Thanks :) Zapier is great, but we think LLMs can make automation way easier than it currently is; I personally end up automating a lot more stuff when there's a good chance it can take ~30 seconds (+/- some tweaking ofc).
Zapier is working on something very similar! We actually did our live launch at the same event as them for their new chat product -- https://central.zapier.com/. We think our UX is actually a lot simpler than there's is at the moment, since they're focusing on fine-grained control.
Also, the best way for them to do this would be pretty close to a ground-up rewrite -- both in terms of frontend/interface, but their model of integrations/connectors is not really compatible with allowing AI to take a bigger role in data transformations.
Zapier is definitely trying, but they're not there yet. That feature unfortunately doesn't do much to configure the blocks for you (it just selects which to use) -- you're largely left to sift through the same menus to set it up.
Zapier has actual experienced software engineers and real budgets, would not rule out their ability to perform the same: text to IFTTT like auto-execution. Or consider your company right now, your current company is essentially a single team at Zapier, and you've got some free-way to mix research and product development. I suspect this is more an acquisition target -- small team develops larger idea in better way, Zapier says thanks and hooks it into their own stack, networks, and customers.
It took Zapier ~12 years to become a ~$5B company and build the book of revenue supporting such a valuation. For the right price, certainly, cash out (time value of money/time). But it's also reasonable to build and see how far you can run organically, depending on what you're optimizing for as a founder. You might be able to run faster because you're not carrying a decade of technical architecture to today's market, regardless of current cashflow and engineering capacity.
Zapier is a great company from a product and financial fundamentals perspective, big fan in all honesty, but I wouldn't sell upstarts short (that they can't execute).
That's the whole point of a startup. And we know startups fail. And Zapier is a YC company. This is a 2 person team using LLMs, I doubt they are building their own, nor building some "foundational connect-the-internet" agent nor have built for any scale beyond an internship. Still, they are definitely going to make something, and good luck to them.
Yup, great point, & Zapier is working on very similar stuff! Our thinking is that incumbents have some disadvantages here (one example is that their data models for integrations all need to interrop with each other whereas we can delegate the data mapping to LLMs natively). Also, innovator's dilemma is real; we think we have a fighting chance at being a cleaner & faster product just by virtue of being very small and nimble and responsive to feedback.
I started using Elixir last year after being a long-time Python dev.
Apart from the pros of using a niche language as espoused in the OP write up, the downside I see can be the lack of community, 3rd party libraries and tools and lived experiences which could be discouraging.
I think Elixir falls into the same category of Clojure when it comes to "niche". However, my experience with Clojure is that the community is small but tight-knit: you can usually easily reach library authors in case there are issues and discuss things on Clojurians Slack. The libraries usually adhere to "don't break" like Clojure itself and when there isn't a library for a specific problem, you can drop down one layer to the host system where there is usually a library for everything (Java, browser, Node.js, ...). So although Clojure is fairly niche, you can use a wide array of mainstream libraries to solve problems.
My experience with Elixir has largely been the same, to be honest. I’ve managed to speak with lots of well known library authors just by messaging them on the elixir slack. The creators of the language and the dominant web framework, Jose Valim and Chris McCord respectively, are well known for popping in on threads, conversations, and GitHub issues all over the place.
Elixir libraries are also pleasantly backwards compatible in my experience (with the occasional exception to be sure). At my company the effort required to maintain currency has been 1/10 that of Ruby in my experience.
I frequently hear that elixir lacks the 3rd party library support of Ruby. If you use sheer quantity as the criteria, then definitely, but in the 6 years I’ve been using Elixir, this has interestingly never gotten in my way. I’ve always either been able to find a library or the problem simply isn’t gnarly enough to deserve a library. Maybe I just haven’t picked the right problems with which to experience this lack though :).
All that to say I think Elixir and Clojure are very similar in these regards!
I chose Elixir over Clojure simply because the web development story is better (in my opinion) due to the community rallying around Phoenix. I preferred the Lispiness of Clojure but all you have over there is Fulcro and Luminus, the former is far, far too complicated and niche, while the latter is just curated libraries.
Erlang is definitely more niche than elixir at this point. Too many well-known companies use elixir: discord, pagerduty, Weedmaps, Boston MBTA, apple, etc.
I am currently pleased at the current renaissance of CLIs.
If you use Python, Rich and Textualize is leading the forth. I am currently using it to build a frontend to a DRF backend and I am really enjoying the experience.
