from Hacker News

Dev Tools Honeytrap: Why We Can't Stop Building Tools Nobody Buys

by lunarcave on 4/11/25, 11:37 PM with 30 comments

• by encoderer on 4/12/25, 1:23 AM

  There is some truth here but I find this take to be overly cynical.

  I built Cronitor in 2014 not because I liked making dev tools or was even particularly good at it, but because in my day job at Zillow my team had a lot of problems with silently-failing cron jobs. I had friends who were developers at other companies so I had the ability to validate this problem with other people in my network.

  With any business it’s very important to solve a real problem. Steve Jobs called this approach starting with the customer and working backwards to the technology. So, you build what you know you need, with the belief that you are not as different from your peers as you might think. In contrast we have a lot of people starting with LLM technology and trying to work backwards to customers. I think that’s the real honeytrap.

• by 8f2ab37a-ed6c on 4/12/25, 1:37 AM

  This is my pet theory, but I suspect that dev tools also get in the way of opportunities for promotion for engineers. Sure, buying an A/B testing tool will solve the problem of needing that tool, but it will add nothing to the resume of half a dozen people trying to get a promotion or an impressive project on their resume that they can then shop around at other firms. Dev tools go against resume-driven-development at larger firms, so in some sense they're doomed to fail. They make a lot of sense at earlier stages of companies where everybody's incentives are aligned around making the company win, and that might be the only opportunity the dev tool has to capture a logo and grow with them upmarket.

• by 8f2ab37a-ed6c on 4/12/25, 1:20 AM

  > Dev Tools are the hardest business on earth

  Don't most people say that about their niche of the tech industry? Healthtech. Online dating. Edtech. Game dev. You name it.

• by wavemode on 4/12/25, 2:45 AM

  If you want your dev tool to sell, just sell a cloud service along with it.

  What I've found motivates this phenomenon is the fact that many companies have a strong aversion to adding any technology of any kind to their tech stack, regardless of how simple. Better to pay an external provider to run it for you, the thinking goes.

  So naturally there is a gigantic market for cloud hosting of all kinds of software, even software that is very rudimentary to self-host.

• by simpaticoder on 4/12/25, 1:23 AM

  A useful analogy is natural selection. The two features, mutation and selection pressure, are present in software. From the inside, the mutations seem rational, controlled, planned, but from the outside they are random. The selection pressure is itself complex, but success can be measured by "number of copies in the world", which is ultimately driven by social success and luck as much as anything. Software also has a (unique?) "win more" mechanic where a popular tool tends to get more popular. The pressure happens recursively at different scales, and sometimes very large branches tend to die off because of big topics like "lack memory safety" or "supply chain attacks".

  Interestingly, language diversity seems driven by school curricula, which becomes comfort which becomes hiring practice, the change driven by academic boredom with a given language.