Dexter

Cloning any random piece of SaaS is something that could already be done before agentic coding, and the economics of it haven't changed meaningfully. Before, writing the clone would cost 0.5-1% of the valuation of the legacy SaaS company. Now it might be 0.1%. It doesn't make a difference -- if you can pull it off profitably today you could also have done it profitably in the past. The code is a very small part of the process of making such a clone successful, and the reason legacy software has often bad UX is not because code was expensive to write.

Ultimately we all want to get here, and the code quality will get better, but right now multiple passes over the code are needed to keep the quality high.

Most people's mental model of Claude Code is that "it's just a TUI" but it should really be closer to "a small game engine". For each frame our pipeline constructs a scene graph with React then -> layouts elements -> rasterizes them to a 2d screen -> diffs that against the previous screen -> finally uses the diff to generate ANSI sequences to draw We have a ~16ms frame budget so we have roughly ~5ms to go from the React scene graph to ANSI written.

This has been said a thousand times before, but allow me to add my own voice: the era of humans writing code is over. Disturbing for those of us who identify as SWEs, but no less true. That's not to say SWEs don't have work to do, but writing syntax directly is not it.