a company own the code and pay developers in shares of the company for PRs or other contributioins.
Also who would take on any of these projects for a meager 200$? Most of that stuff is borderline interesting, clearly not interesting enough for the people proposing the things to start working on them themselves.
This sort of reminds me of startups that go out of business and then open source their code. It's kind of cool when they can do that, but almost nobody ever gets value from it.
Anyway, if anyone uses the code produced this way in prod, I'd love to hear your story.
Could this be the way we develop software in the future?!
- instead of paying for subscription SaaS. Users pool resources for the idea, AI builds and maintains it. Pricing is a fraction of what we pay otherwise.
A bit early today but definitely a possibility in a couple of years.
This is one of those ideas that sounds bad on paper (Like people renting out their houses. But if implemented correctly could get some traction.
Rather, it did work at milestone 14, but then regressed at milestone 15, where it changed the link from a wikimedia image to a nonexistent file in /assets (despite still having the "Photo via Wikimedia Commons" caption).
edit: they removed it :^)
My question, though, is why the "Live, public build log" only showing up to milestone 3, but the artifacts go up to milestone 15? And there are different index.html pages in the artifacts list, one for milestone 14 and one for milestone 15? Are there different conceptions of "milestone" in here? What's up with that?
In all seriousness, I would probably throw $10 at a project to design and implement a modern turbofan FADEC + all of the certification artifacts.
this literally already exists if you’re willing to maintain your own physical infra, and has for a long time - nothing aws does is that innovative software wise. maybe their managed k8s eliminates a ton of pain, but I dont know. it’s the reliability guarantee + support + not having to maintain physical servers. if youre willing to shirk all that and do it yourself why would you want aws? lol
tldr; was laughing at the xy vibe of the ask
This can't be serious.
Broader point I am making is, what differentiates genuine ideas from the token burn? What happens when the pool exhausts but the task is not done?
> What happens when the pool exhausts but the task is not done?
Have a stupider LLM aggregate similar questions.
Most other devs don’t talk about language in a driest few sentences intro.
"A thorough written survey of why .NET garbage collection causes latency spikes in HFT contexts"
i'm like, dude, just rewrite in Zig if you want that control back, not all of your compute goodies will come from Redmond
You can write only-stack-alloc or limited-alloc C#, and Microsoft have put a lot of work into it (Span etc); it's just a bit unidiomatic.
Mind you, the last time I had contact with HFT it was inside an FPGA context..
Or maybe there is? or a version where only those funding have access to the results.
Remember, Google aids and abets militaries of governments that the UN has found to be committing genocide.
Weird how people seem to forget this.
Lets just hope the project is able to soldier on without you.
Btw, thanks for the response. Not sure why you got downvoted for it, but you have my gratitude for being one of few devs who are sincerely responsive to these types of concerns.
Yesterday, I prompted Fable to improve the frontend to make it look different from Claude style, gave detailed examples etc. 15 minutes and $32 dollars (!) later (used cursor lol) it gave me the shittiest more claudiest website ever, basically ignoring everything I asked
We've seen something like 20+ years of different attempts of voluntary donations to fund open source, and it never worked. Companies barely fund anything voluntarily.
I'm taking the opposite approach with Supported Source (https://supso.org/) which is this: actually force companies to pay to use the project. Sell commercial licenses. Make it mandatory to using your software commercially. This approach works much, much better than voluntary donations.
This is engineering theatre (pun intended).
The amount of hubris here is exceptional, the author doesn't even know that it's "clean room" rather than "green room". What does it even mean to build an open source AWS? There are many open source IaaS/PaaS components. Is the author suggesting any hardware design, because that's a critical component.
The only possible result of this is an AWS fanfic. An art project that looks vaguely like a cloud provider on the surface if you squint, but with zero substance to it.
And this criticism has nothing to do with AI. You'd get the same spending 100x that budget on any engineering team.
First, your server is struggling. It took about 20+ seconds to respond just now, FYI.
Second, it's not obvious to me that I can get my money back if something doesn't pan out / get approved by a certain date from the homepage alone. That might make people hesitant to put anything in if they think it might get locked in there forever if the site dies / you take it down / etc.
But I stopped after asking Claude about it. It categorically told me that the moment you fund a model, you are legally liable for its actions.
How to get around it?
I mean Claude will tell you because anthropic made it tell you that, doesn't mean it's true.
GoFundMe and indigogo aren't responsible for the actions of the funded projects either, hence it's unlikely that any judge would decide that the liability would go to the platform if it can show it's doing it's best effort in moderation wrt illegal content
If you mean just throw it together and then don't moderate at all then .. yeah, you'll be held liable. But that's not because of the person paying the prompt, it's because moderating illegal content is the responsibility of the platform provider.
Imho you should wipe them, populate it with some realistic small scale ideas and be much more strict in review, at least for now.
It's hard to explain briefly, and so putting this prompt up was a way for me to possibly generate some interest and act as a little public marker for an idea: open-source user-owned memory infrastructure for AI and the importance that I think it represents. My vision and belief behind this project has been slowly building for the past two months - I think personal AI memory will become one of the most important layers in computing, and I'd like that layer to be inspectable, correctable, portable and truly owned by the humans it describes. I'd like to encourage any casual readers who might be interested to reach out to me.
i built a turbofan
https://app.confbuild.com/p/z459
now I want to build a complete Airbus as detailed as possible with give budgetThere is also the question of whether humans can waste so much time reviewing AI code that the vulnerability is not patched before it is exploited. Another one is whether when the human is removed from the loop that the codebase becomes more vulnerable in some other ways.
$1.00 raised of est. $205.00 target
Humans shouldn't provide estimates.
Why do open source collaboration? Why not a single product developer getting crowd paid to add features, solve bugs, using AI. So many businesses will see their moat wiped out.
On the macro level capitalism is winner-takes-all and Musk is the only one seriously playing the game. End game: own everything, including payments, and governments come begging and will protect him from citizen revolt. Supervillain/overlord territory.
Also, is there some kind of ownership structure based on investment?
Here's an idea: reverse kickstarter
1. people post ideas
2. good ideas go viral
3. people pledge actual money to encourage someone to step forward and build it
4. interested creators make kickstarter type videos explaining their proposal for making the thing
5A. people vote on which proposal to accept, or maybe
5B. each backer can select a project to support
---
Here steps 4 and 5 are replaced by Claude.
Cool idea!
That seems to massively lower the bar for people investing.
For years I've been trying to get estate agents to support an open-source real estate website builder. The pitch is obvious: instead of each agent paying thousands for a bespoke site, pool resources, fund the features you all need, and everyone benefits.
Getting non-technical people to commit to something abstract before it exists is nearly impossible though. Hope a model like FablePool can change that.
For the website builder, the open-source product is already there: https://github.com/etewiah/property_web_builder. It just needs momentum.
It reminds me of scam eshops where everything cost $random dollars in a hope that someone will enter a credit card number.
If Anthropic had a problem with Clawdbot they are certainly going to take issue with FablePool.
... I was feeling generous, so here you go!
https://github.com/PhillipTaylor/notepad_plus_plus_mac_os
I copy and pasted your prompt into Augment (Opus 4.7) and told it to do everything you wanted, then I told it to keeping going afterwards.
I think there are a few missing pieces as it's quite a open-ended piece of work. This took 59,000 tokens.