My fellow Hivers,
We are at a point in Hive's timeline where the future looks bright and grim at the same time. We've celebrated our 5th anniversary as Hive. The core devs have been cooking for years, and our blockchain is more robust and scalable than ever. But our user base isn't growing much, meaningful new apps are yet to be seen, and our price is sinking while we are building 18k gold boreholes somewhere in the physical world.
But I come here to give you a message. Like Bilbo Baggins, who left the Shire to face dangers he's never seen before, to come back rich with experiences and gold. Now, I do not come back with gold but with experiences nevertheless.
There are many stories to be told, and telling you I'd like, but for now, one shall suffice. Starting with a quote that many of you will know in some different form:
Ask not what Hive can do for you, ask what you can do for Hive.
A few months ago, I had what I would call a professional-life crisis. The skills I had spent years crafting to (cough) perfection were becoming obsolete. Agent AI reached a point with Claude and Cursor where it wasn't reasonable anymore for me to code myself. It didn't hit the same quality code and made mistakes more often than not, but realizing that this would be the worst agentic AI was ever going to be was an eye-opener, and it was devastating.
Let me explain: Coding came to me by chance. At the same time I learned about crypto, I taught myself everything I could to bring what I had in mind to vision. Others use color to paint or notes to create music; I was using code to create—carefully positioning each part where it should be for it to ultimately turn into a masterwork. And all of that code was my preciousss.
After years of working, writing millions of lines of code, I was confident about who I was and what I could do—like a hiker reaching a mountain, but who also just found out that on the other side of the mountain a lift got built.
And when I saw @meno putting away his guitars and building Snapie in a matter of a few months, a social media interface that would have taken me a month or two as well—something snapped. (pun intended)
After a bit of time, I decided to accept that my time as a human programmer was over and that I would open myself up to what was to come. I signed up for Claude's $100 subscription and began exploring. And suddenly, I saw a whole new set of opportunities. Being able to build apps in a matter of days and weeks rather than months. My experience and knowledge were still useful, but I wasn't doing the code by hand anymore.
Ideas, Ideas, Ideas
Like the Big Bang, ideas suddenly started to rush towards me, and rather than the code or the implementation, suddenly the quality of the ideas became the bottleneck. And I realized that my identification as a software developer wasn't important anymore. I was, am, and always will be an idea man who uses technology to bring them to life.
So, what does that have to do with the title?
Well, that's what I've been asking myself recently more and more:
"What can I do for Hive?"
There isn't just a single answer. It's a difficult question and simple at the same time. There is no right or wrong, just a matter of perspective, subjectiveness, and reflection. But by putting Hive before myself, the priorities become clear and the ideas can flow.
I'll leave the post open with these questions so that everyone who reads it can come to their own answers in relation to:
- "What can I do for Hive?"
- "How can I serve Hive?"
- "What does Hive actually need?"
This is a question you asked me over phone/voice, and I think I answered. But the fact the you wrote this post with humility speaks a lot. I think you still have ways to go, but this is a good place to start.
I am not a coder myself, but I work with many and being from India and being from an exclusive University in India, which has produced some of the best coders in the world that we know, I have a good understanding about the industry. My nephew works for google deepmind. I have a close friend at NVDA, from the early days, also several at AWS from its inception, and from early days at MSFT. So when you did a lot of mumbo-jumbo in the past, I was disapproving.
The point is not that coding is getting obsolete. That is merely a fact. Now I can code fairly well in python using web version of Jupyter notebook and any of the basic LLMs, but that is NOT the point.
The point is, what is the next step? This is a loaded question.
There are two broad segments towards the solution:
Let us not get into the second, as that will take 2 hours to write and we won't get anywhere.
But, the first point is solvable and easy. As a person, one should explore a profession that they like, but there are times when the likable profession is not enough to produce an employment. Imagine a job of a typewriter maintenance worker (I mentioned that because one of my uncle was one!), no matter how much he/she liked the job, it doesn't exist today. So the person (my uncle) started selling life insurance. Did he like it? No. But if provided the employment. And then after a while he started doing real estate, buying and remodeling home, which he liked a lot. He retired comfortably. Hope you get the moral of the story.
