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Just wanted to say that I haven't felt this good about writing code in a very long time. No pressure, just building something I've been wanting for a long time and the pieces are finally falling into place.
Yes, it is using AI ... local Ollama models to control an electron browser context via Playwright connected as an MCP tool to an agent instance. Sounds fancy, right? And you know what? It is and it's pretty darn cool. I've been waiting at least 6 months to build this because I couldn't find an ai agent sdk library for nodejs that didn't suck. Fortunately a while ago, Open AI released their python port finally.
Now that I had all the tools that I needed, I got to work and in a couple of weekends I managed to get a prototype working. It's still rough around the edges and needs a lot of polishing, but as a proof of concept, it works.
I can't even remember the last time when I went to bed at 4am because I got stuck on a coding frenzy. But it feels nice man.
From the begining I’ve had users asking if the app would be able to auto-apply for jobs on their behalf and I realized there was a market for it, but I had an ethical dillema with the idea. I didn’t like the fact that it could be used to spam job sites.
Fast forward a little bit and everyone and their mom started building auto-apply bots (some of whom have been really spamming reddit/twitter with their ads). Ngl, I felt a lot of FOMO, especially in the beginning when I saw actual good feedback from users of those tools.
To my surprise, in the last few months people have started hating these kind of apps. Part of it because all of the spammy ads, but also because most of them SUCK. They promise users that they only have to pay $50-$100/mo and the tool would magically land them a job. And 90% of the time they fail to deliver. And besides that, they’ve just made the entire process a lot worse. Recruiters are overwhelmed with low quality submissions and everyone is having a much harder time getting hired.
Bottom line is, the world doesn’t need yet another auto-apply bot so I’m not building one. Even if I could make a quick buck, it’s just not healthy for the job market.
Technology is awesome, but when used properly. For now our core mission will remain helping users to find the right jobs and find them before everyone else to give them the advantage of applying early.
Since then, about a million other similar apps have been released and are flooding/spamming reddit almost every day. I actually play a drinking game with my wife, every time we see a new tool released we drink a glass of wine. My liver has not been doing great lately.
Nowadays if I try to promote the app again, it either gets ghosted or down right hated upon with the usual “great, just what we needed, another job search app”.
I don’t know what to do to stand out, or do I just have to wait until the wave passes and people start building other tools and the current ones die out?
For months I was on the edge wether I should open source it or not, my main concern being that someone would “steal” the code and sell it under their own brand.
Eventually I caved and decided to risk it. If someone takes the code and builds a better business out of it so be it.
Super excited about it, I started spreading the word that the tool is going open source and … radio silence. It got some stars and a couple of forks, but I don’t think anyone actually browsed the code or anything.
It made me wonder: this whole “I’m not using this tool unless it’s open source” is nothing more than hypocrisy? Because I don’t think those people actually go through the source code to make sure it’s safe or anything.
For me, the only benefit I see in a tool being open source is that I could build it and run it myself for free. Other than that, I couldn’t care less.
I'm currently working on a side project which is a paid product (no free tier). Main target audience right now are software developers, but it also works for other industries (it's a job hunting tool).
I've put quite a bit of work into it and the main reason why I didn't go open source from the start is because I was afraid someone might copy the code and sell it on their own. Also since the main target audience are software devs, people might just spin their own instance to avoid paying for the product.
Does anyone have any advice on this? Is it worth open sourcing a comercial product? Right now the main benefit I see is that people might feel more comfortable using it since they can check what the app does, but not sure how relevant this is for most (personally I've never browsed the source code of any app I've ever used).