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  • Shameless plug, I submitted a similar thought in here the other day. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48503555

    I like your approach of pooling resources around specific issues. That seems a practical missing piece for aiding the maintainers.

    by logged4upvoting
  • Really interesting solution to the AI PR problem. Keeping the maintainers in the driver's seat for issue prioritization is definitely the right approach.

    How are you handling the token allocation under the hood, is this managed via a GitHub App integration, and can backers target specific issues or just the repo as a whole?

    by grrinkarthi
  • I've got a couple good docs in the footer of www.clevercrow.io that will answer the token stuff. GitHub app integration for all repo interaction. Yep, backers can target specific issues or entire repos, their choice.
    by zhubert
  • I think I've read from a few different sources that the Claude Code $100-$200/mo plans are subsidized so hard that it's basically $2k-$8k/mo in "would-be" equivalent API token usages.

    This kind of makes sense in that space while the subsidies (if true) last?

    Unrelated, "tokens" feels very like... back-then blockchain to me. All the craze.

    by MuffinFlavored
  • Yeah, rising token costs definitely played into my thinking too. I want builders to be able to use the best models and it seems like they are getting more expensive. But maybe local models will get there?
    by zhubert
  • Or the API is massively overpriced. What Anthropic/OpenAI are charging for tokens says almost nothing about their actual costs, just what people are willing to pay.

    It’s just an obvious example of market segmentation by charging enterprise customers many times more than personal users while selling the same product

    by wqaatwt
  • Better yet: give them cold hard cash instead of what is arguably monopoly money for many OSS devs. Ironically this is something GitHub made "easy" with sponsorships several years ago.
    by tfrancisl
  • How do you ensure that funds ear-marked for a donor-specified issue goes toward that issue and not something else?
    by skeledrew
  • I always thought that the donate tokens thing would be done by sending some tokens from your personal sub to the maintainer's pool with some sort of proxy for tokens with rules, in a more direct way without doing it in cash, but yeah that's where the sweet fees live.

    If this gets any traction, the "share tokens with a friend" could be good PR for the labs, instead of buy me a coffee, buy me a clanker.

    by frangonf
  • For posterity: Through a bit of engineering work and better anomaly management, I’ve been able to get the platform fee down to 5%! I’m quite proud of this as there’s a lot of moving parts. In time I’ll probably be able to get it lower too which makes me happy (says the guy that tried to give his first startup away for free). :tada:
    by zhubert
  • What if the maintainer doesn’t want to implement a particular feature at the moment?

    I suppose this is the most common scenario - I doubt features are not getting implemented because maintainers are lacking tokens.

    by thih9
  • 100% expected, in fact, desired (maintainers should be/are in charge). My goal is to create enough surface area that backers see their tokens going to many of the things they care about, not necessarily all.
    by zhubert
  • Just curious, why is there a login gate before seeing the list of projects that participate in the platform? Usually similar donation(?) websites list those publicly for better visibility and less friction.
    by AKSF_Ackermann
  • Probably an oversight on my part. I was thinking that backers would find out about CleverCrow through the project maintainers so the public pages are repo specific.

    As an aside, when you do login, CleverCrow shows projects that you've starred on GitHub to help find things you might want to support.

    by zhubert
  • Just finance the project for god sake, why introducing another "gift card" that they sell at cashiers? Let the maintainer spend the money, maybe he/she needs bread, not tokens
    by dgan
  • At first I was like "i want to use ai but dont have the money to burn for api tokens" cool. But then I realized the backers are essentially saying "i have money and could support developers but i choose to give the money directly to a mega corp and skip the human". I recommend you remove the policy of "Whatever the run didn't spend goes straight back to your backers' wallets." and make sure the human behind the wheel gets to eat. Somehow
    by accountrequired
  • While we're in the token-equivalent of ZIRP, tokens don't cost what they cost, so there's sort of arbitrage to be had. I have tokens I've been given than I'm not using, but that's not the same as me having been given cash in the first place.
    by fragmede
  • I like the "maintainer stays in control" part, but isn't that also a problem in a way?

    The AI provider gets paid, the platform gets paid (20% is a lot in my opinion!), and the maintainer gets more unpaid work: another PR to plan, review, revise, merge, and then maintain... that's a lot of work.

    If people are willing to fund an issue, why should that money mainly cover LLM tokens rather than maintainer effort? Or at least, why doesn't the leftover money go to the maintainer instead of back to the donors?

    by KomoD
  • "We can pay you in exposure... And b̶e̶e̶r̶s̶ tokens!"
    by gxnxcxcx
  • Tokens are better than money. They let you train your skills to get top 1% on LeetPrompt so you have an entry in the lottery to interview for your next temp position.
    by duskdozer
  • While I definitely like the Patreon for Software Builders idea, that's got some moving pieces which take additional legal work. My hope is that could come in time as it would be really cool.

    Regarding rewarding maintainer effort, I'm shooting for the value prop of "free AI", this only works if reconciliation is per-phase and liquidity is accessible across as many repos as possible. So if I had each reconcile drain the pool, there would be a lot of stalled work and human intervention required.

    That said, there are probably some maintainers that don't want "free AI" and that's okay.

    by zhubert
  • I don't think you understand if we were to just give people money then how are these platforms gonna take a cut of the action?

    sounds like you do not support other people that have nothing to do with the code that you like

    by acestus5
  • One of the cool things about code is that you can build stuff out of thin air, basically for free. It's not like woodworking where you have to pay for the wood.

    We are moving into a weird time where people are assuming that now we have to pay machines churn out code.

    Somehow they packaged up our own ability to think and are selling it back to us. If they can get us to forget how to do it we'll be the perfect customers, dependent forever.

    by adamddev1
  • I really dislike it but the effectiveness of code generation is just too good now. I really doubted it at first but I can churn out 10x the work. Is it the same quality as IC? no but I think that it doesn't matter anymore. How many of us have worked on some 10+m loc monstrosity for years never knowing more than 1% of the codebase? Probably most. Now I can generate that same monstrosity on my own. I've created a 1.1m+ loc and growing trading platform that automates options trades based on live ML edges from research papers. I never would have been able to do that on my own before LLM's. It has full telemetry and comprehensive error logging and testing as well. I'd have been strained to get MVP done before LLMs.

    I don't think someone without coding experience can do it though. I've accepted that the new expected output for a single dev will eventually converge to 10x-100x what it is now.

    by citizenpaul
  • You can only build it for free if you don't value your time. That is good for personal projects and hobbies but which company can build stuff without costs? There was always an expense to generating code. Plus you have to pay for equipment, electricity, subscriptions to stuff for their staff etc.

    I don't really think they are packaging up ability to think abd selling it back to you. There is nothing stopping you from not using AI and even companies, many firms just dont trust AI and don't use it.

    But the idea that code could be built of thin air is not true in case of actual businesses.

    by altmanaltman
  • idiocracy in progress
    by whateveracct
  • That’s what I don’t get about this whole AI push. It’s a global rug that everyone plans to pull, it’s sold at cost, it already presents major risks, everyone seems to be aware of all that and yet - the consumers and lawmakers are relatively quiet.
    by thih9