I don't want to come across as negative here, because I love Hive. I've been around since the Steemit days, and the developer community is genuinely strong even if it's smaller than other blockchain ecosystems. And I appreciate that this is a modest pilot with a conservative budget. That's the right way to test an idea.
But I'd honestly rather see proposals funding specific projects and developments on Hive than AI subscriptions, even at this scale.
The proposal does mention accountability, and I think that's good. Developers showing tangible progress after each month is better than nothing. But here's where I get stuck: if we're measuring success by output anyway, why not just fund the output directly? If someone builds a great dApp or contributes meaningful infrastructure work, fund that. You skip the middleman of monitoring whether a subscription is actually being used for Hive work, because you're paying for results instead of tools.
And that's the core issue for me. There's no way to verify that these subscriptions are being used for Hive development specifically. A dev could use 80% of their Claude Code usage on freelance work and 20% on a Hive project, show the Hive project as their monthly progress, and nobody would ever know. I'm not saying people will do that, but when you're spending community funds, the structure should make that kind of thing difficult by design, not just hope it doesn't happen.
What I think would be more beneficial is starting with a list of things the community believes Hive actually needs. Tools, dApps, services, infrastructure layers, documentation, onboarding flows, whatever. Then fund those efforts directly with clear scope and milestones. Tie the money to deliverables. That way the community sees exactly what it's getting, and developers have something concrete to be accountable for.
I also want to push back a little on the 10x productivity framing. AI tools in the hands of a skilled, experienced dev are an absolute force multiplier. I've seen it firsthand. A senior developer who already understands architecture, system design, and debugging can use these tools to move at genuinely impressive speed. The AI handles the repetitive stuff while the dev focuses on the decisions that actually matter.
But for inexperienced juniors, or even some intermediate devs I've worked with over the years, these tools can be a trap. They generate code that looks right, passes a quick review, and then falls apart in production because nobody involved actually understood what was being built. The 10x claim assumes a baseline level of competence that not every applicant is going to have. AI doesn't replace the need to know what you're doing. It accelerates people who already do. That's a big difference, and the vetting process would need to be pretty rigorous to account for it.
None of this is me saying the idea has no merit. I get the reasoning, and I respect that it's being pitched as a small pilot rather than a massive funding ask. But if we're going to spend community money to grow the developer ecosystem (especially during what appears to be a bear market and negative sentiment in crypto), I'd rather see it go toward bounties for specific features, grants tied to shipping working software, or direct funding for projects that people on Hive can actually use. That feels like a more accountable path to the same goal.
In my case, I'm a senior dev and I already use these tools, so I don't need a subsidised subscription. I would rather be paid to work on a problem or task instead.
The DHF has been 90% waste & abuse. Don’t feel u need to apologize or preference what you are going to say. We must be critical! As most aren’t! Appreciate this detailed reply!
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Appreciate that. And you're right, we shouldn't have to soften every piece of criticism with disclaimers. If something isn't working, it's not negativity to say so. It's just paying attention.
I've always had a soft spot for Steemit and Hive. It's a really nice developer experience (even if we don't have smart contracts), I like how you can do on-chain stuff (although smart contracts would be really good).
What I'd really love to see is a dedicated platform built specifically for task-based Hive development. Something like a bounty board or project marketplace where the community defines what needs to be built, developers pick up the work, and payment happens on delivery. No long proposal cycles, no needing to know the right people, no whale politics deciding whose work matters.
The DHF's fundamental problem isn't the concept. A community treasury funding development is a great idea. The problem is that the approval mechanism is stake-weighted, which means the same dynamics that play out everywhere else on Hive play out there too. A handful of large stakeholders effectively decide what gets funded. If you're not on their radar, your proposal might as well not exist. And if you are on their radar for the wrong reasons, same deal.
A task-based system sidesteps a lot of that. You define the work, you define what done looks like, you set the price. A developer delivers or they don't. Nobody needs to campaign for votes. Nobody needs to write a blog post justifying their existence. The work speaks for itself.
Obviously something like that still needs governance and quality control, you can't just let anyone claim a bounty and submit garbage. But that's a solvable problem. What's harder to solve is the political capture that happens when funding decisions are tied to stake and social influence, and that's exactly what a task-based system would route around.
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Great comment, the problem in this case is that tool/app/project based funding has hurt Hive and DHF before. So people are incredibly reluctant to fund any projects nowadays. In quite a few cases we had people pitching their ideas about the new shiny thing, receive over $100k in funding and then deliver basically no tangible results or results that did not make any sense or help any Hive user in any way (or help attract more users) before the funding eventually dies out and they disappear.
Not everyone manages the DHF proposals daily, so you'd have a proposal proposed for an entire year, made so much sense, got paid thousands of HBD per month but have next-to-no accountability, simply because no one is actively managing the project from an "investor" perspective.
That's why I believe this project might be more successful, of course, we are not going to invest in some no-name person with a subscription, we would like to vet their previous projects and contribution first. I'd love to see some senior devs who are mingling with AI but haven't had the opportunity to pay for an expensive (yet strong) subscriptions.
As I said in the post, if everything goes well, in the future I'd like Hive Dev Fund to be something akin to the DHF system itself, albeit on a smaller scale. Where tasks, small projects and ideas can get funding, just not in the hundreds of thousands level.
That's a really fair point, and I think you've actually identified the exact same problem I'm describing, just from the other end.
You're right that project-based funding has burned Hive before. People pitching big ideas, collecting six figures, and delivering nothing or next to nothing. I've watched that happen too and it's frustrating. So I get why the instinct is to go smaller and more controlled, and honestly, I respect that this proposal is designed that way. Conservative budget, pilot scope, vetting applicants. That's all sensible.
But I think the lesson from those failed projects isn't that we should stop funding projects. It's that we were funding them wrong. The reason people walked away with $100k and no results is exactly what you said: no one was actively managing it from an investor perspective. No milestones, no stage gates, no "deliver phase one before you get phase two money." The accountability structure wasn't there, so the money just flowed until someone eventually noticed nothing was happening.
That's a fixable problem. If you fund a project in stages tied to deliverables, the worst case scenario is you lose one milestone payment before you cut someone off. That's a completely different risk profile than handing someone a year of funding and hoping for the best.
The other thing milestone and task-based funding does is open up a single feature or problem to multiple contributors. Right now, most proposals are one dev, one project. If that person gets busy with their day job, burns out, or just disappears, the whole thing stalls. But if you break a large feature into discrete tasks, three or four developers can work on different parts of the same problem in parallel. You're not betting everything on one person's availability and motivation. The work keeps moving even if one contributor drops off. That's just a more resilient way to build software, and it's how most serious open source projects operate outside of Hive already.
And what you described wanting for the future of Hive Dev Fund, a smaller scale system where tasks and small projects can get funding without the massive overhead of the DHF, that's basically what I'm arguing for too. I think we're on the same page about where this needs to go. I just think we should start there now instead of routing community funds through AI subscriptions first and evolving toward it later. The task-based model is the stronger foundation, and I'd rather see the pilot built around that from day one.