Nick Bonatsakis

Every time I get bit by an LLM it's because I stopped using my brain. It's such an easy trap to fall into, especially when these things are so incredibly good at tricking you into believing they are 100% competent at everything.

It's always been like this Most engineers believe what they see, and what works today Those who are not engineers eat up the hype/projections And then we have investors hyping up investments, influencers realizing they need hyperbolic takes to get traction so they do that. And social media amplifies these extreme takes... just how it works Great question why people trust others who are not even using it btw

@MobileAppBro So what would you recommend?

I spoke about this last year about this exact scenario for this exact app. History may not always repeat itself, but it rhymes x.com/mobileappbro/s…

@d4m1n The people that live in this bubble don't quite understand how much of a bubble it truly is.

must be the only guy on the planet thinking this... but senior dev experience is a huge boost for AI tooling even outside coding. ppl are struggling big time beyond basic concepts. like even agent skills are hard to understand for most and I'm talking above avg ppl that get paid well

@filippkowalski Now that enough people have realized there's no way to make money that way and that product quality actually still matters, yes.

I think nowdays its a bigger flex to hear someone spend X days polishing and making their app really solid and beautiful instead of sending 10 of them in one day for a review.

Absolutely nobody should expect to make any money with this low effort nonsense.

Why is CBS Sports the default bracket website for March Madness? It's a horrible, cluttered mess of a UI, and the fact that this site most of us log into once a year doesn't have a gigantic "FILL OUT YOUR BRACKET HERE" button on the home page is absolutely criminal.

@filippkowalski @tadasgedgaudas Does it support MC or CLI?

So @tadasgedgaudas gave me access to his AppKittie to test it out and I gotta say it became very useful on my first use. It discovered a set of keywords that I had never found before for one of our apps and I'm going to use those to update our metadata in the next release. There is a big difference in popularity value between AppKittie and Astro, so I'm curious what's the source of it, but afaik Astro is reporting old data because ASA stopped sharing those details?

That's cool, but I already have all of this directly in Claude Code via the wonderful updates you guys made to your MCP. And it's way more useful there because I can cross-reference any other data I have connected. You guys already have the data mote, that's the most important thing and why you're extremely sticky and well insulated from AI disruption. Just focus on hardening that, making it insanely easy to BYO agent, and you'll be golden.

Six weeks ago, I fell down the OpenClaw rabbit hole. One of my experiments was to give it an API key for one of my RevenueCat apps, and I was blown away. It made things that would take minutes in the dashboard take seconds. With no handholding. Immediately I started productionizing it, building my first production feature for RevenueCat in 5 years (with some help from some friends). Using codex + claude code, we quickly built up a prototype which is in private beta right now: Rico, our first in-house agent. revenuecat.com/feature/ai-age… It's clear to me now that CRUD software won't be enough anymore. Many interactions with software that were once tedious become magical if you just pour some tokens on it. We will need to reinvent much of what it means to be a SaaS. It will require new thinking, and RevenueCat needs to get there fast. We now have several agentic features in the works, and I think it's just the beginning. RevenueCat of today is the brain stem, AI and agents are the neocortex we will layer on top to create a truly powerful, thinking machine that will help any developer make more money, autonomously. As part of that we need help. We're catching up quickly here, learning how to build and deploy agentic systems. But we need to build a team, and I'm looking for the first product engineer to own how intelligence is built into RevenueCat. You'll work directly with me, @elwatto and others to bring the vision to life. Apply, or send me a DM with the craziest AI system you've built jobs.ashbyhq.com/revenuecat/ec6…

I think that legislation is mostly about preventing from using AI for law, which should surprise nobody since most politicians are lawyers. Disgusting gate-keeping of the highest order. And the stupid thing about it is that people are just going to use OS or Chinese models instead. This would be like if we banned the use of the internet in the earliest days due to "safety" concerns.

I solved a problem with GPT that my doctor could not solve for YEARS. I was getting constantly sick to my stomach. Saw her a dozen times during that time. Saw specialists. Had an endoscopy (fun). Tried all kinds of different medicines. Different diets. Blood tests. Nothing worked. Eventually I figured it out with Reddit and GPT. It was my cholesterol medication. A rare side effect. Told my doctor. We changed to an alternative, GPT suggested might work and I double checked on WebMD. Problem went away in a week and never came back. Maybe you don't want people to have this power. Then you are my enemy and the enemy of freedom. I want to have this power at my finger tips and if you want to take it away from me I will fight you tooth and nail to keep it. People who want to take this power from you are protectionists, protecting existing guilds and incumbents, or they think you're too stupid and that you're a baby who has to be protected from yourself. Either way, they deserve zero respect and no quarter. They need to be beaten back at all levels of society because they are destroying it.

@drbarnard @Russian_LLM @garrytan Don't waste your time, just go straight to Axiom.

I’m on a road trip finally learning to vibe code an iOS app, and my son, @Russian_LLM, won’t let me install @garrytan’s Claude Code skill without reading the raw markdown first. Kinda impressed at his vigilance.

@seanallen_dev It won't go over well with folks that are making $200/year on hobby apps. Overall App Store revenue is massively top-heavy, the vast vast majority of developers that Apple cares most about would happily pay more to guarantee a higher level of service.

It wouldn’t go over very well, but I like this idea.

@FoxyFoxalot But there's no way for them to prevent people from submitting low-effort slop. This is in fact why things are so bogged down.

@nickbona We shouldn't have to pay extra to make Apple apply their own rules (so-called "guidelines"). Low effort, copycat or meme apps shouldn't be allowed in the App Store. They take up reviewer time, they dilute the store, they make it impossible to navigate.

I think it's pretty clear that App Review is bogged down right now and I don't know if Apple is even trying to solve it. I remember the dark days of 1 week+ review times being standard and it seems we're almost back to that. At risk of being accused of "gate keeping" I fully support a new membership tier. Call it "pro" or something and charge $1k/year instead of $100. Pro gets a higher priority review queue and better support. Serious people will easily pay more to bypass the thousands of drop-ship-bro slop submissions.

@Lofionic I'm not suggesting it is a money issue, adding a fee is to raise the barrier to entry artificially.

@nickbona This presupposes that the blocker to fast app reviews is money. The length of time a review takes is a fixed cost, sure they could hire more reviewers but then they’d have to scale the whole setup and really to what end ? There’s not a lot of impetus for Apple to do this.

@b_nnett Trust me bro

@nickbona My app hasn't had to wait longer than that period since last year. Not rare!

@b_nnett Everyone has had the rare 3-hour review, but I have yet to see any evidence it has to do with anything concrete or reproducible.

@nickbona they already have a different tier. your apps get reviewed within 3 hours if they’re on the charts.

@staysaasy So what's the calculous here? Clearly they think it's worth losing 20% of the workforce in pursuit of something AI will ultimately yield. I mean, it is Meta, they do operate on FOMO.

I told yall. AI layoffs will not happen because it’s doing people’s jobs. AI layoffs will happen because AI is expensive.

@PhilStarkovich @loverofapps That would totally work too. It adds back a bit of friction that used to be there when it took a long time to build.

@nickbona @loverofapps I like the idea of paying an initial submission fee ($100/app ?) for each new app to discourage slop.

What does it say about QuickBooks Online that I finally find it usable because I'm interacting with it fully through Claude Code? It's pretty bad that I have to burn down the equivalent of an entire forrest in token/energy cost to get my taxes done.