I'm an introvert and socially anxious, but I do enjoy hanging out with my friends. I just HATE the invitation-and-coordination game. If someone invites me and I don't want to go, I hate having to come up with a socially acceptable excuse. Inviting someone and waiting for them to make a socially acceptable excuse is equally awful to me.
Then you get to coordination. I want to go to the brewery at 2pm, but your kid has soccer practice so you can't get there til 3:30, but then Joe has to leave at 4 to pick up his mother in law at the airport, and... ugh. It's the worst.
So I made Holler, which is basically you hollering to your friends, "I'm going to be at the farmer's market at 2pm," and then you just go. If they show up, fantastic. If not, whatever, you were going to go anyway.
No coordination, no invitations, no friction. Just holler and go.
It's iOS only for now, but I'm working on an Android app as you read this, so hopefully that's coming soon.
That seems like the kind of "social app" that might actually work for me. I like the idea of sort of passively declaring "i am doing something, feel free to show up."
I guess the potential failure mode is ... no one ever showing up. I've got a standing slot (during work hours) at my current company where it's just "AI Jam" - just come in, eat lunch, and we'll hack on something, ramble about the news, etc. It's been moderately successful but there are definitely weeks where you just end up in a call with one or two guys with nothing to show.
That's not so bad though - last week we just talked about video games. Still fun.
Yeah, I get that. My thinking is that I'd rather go do something fun by myself than sit at home because I couldn't coordinate something or because someone else didn't want to do my thing.
This weekend, for example, another couple invited my partner and me to go do an activity. They sent the text at 11. We finished giving our kid lunch, walked the dog, and loaded up the car. They texted and said their kid wasn't ready yet, and maybe they'd leave by 2. They didn't leave home til 2:30, so we didn't start our activity until noon, almost three hours later. The activity lasted about an hour, then we suggested going to a brewery to get some drinks, but for one reason or another, we wound up going our separate ways.
My partner looked at me and said "This would've been a better Holler use-case. We could've just gone for a hike ourselves and not had to coordinate with someone else who can't show up on time."
Sure, it might've just been us, but we spent a lot of weeping and gnashing of teeth coordinating with people that we ultimately barely spent any time with, and instead lost half our day.
Holler, to me, represents a form of social freedom. I'm freed from the constraints of other peoples' calendars. If they really want to hang out with me, they'll come to the events I holler. If they don't, then that's fine, we can still be friends, but if they can't be willing to attend things on my schedule, why should I adjust my schedule to conform with theirs?
So I'm going to do what I want to do, and if anyone wants to join, fantastic.
Better than sitting at home twiddling my thumbs wishing I was doing something fun.
I do this in my running club (granted, it’s quite specific). Hello I’ll run X time at Y place for that long / that purpose. I don’t even explicitly « invite ». Then a few people sometimes join. We are a few hundreds so I meet new people each time. It’s nice and bears 0 organizational cost for me
Ah, Foursquare was so much fun. Definitely inspired this, except this is a little more private -- only your explicitly-added friends get to see your hollers.
I spent a lot of time thinking about what a "public" feed might look like and ultimately decided that my goal wasn't to make a social media app, but to specifically hang out with my friends in person. There's also a locality angle to this, where if you live in LA, you won't add a friend in Montana to your group, because they could never attend your events. So it becomes hyper-local by default.
Group chats, I think, are a fantastic medium for directed messaging (you have to explicitly choose the friends that you're group texting), and if that's something you like, then there's no reason to use Holler. This app, on the other hand, is about undirected messaging, where you simply broadcast your activity. The friction of choosing the group text and possibly excluding someone or accidentally including someone you didn't mean to goes away.
It does introduce other problems, to be fair, but I think it's a trade-off that I'm happy to make.
Thank you for trying! Sadly for ease of use but excellently for privacy reasons, Apple isn't very nice about giving names. It's just something we have to work around.
Privacy is definitely a goal. I'll update privacy policy for sure.
Part of the deal is that only the people you've added explicitly as friends can see your hollers. There's no "public feed."
One of the things that really jumped out at me is that several of my friends are Latino, and I was building this back when the ICE in Minneapolis thing was really big. I don't want to create world where people can track them and say "I know this group of non-white folks will be at this location, therefore we'll park our ICE truck outside and wait." So there was a lot of thought that went into how to make it safe for them.
