2026-07-15
42 signals reviewed · 5 high-signal · 1 themes
Themes
Paid AI Tools Underdeliver on Pro Workflows
17.75 ★ new
Developers and power users are paying for premium AI services but find them insufficient for non-trivial tasks, forcing them into complex workarounds, custom-built solutions, or constant manual intervention.
4 signals · 4 voices · max 20
"I go to a different frontier LLM, I ask it to make me a PPTX file from my description (which I downloaded from Google docs as markdown). After a few minutes I have a nice PPTX file. I upload that to Google Drive and open it. Google converts it to Slides. NOW, finally, I have the joy of improving one slide at a time with Gemini."
AIDeveloper ToolsWorkflow AutomationSaaS
All Signals (42)
| Title | Source | ↑ | WTP | Work | Pain | Evidence | Score | Theme |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ask HN: How useful is Gemini for Google Apps? | hackernews | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 | I go to a different frontier LLM, I ask it to make me a PPTX file from my description (which I downloaded from Google docs as markdown). After a few minutes I have a nice PPTX file. I upload that to Google Drive and open it. | 20 | Paid AI Tools Underdeliver on Pro Workflows |
| Ask HN: Who build production apps with out seeing code? | hackernews | 1 | 3 | 3 | 2 | 99% of our code is written by AI, but it's helpful to have the code editor so we can just review and see what changed. VS Code is good for that, but Claude Code and Codex and all the other CLI-based stuff is just not really well optimized for reading code. | 19 | Paid AI Tools Underdeliver on Pro Workflows |
| I reverse-engineered the three biggest agent-memory tools | hackernews | 2 | 2 | 3 | 2 | I really wanted to use them for my personal use case, but that looks like such a heavy setup that adds a lot of friction and silos. Plus, it feels like I just get my data trapped in their service...That's why my "long-term memory" still lives in Obsidian, Readwise, and Google Drive | 16 | Paid AI Tools Underdeliver on Pro Workflows |
| Ask HN: How are you productive with GPT 5.6 Sol? | hackernews | 3 | 3 | 1 | 3 | I recently switched from Opus/Fable to GPT 5.6 Sol, and so far I’ve found it so dumb that it often makes me lose time. With GPT I constantly have to steer it | 16 | Paid AI Tools Underdeliver on Pro Workflows |
| (comment) | hackernews | 0 | 3 | 0 | 1 | I say this as someone with a lot more money invested in local inference hardware at home. | 12 | — |
| (comment) | hackernews | 0 | 0 | 3 | 2 | So I created a system that seems a bit opposed to yours... It's an overlay that I can resize, and an accompanying web view, of all my running coding agent terminal sessions. | 10 | — |
| (comment) | hackernews | 0 | 0 | 1 | 3 | Eventually it turned out to be that /etc/pam.md/common-session was misconfigured by installation default to have 'pam_elogind.so' set up, which was trying to do some cockamamie dbus bullshit | 7 | — |
| Ask HN: How do you do marketing in the age of slop? | hackernews | 9 | 0 | 1 | 3 | We (that is to say my business partner and I) are building SaaS products, but we are really struggling to find enough users. | 6 | — |
| Ask HN: Are AWS Certs worth getting for experienced Devs? | hackernews | 6 | 1 | 0 | 1 | Would it be worth it for me to start getting some Certs (like AWS solutions architect - associate/professional) | 6 | — |
| Ask HN: Evidence for JavaScript ecosystem being more vulnerable than Rust's? | hackernews | 2 | 0 | 1 | 2 | Suppose you have to deal with vulnerability findings reported by some automated tools that seem to scan JavaScript projects's dependency lists | 5 | — |
| (comment) | hackernews | 0 | 0 | 1 | 2 | The atrophy of coding muscle from using AI is happening to me too. That's why I make myself type for at least an hour a day, just to maintain the coding muscle | 5 | — |
| (comment) | hackernews | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | I wish I'd been able to order a set, frankly | 5 | — |
| (comment) | hackernews | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | pay for rarified (so expensive) talent to write your own | 5 | — |
| (comment) | hackernews | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | I switched around the options, coloring, the words in the loading, I mix and matched the components from different CLIs, etc. | 4 | — |
| (comment) | hackernews | 0 | 0 | 0 | 3 | — | 4 | — |
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| (comment) | hackernews | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | — | 3 | — |
| As a dev, would you use a form backend tool? | hackernews | 2 | 0 | 0 | 1 | — | 2 | — |
| Ask HN: Insightful research or longreads on core teams in IT? | hackernews | 2 | 0 | 0 | 1 | — | 2 | — |
| Ask HN: Do y'all sit here just looking at each url pop up to engage? | hackernews | 3 | 0 | 0 | 2 | — | 2 | — |
| (comment) | hackernews | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | — | 2 | — |
| I'm building a project rn that shares ad revenue with users. What do you think? | hackernews | 3 | 0 | 0 | 1 | — | 2 | — |
| Ask HN: What company could create an iOS/Android competitor worth adopting? | hackernews | 4 | 0 | 0 | 1 | — | 2 | — |
| (comment) | hackernews | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | — | 1 | — |
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