I think they did. If you start the download and then open the sidebar and/or background the app, the download progress bar disappears and is replaced by the download button. If you press the download button again, the progress bar reappears at the correct point.
I find that Claude often makes little statefulness mistakes like that. Human developers do too, but the slower and more iterative nature of human development makes it more likely that that would get caught.
This probably could have been one-shotted with Sonnet, not even Opus. Given how over indexed they are on LLM coding, Haiku might even be able to do it.
This is actually an interesting coding model benchmark task now that I think about it.
If it's so great, why is there so little viscera documenting it's greatness? Just lots and lots of words.
There is truly nothing original here and the product doesn't have a chance in hell of earning money. Local LLMs on-device will be dominated by the device vendors, whose control of the hardware stack combined with their ability to subsidize billions of dollars of machine learning research gives them an unfair advantage. Apple knows what the next generation of silicon will deliver, and their ML engineers are already hard at work building models that will be highly optimized for that silicon a year or two ahead of time. Open source models are really great and are backed by well funded labs; however, delivering these models on-device in a way that pleases users will never be easier than it is for the vendors of the devices.
Plus, device vendors have ways of making money from local LLMs that third-party app providers do not. They can make their local LLM free and earn money on the hardware play, without skipping a beat on the billions of dollars of ongoing R&D. I don't see how third party app vendors make money here when they will be competing with the decent, totally free alternative that Apple and Google (and Samsung etc.) will load on in the next year or two.
Same with Kagi. Thats where Kagi news was born.
I quite like the ethos, but this Ensu definitely seems underbaked.
But where are they! https://ente.com/about
Small team, rooting for them
But sure, making money with standalone "local first is our headline feature" will be incredibly hard against those, no doubt about that. In light of the limited quality of what local models can achieve, the privacy bonus just won't compel many to pay. But that only means that this "morning with Claude" you are suggesting might be just the right amount of investment for the result you'd realistically expect. But is that so bad? I'd argue the reverse: bundling up the low hanging fruit but not by some hobbyist who will lose interest two weeks on but by a company big enough the keep it going while small enough to not be a VC furnace that will inevitably turn on users once the runway runs out (*), that's an opportunity to fill a niche few others can. Valuable for users who don't want to roll their own deployment of open source models (can't, or unwilling to commit to keeping them up to date, assuming that Ente does keep that ball rolling), and also valuable for the company of the investment actually is so low that it pays by raising awareness for their other products that apparently do earn them money.
(*) I was googling around a little wondering if they actually are as close to bootstrapped as they seem on the surface, and yes, that's supposedly the core idea [0], but despite that they also took 100 kUSD in "non-diluting" (basically a gift then?) from Mozilla with the explicit goal "to promote independent AI and machine learning" [1]. So not a CEO whim but following up to a promise made earlier. If they actually did avoid spending all that money on a one-off but went smaller planning to keep it current for a longer time horizon, I'd congratulate them on an excellent choice.
[0] https://ente.com/blog/5-years-of-ente/
[1] https://ente.io/blog/mozilla-builders/
The hn discussion for [1] seems to be completely missing the point, that Mozilla program isn't about funding an image host (yeah, I'd also prefer if Mozilla focused on the Browser and perhaps Thunderbird, but the foundation is what it is): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41681666
We have not seen a tidal wave of untechnical people vibe coding up their own software solutions.
When my little brother who is a drummer, and has never even looked at "code" before, had claude on-shot a python app that let him download songs on youtube, extract the stems, collect tempo/key/etc information, then feed that into his DAW, all without ever looking at code, knowing what any of it did, etc., I knew that we were about to see a LOT of single-use applications.
I'm not against it, honestly. I have always written little one-off scripts and apps that accomplished something faster than manually, now that those one-shots are possible with an LLM in seconds sometimes, it makes all my personal scripts so much easier... that said, I definitely read the scripts that are output, and attempt to step through them in a debugger before assuming it is all good.
That to me is more valuable than code vibe coded by Claude in one afternoon.
I do agree that more local LLM options are always better.
(Though I think this announcement is sufficiently unpleasant I'm starting to reconsider)