Among other things, the data in the system only sticks around for a few days after the event. Also, while there is RSVP functionality, it's not required -- you can just show up. There are a few other things I've added that I can't remember off the top of my head that focus on the privacy angle.
E2EE felt like overkill at the time, but I can certainly work on adding it. Thank you.
Thanks for calling out the broken links (I don't use Twitter, and the email just needs to be wired up), and for the call out on privacy. Will get that updated soon.
This sounds great! The main barrier I see is getting everyone I want to install the app. Perhaps a "mass-SMS" variant could work, so it's independent of whatever messaging apps everyone runs.
As someone else pointed out, there's pressure in group chats to reply. This explicitly avoids that.
Also, let's say you want to go to a park for a picnic, and you have 100 friends. Which 100 friends are you going to add to a group chat? That's thinking you have to do, friction to getting the engagement going. You have to start thinking about "if I invite Sue, then I can't invite Dan because he's her ex," and blah blah blah.
Group texts are excellent directed communication media. But this is undirected event management. Rather than me inviting 13 specific people, I'm simply broadcasting the destination and time vector.
It's a different way of doing things. I'm not surprised at your question -- it's often the first one I get. But I'm explicitly attempting to solve a different problem than group texts solve.
Like the idea and the website looks good! Did you design by hand or what was your workflow for coming up with a design language, color palette, the sliding banner with headlines, etc?
Thanks! I came up with the color palette and the overall design. To be totally honest, I had AI do the HTML/CSS, as frontend is not my specialty, but I drew up the main design in Canva first and spent a lot of time with Claude to get it to reproduce what I wanted. It came up with a few things that I liked, and it came up with a few things that I hated. The final product out of Claude was probably 95% of what you see here, and then I went in and tweaked the rest of it by hand.
Not the person who wrote that reply but their reply immediately clicked for me.
Here in Europe basically everyone uses WhatsApp. So you might as well just place a WhatsApp status update writing something like "We're doing X this afternoon? Wanna join? We'll leave from [location] at [time.]" and basically everybody in your contacts can see that update.
It's not perfect (different privacy model, a lot more people can see the update unless you have a very curated contacts list) but no friction of getting people to install another app.
Edit: Also no notification for status update, so slightly different model that could solve the same need.
Ah, yes, that makes sense! I think that's a great solution.
I think perhaps one sort of semantic/slight difference is that Holler is hyper-local. If you live in LA and your friend lives in London, they obviously aren't going to the local farmer's market with you. I'd say the vast majority of my WhatsApp friends aren't local (I'm based in the States.)
BUT I can totally see that being an easy way to do things if your local friend group is on WhatsApp!
One of my questions would be whether anyone (strangers?) can see that or not. And again this is a US-centric concern, but one of the things I think a lot about is ICE and the government tracking non-white people, and so if there's any semblance of a public "I'll be at X place at Y time," then I'd rather not make that public. So Holler solves that.
But yeah, that's a creative use case for WhatsApp I hadn't considered! Very neat. Thank you for explaining.
As noted elsewhere, the website was made with the assistance of AI. I designed it myself in Canva, used AI to generate the HTML/CSS, but I designed it myself. The app itself is 100% hand-coded by me, though if you consider some of the AI-suggested autocomplete to be AI slop, maybe that's fair.
This app is designed to make the world a marginally better place, so maybe instead of shitting on someone's hard work, providing constructive feedback would be more in the spirit of collaboration and positivity. Have a nice day. :)
But to be honest, it sounds like you haven't found your product-market fit. Couple of questions:
1. Why do you think many business owners would use it?
2. Who is your target audience?
3. What's your advertising campaign targeting?
One reason I ask is that you state "I genuinely believed that many business owners would use it." Consider that the vast majority of business owners outsource their websites to agencies and don't know HTML from a roller coaster, and that might indicate that your ICP (ideal customer profile) might be wrong. And then further consider that agencies have been doing SEO and these other things for a long time, which... might indicate that you're solving a solved problem for your ICP.