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I appreciate the thoughful answer, @azircon and I do remember our conversation vividly.
If I understand the morale of your story correctly, you're referring to practicality, which is one of the lessons I had to learn myself over the last years. Well that and PMF is very important - but that's a long story. In regards to practicality and being willing to change professions: yes, fully agree there.
That said, I hope you don't find my posts to be mumbo jumo. I enjoy parabels and I try to explain my thoughts through them as well. Might not always turn out perfect, but won't stop me from trying again :)
Not your posts in particular, I was referring to hivemiximus. Anyways, water under the bridge.
You nailed it Wolf... By you leveraging everything you've learnt over the years, and using AI as your grunt workers, you can literally build sky scrappers on your own. All the ideas we ever discussed, and all the one's we had not come up with, are now real possibilities.
I sincerely thing the new age belongs to the people with big ideas. It belongs to the people who can visualize the direction in their heads, and then break it down to steps, to build amazing things.
In that sense, you and other real devs (im not in that department by any stretch) are in the lead.
I quickly noticed this when I spoke with @mengao over some of my solutions for building @snapie - His approach as a real developer, would always end up beating my own solutions, because like you, he's been "in the trenches" too.
I love the escrow you've made, and the simple onboarding tool too.
I'm going to put on the thinking cap and shoot out more ideas into the ether, maybe one will catch your eye.
Cheers my friend
Thank you for the encouraging words, @meno! I do believe that building snapie yourself, even with outside help, was important for me in accepting (even unconsciously) that the days of the "bruteforce development" were over. Maybe they were never a good idea to begin with, but I enjoyed it at least.
Let the age of the idea man begin.
That said, I wish you all the best and truly hope that whatever you're building brings you lots of success!
I think there is so much more to being a developer than just writing code. There's architecture, security, community-building, etc... and we have plenty of examples where vibe-coded apps have had massive security flaws that have put users in a lot of danger. I do, personally, think it's possible, maybe even likely, that Agentic AI does get worse, especially if synthetic data isn't great, or companies like OpenAI have to shut down data centers because their revenue doesn't cover their costs... but all of that is irrelevant to really the point of your post...
I'm honestly not sure what Hive needs... it does feel like the cryptoworld has kind of left us behind. I do think crypto people tend to flock to the newest, shiniest thing - and I'm not sure where that leaves this blockchain.
Not just coding I think eventually everything will be solved by AI, just a question of time. Definitely exciting times we are living in. Think Hive is quite unique in the crypto space, at the end of the day we have a great product but too few people outside our bubble know about it.
What I am doing for Hive is hoarding every Hive token I can get my hands on. :)
LoL, I really wish that with some luck and extreme longevity, maybe, just maybe you may be able to see, verify and confirm the true value of that outlandish hoarding behavior you have now. :)
We really are approaching an age of amazing abundence. Lucky AI didnt catch up with my skills yet, so I can fiat mine a little longer.
I had a similar experience with my former employer. I was a data analyst. I knew a bit of python. I've spent the last 6 months out of work, tinkering with hive. I always wanted to see a tool that could analyse a user's posting history from a language standpoint.
So I just built it.
I both loathe the use of LLMs and AI, yet, in the right hands they're potent tools to amplify my existing abilities. Provided I know the guard rails and what to do when something breaks.
I start a new job on November 10, though, so I only have a scant few days to relax before my time becomes incredibly limited again.
Totally agree with you. As someone who had big ideas for Hive but no coding ability when Claude (and actually ChatGPT also) came around it became a question of "What do I want to do" rather than "wouldn't it be nice if....". It will be curious to see what the Hive community comes up with :)
Yes. I had the same revelation. (not the coding part tho, i could never code)
what I CAN (and will ) do is add, through my personal efforts, 1k or more hivers starting now. (actually already started.. got about 50 member of filipinos of hive so far..)
HIVE ON!!!
I've had over 60 differend jobs some for a couple of hours some for a couple of weeks , explore what you like or don't like longest time i've spend on one job is 3.5 years , and then i got bored again .
Find something that you are passioned about but be aware not to become a workaholic and end up with a burnout like i did .