Too late for what? Could no one start a viable internet business in 2005, or were they all taken in 1998? Is it impossible to learn machine learning today, if you weren't jumping into Tensorflow in 2015? Do you think it's impossible to learn OpenClaw today, if you weren't playing with it six months ago, and do you think there might not be a successor that "wins" and is easier to learn and use six months from now, or will I have "gotten there too late" to possibly leverage or learn agents?
I just don't understand what it is you think anyone will be too late for, unless this is just self-justification and snide ego-boosting.
Do you think no one can create anything alone ever again? Or can they only do it by adopting the bleeding edge?
> It's called low-hanging fruits.
1 in a million ideas are 1 in a million, and they don't require being a bleeding edge adopter of anything. Do you think no one can create a better version of a first-try service? Is the agentic world now closed because someone built a mediocre version of it?
For a start-up based board, this point-of-view just feels so sad and myopic.
The behaviors of NFT advocates and AI advocates are shockingly similar.
Remember how NFTs were supposed to be the future or art ownership, and all it amounted to was awful pictures of bored apes and ahegao lamas? The NFT bros proudly displayed their shitty art - not because it was good, but because it signaled their allegiance.
Now go on to any pro-AI blog. Look at the images. They've stopped trying to edit out the AI errors - they proudly display images with garbled text and bad anatomy. Just like before, it signals allegiance to AI consumption.
Even the last sentence of your post is the same sentiment as "have fun staying poor" was for the crypto bros.
> The behaviors of NFT advocates and AI advocates are shockingly similar.
It’s the same people every time. Stupid, gullible idiots.
Remember when HN was obsessed with the room temp superconductivity fraud a few years back? Remember the zealous indignation at anyone suggest skepticism? The empty attempts to downplay their rabid stupidity afterwards?
Only backend developers that think frontend is trivial and we’re all just idiots think that HTMX is the solution. They saw it working in their hello world side project and think they discovered gold.
This is why I'm a big advocate of Inertia.js [1]. For me it's the right balance of using "serious" batteries included traditional MVC backends like Laravel, Rails, Adonis, Django, etc... and modern component based frontend tools like React, Vue, Svelte, etc. Responsibilities are clear, working in it is easy, and every single time I used it feels like you're using the right tool for each task.
I can't recommend it enough. If you never tried/learnt about it, check it out. Unless you're building an offline first app, it's 100% the safest way to go in my opinion for 99.9% of projects.
I am also in love with Inertia, it lets you use a React frontend and a Laravel backend without a dedicated API or endpoints, its so much faster to develop and iterate, and you dont need to change your approach or mental model, it just makes total sense.
Instead of creating routes and using fetch() you just pass the data directly to the client side react jsx template, inertia automatically injects the needed data as json into the client page.
I feel very comfortable with Django on the frontend, what are you missing there? I usually use Tailwind or Bulma, with HTMX and AlpineJs. I feel like the experience can be very much React like, even if you leave out HTMX. The frontend game of Django really changed about 2 years ago (at least for me).
Laravel's Blade templates are just absolutely phenomenal. The partial rendering, the integration with Livewire, the first class component paradigm. It's just far beyond stock Django / Jinja at this point and delivers some serious dev experience performance boosts.
Glad to hear that works for you. But nothing of what you are mentioning is part of Django, nor an official package,etc.
And I’m not going to get into the details of whether that stack would work for non backend developers, developers working on medium/large projects and/or medium/large teams. That’s a separate and unrelated discussion.
But compare what Django brings you (Stone Age templating system and that’s it) to what Laravel provides out of the box (or via official packages) like assets bundling, live reloading, an amazing and modern template system with proper “component like” partials or even if you need them, the “big guns” such as Inertia or Livewire. More or less the same is true for Rails with the Hotwire stuff.
There’s absolutely no point of comparison here. Even if that works for you, Django is not even in the same league.
It is still a great backend framework though, which was my point.
This is more on the scale of the invention of the press, the telegraph, or the internet itself.
"I'm ok being left behind, I will join this Internet thing when it really becomes useful"...
Ok... you do you. Hope you don't get there too late.
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