That doesn't mean that your business is a bust. But it might mean that your marketing strategy and market positioning might be off. I'd find some local businesses, run some analysis on your own dime, and then go talk to them and see what they say. Chances are they'll just direct you to their web dev agency.
So then you talk to the agency, and... maybe they've already solved it. Or maybe you can get the agency to pay you instead of doing it in-house -- especially if you're doing more than they are for less than they would spend.
This is not an uncommon space to be with new business ideas, so I wouldn't take this as a sign to give up, but rather a sign to dig in and figure out how to pivot to generate real income.
Why do I think many business owners would use it?
Because ScanMyPage offers a fast, affordable AI-powered website analysis for just $1, helping businesses identify SEO, performance, usability, and website issues.
Who is my target audience?
Small and medium-sized business owners, entrepreneurs, freelancers, and website owners who want to improve their websites without hiring an expensive consultant.
What does my advertising campaign focus on?
The campaign focuses on people actively looking to check, analyze, audit, or improve their websites, especially SEO and website performance.
But you’re right that most business owners let agencies manage their websites. Do you think I should keep paying for Google Ads?
Right. I think you're missing my point a little bit. To put it a little more clearly: if you're marketing and getting zero leads, then you're marketing at the wrong folks.
If business owners outsource their websites to agencies, then they don't care about your service, ergo your premise of "many business owners would use it" is not a statement around which to build a business. In other words, business owners should not be your target audience -- agencies should be.
So if I were in your shoes, I would go talk to some businesses that you think should use this site and ask them straight up if they would use it. And when they inevitably point you to their agency, you should go ask the same question to the agency.
I would not spend more money on ads until you have real user feedback.
I guess I'd turn the question around to you: what do you want to see in release notes that you don't already see? What information do you feel is missing?
From my personal experience, the context of the fix lives in a dozen different places: the ticket, the code, the commit message. And now I need to document it a fourth time? From a dev perspective, the value just isn't there beyond a vague "fixed zoom issue for #1355," because you can go look at ticket 1355 and see the context, and look at the diff to see what changed.
From a dev's perspective, I'm documenting the same thing for the fourth time, except this time, perhaps, I have to think about the information from the perspective of a customer or non-technical person, and then decide how much information and detail is appropriate, and so on and so forth. I wouldn't say it's laziness, per se, as much as it's more work, and we have a lot of other things to do.
Also, let's be real: how many people read release notes? My boss doesn't, the CEO doesn't. Release note quality doesn't show up on my performance reviews. Customers don't leave Yelp reviews or App Store reviews because my release notes were bland. There's no career incentive for me to do "better." Maybe that should change, but that's the reality.
So the question comes back to you: what value are you seeking from release notes, and what level of detail makes sense to you?
I was also skeptical, but I started measuring quality (I'm using rework as a rough metric) and quantity (PR throughput), and I've found that, on average, LLMs are 60% worse at writing code (meaning they rework at a rate 60% higher than humans) but my team produce PRs about 2.4x faster. So objectively my team's numbers don't match up with yours: our speed is about 2.5x increase _on average_ and a 60% reduction _on average_ in quality. Some basic math suggests that our ROI is something around 50-60% improvement over just humans.
I'm not convinced that throwing more money (i.e. tokens) at the problem would make us any more efficient, but 1.5x improvement ain't nothing.
And just to address the "night and day" bit.. if you gave a construction foreman a machine that made his team 20% more productive, he'd take that all day long and tell everyone it's "night and day." I'm not sure what your threshold is, but +20% isn't nothing either. That foreman would hit more deadlines than not, and get more bonuses than not.
Quality is more about maintainability, IMO, which comes down to consistency and clarity of design, sensible abstractions, cohesion, decoupling, etc. I don’t think a rework metric tells you that.
It's like any other tool. Use it when you need it.
We don't insist that HVAC installers use hand-powered drills to "feel closer to the work," but we also don't insist that they use battery-powered drills and impact drivers on every single task.
We don't insist that a chef use a Vitamix blender to chop a single onion when a couple seconds with a sharp knife will do, but we certainly wouldn't only use a sharp knife to create a salsa.
We don't insist that a carpenter use only hand-saws to build a house, but we also don't insist that they use a chainsaw to make a chair.
