Stupid Simple

6 April 2025

A friend recently shared a development tool he built for himself while using AI for coding. It was straight and to the point. He said it was stupid. “Stupid simple” was my retort.

My friend, like a lot of people these days, has taken to vibe coding. But he vibed a little too hard and the project got out of hand. So he built a tool to debug his vibe-coded projects.

It’s a command-line interface tool. It feels limited. But that’s exactly what is needed when you’re performing surgery on something complicated.

...

Complexity is a barrier to adoption

At a recent AI developer meetup, one of the discussion points was about how the nature of developer tools is changing. A lot of people are adopting AI coding agents. Web developers attempt to rank high in search engines using search-engine optimization, and now they have to optimize for being recommended by LLMs. Similarly, developers will need to optimize their tools such that they get recommended by AI coding agents.

The way to get adoption for your shiny new developer tool is to make it perform a task well, while being very easy to use. Any complexity early on reduces the chances of your tool getting adopted by other developers, which reduces the chance it gets recommended by AI coding agents.

Especially, when you're seeking reliability

Voice agents are blowing up.

One of the best indicators of a hot market is YC founders building there.

And these founders are increasingly choosing (or pivoting to) one space...AI voice agents!

There are 90 voice agent startups from recent YC batches. Full list + a breakdown of the verticals of focus 👇 pic.twitter.com/kuj1Dh94SW
— Olivia Moore (@omooretweets) January 31, 2025

There are a lot of moving pieces to a voice agent, and they require a lot of testing to ensure reliability. Naturally, a lot of people have built tools to test these voice agents. And because all these people are very smart, they immediately over-complicate their tools. They add so many features that simply getting started feels like rocket science. Well, if there a lot of moving pieces to your agent, why would you add something even more complicated in your search for reliability?

Simple vs Complex tools

IDEs

Build into the future vs teleport people into the future with no stepping stones.

Cursor started out as a VS Code fork. It came with an intuitive auto-complete feature and a simple chat interface. They saw a lot of adoption and have massively expanded their feature set since. It is now one of the preferred tools of the vibe coder.
Devin was the better-funded competitor. From the start, it promised to completely replace a software engineer. Well, a lot of people freaked out, then they tried it, and they were disappointed. The interface was built for a tool that could natively take instructions with little context and run with it.¹

Smartphones

There is a very clear winner here, so I'll keep it brief.

Android: free, open-source, very customizable. And remember that “we’ve had this feature for 5 years!”
iOS: premium pricing, closed source, limited customization, keep you in Apple’s walled garden. But “it just works!”