We don't insist that an accountant write out taxes by hand, but we also don't insist that they use a calculator to determine how old you are from your birthdate.
You use the power tools when appropriate, and you use more delicate, surgical tools when appropriate. It's not any more difficult than that.
The problem with this analogy is an LLM isn't very much like a "tool" at all.
- In cases of practical relevance, you pay a recurring fee to keep using it - not very tool-like.
- Rather than doing a predictable action in response to user inputs, you give it imprecise instructions and it does something unpredictable but vaguely correct in response, which then must be thoroughly inspected.
- In cases of practical relevance, its actual operation (not just design) is entirely handled by a third party, not by the user.
These things describe a subcontractor, not a tool. We don't insist that a chef at a restaurant use this tool or that tool, but if the restaurant was actually just outsourcing all its cooking to some other company...yeah, that would absolutely factor into my decision to go there or not.
Let's go with your analogy: you would hire contractors to build a house, but not to put an IKEA bookshelf together. You would hire a professional chef to cook a five course meal, but not to heat up pop tarts. You would hire a surgeon to operate on your brain, but not to prescribe advil.
The point is that it's one of many things (tools, contractors, whatever) in your arsenal, and you use whichever one you need. You don't automatically reach for the surgeon or the chef or the contractor.
But the thing is, in this analogy, we are the chef, surgeon, or builder. We're the ones other people look for when they can't do the thing by themselves (in this case, writing software).
Neither my analogy or yours is exact, but it's really worth thinking about.
Right. But OP's question isn't "do you need a chef?" the question OP posed is more akin to "why should chefs use knives when they have blenders?" or "why should I build an IKEA bookshelf myself when I can hire a contractor to build a house?"
Because they're two different tools and situations.
You may be right but it seems like a different type of tool when it does the thinking for you. I feel like your analogy is closer to a good autocomplete rather than an agentic LLM loop. Agents feel like a genuinely different technology.
Maybe it’s more like an HVAC installer has a tool which tells them where to position the furnace. After many years, will they forget why the furnace should go there? Or maybe it’s like the HVAC installer has a tool which auto attaches the pipes. Hopefully it attached cold to cold and hot to hot, but the HVAC installer hasn’t had to do this in a while so they kind of forgot how to do it manually, and so will just trust the tool.
Imagine a carpenter needed to be proficient in hand-saws to use their chainsaw well, and using their chainsaw required knowing details about the wood they were working with, in only the way using a hand-saw gave.
I really like your analogy as-is, but LLMs aren't reliable power tools. Asking for external help requires good communication and can be overkill for small tasks.
Hiring a team of subcontractors carries risks unless you babysit the whole project.
...and it's fine to not use the loud, vibrating power saw and instead take some extra time to use a handsaw, and thus get more practiced at it.
It's fine to hire movers, but sometimes they end up damaging stuff. My solution is have a lot less stuff, and move it myself.
I increasingly have more respect for the Amish community one of my relatives lives near, at least in terms of their considered, intentional limits set on resource use. I don't agree with all their choices, and some seem arbitrary, but I respect their autonomy to choose.
I choose to move around the world primarily under my own power or augmented by a battery (supplies 2/3 of the Wattage I need to make my cargo bicycle move); harm reduction in the face of fossil-fuel addiction. I choose not to use generative AI because I'd rather human do more work for themselves instead of selling short future humans with profligate resource consumption.
It's fine to strive for things, but the most important thing in my life is my relationships with other humans. If I'm a person who can't walk, and am in physical therapy towards being able to walk, it's fine to keep working at it, and it's fine to never be able to walk; what matters is how I get on with my mates, and spending massive amounts of electricity on data centers is arguably harmful to the health of interpersonal relationships.
This is a great frame. Can I ask (and I mean this with good faith, because I've had this problem for the longest time now) how do you deal with employers or corporations who demand the absolute maximum output every second of every day, forcing you to use the proverbial loud, vibrating power saw to the point that you feel terrified to even look at the handsaw?
The question is what your tolerance to this kind of thing is. If the job is fundamentally changing underneath you, then you need to ask yourself if this is still a job you want to keep. If the answer is no, then you find another one. If you think you can still do it the way your employer is demanding, then stick around.
The sad truth is that the job is changing, and that means we need to change, too. That _doesn't_ mean we need the power saw 100% of the time, but it does mean we need to be very very proficient at it or we'll be left behind.
Leaving aside the conflict of interest here ("EDA bad, workflows good, buy DBOS workflows"), this is a significant straw man. The author more or less picked the worst example of event-driven architecture, then says, "See? It's bad."
The flow of reserve item -> check credit -> process payment -> fulfill order is actually a pretty synchronous process. There's no reason to make that event-driven unless you actually need it.
Should people reach for event-driven first? No, almost certainly not. Is this something that should be event-driven? Not as presented.
But if you imagine that the process becomes "process payment -> [5 other things]," such as fulfilling order, sending receipts, updating analytics, initiating fraud detection... those are all things that should be done in parallel and none of them need to know about the others, nor does the payments system need to know about them. _That_ is a better use-case for EDA that justifies the additional complexity and cost that the author is warning about.
I used a simple event architecture to manage federated identity migration and setup. When an existing user in our internal auth system was migrated to SSO, the identity manager sent a message that fanned out to the internal systems that used legacy auth to tell them to associate the old legacy user info with the new federated identity. If a system had a problem creating the association, it would put a failure message on the bus that we later processed depending on the failure type.
Ah, but you're talking about something else: hardware is quite different from software. Once your machine is out in the wild, you can't update it remotely. But with software, shipping MVPs and iterating is not only possible, it's almost always the right way to go about it.
I frequently tell my software teams "We aren't putting rockets in space; we're shipping an admin panel. We can revert code or change things if we don't like it."
I'll go the opposite direction: if your Sr Release Engineer will use AI assistants (Claude Code, etc) on the job, let them use it in the interview.
The best interviews test critical thinking and problem-solving, not recall. AI makes generating solutions easier, but it also makes validating those solutions harder. That validation skill is what _actually_ matters now. Focus on that. "How do you validate that your solution is correct?" is a great next question.
I also don't think it's wrong to say, "I know you're using an AI tool, that's fine, but I'd like you to answer _this_ question without it. I'm trying to determine whether you can validate whether an AI is giving you good information."
But today? The toothpaste is out of the tube, my friend. AI assistants are ubiquitous in 2026. Pretending otherwise isn't a strategy that's going to lead you to success. Instead, it's just filtering out candidates who've adapted to modern tooling. And isn't the ability to adapt to change one of the best qualities of an engineer?
My advice: learn to interview people who use AI well. You'll hire someone who knows how to leverage it effectively, rather than actively selecting against people who do.
(And if you're asking "absurd questions" to catch AI users, you're just wasting everyone's time. Ask real problems and evaluate how they approach solutions, with or without assistance.)
I only end up with absurd questions if I am nearly positive the candidate is using one of these tools. I was proven right too - I asked a candidate if he'd ever chopped down a tree with an axe. He said no immediately, and then proceeded to give me a solid woodsmans explanation for how to do just that. I stand by what I did.
I guess my question to you would be: does it matter if they're using AI? I don't think anyone in 2026 would criticize a candidate for using a calculator, and Googling syntax and so on hasn't been forbidden in any interview I've had in over 10 years. AI is just another tool, an increasingly ubiquitous one.
Why play games? Just say "Are you using AI to answer these questions? It's OK if you are, but that will change the types of questions I ask." And honestly, maybe that just reveals that we've been asking the wrong questions all along.
I'm an introvert and socially anxious, but I do enjoy hanging out with my friends. I just HATE the invitation-and-coordination game. If someone invites me and I don't want to go, I hate having to come up with a socially acceptable excuse. Inviting someone and waiting for them to make a socially acceptable excuse is equally awful to me.
Then you get to coordination. I want to go to the brewery at 2pm, but your kid has soccer practice so you can't get there til 3:30, but then Joe has to leave at 4 to pick up his mother in law at the airport, and... ugh. It's the worst.
So I made Holler, which is basically you hollering to your friends, "I'm going to be at the farmer's market at 2pm," and then you just go. If they show up, fantastic. If not, whatever, you were going to go anyway.
No coordination, no invitations, no friction. Just holler and go.
It's iOS only for now, but I'm working on an Android app as you read this, so hopefully that's coming soon.
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