S1E3 — Show HN: Ant – A JavaScript runtime and ecosystem

GARY: —and that's the thing nobody tells you about runway, is it's not a length, it's a fucking feeling, and by the time you feel it you've already—

GARY: Oh. We're— is that on? Okay. Okay, hi, sorry, that was — forget the aluminum thing. I'm Gary.

MAEVE: Maeve.

OBI: Obi.

GRUNER: Gruner.

GARY: And that's the show. Vertical integration, everybody, coming in hot before the mic's even warm, incredible start —

OBI: It is a podcast, Gary, not a hostage situation. Nobody needs you to narrate your own rescue.

GARY: I'm just saying the word "runway" came out of my mouth before my brain okayed it, that's a symptom of something.

MAEVE: It's a symptom of Tuesday. What are we reading.

MAEVE: Show HN. Some guy named theMackabu. It's — oh, this is a whole thing.

MAEVE: "I'm the author of Ant." Okay. "Ant is a JavaScript runtime with its own JavaScript engine." Fine, cute, everyone's got one now. "Ant also includes a package manager" — mm — "the ants.land package registry" — a registry, they named it ants.land, I want that so bad it's disgusting — "a platform for deploying and hosting applications, and Ant Desktop, similar to Electron."

MAEVE: This is not a runtime. This is a fucking platform play. Engine, package manager, registry, hosting, desktop shell — that's the entire JS supply chain in one repo, top to bottom, one guy.

GARY: That's — huh.

MAEVE: I would put term sheet in front of this before I finished the sentence. Vertically integrated, zero switching costs, you never leave the garden because the garden is the whole yard.

GARY: Vertically integrated.

MAEVE: End-to-end alternative to the entire JavaScript stack. That's not a feature list, that's a moat with a moat inside it.

OBI: You're pricing a thing with no users, Maeve.

MAEVE: I'm pricing a thesis, Obi. Users are a later slide.

OBI: There's a P.S.

GARY: Oh, I love a P.S., a P.S. is where founders confess.

OBI: "I've shared Ant here before as a runtime." Past tense. "Since then it has grown into the broader ecosystem you see today." So it used to be one honest thing, and now it's five things wearing one thing's trench coat.

GARY: That's not a confession, that's a — that's growth, that's a founder listening to the market and expanding the—

OBI: It's scope creep with a P.S. on it, Gary, I've seen this movie, I write the incident reports after it burns down.

GARY: I was going to say that.

OBI: You were going to defend it. There's a difference.

GARY: Look, I just think — a guy builds one runtime, it works, and instead of stopping, he goes, no, actually, what if I owned the whole vertical, the engine, the packages, the registry, the hosting, the desktop layer, one coherent platform end to end, so nobody ever has to leave —

GARY: — coherent platform.

GARY: That's — huh, that's a phrase.

OBI: That is a phrase you have said before.

GARY: I have said a lot of phrases before, Obi, that's called having a vocabulary —

MAEVE: It's on page four of your Series C deck, Gary. Word for word. "One coherent platform, end to end." I have it. I read it. I passed on it.

GARY: You didn't have to bring the deck.

MAEVE: I didn't bring the deck. You did. Just now.

OBI: Fifteen years, Gary. Fifteen years I have been the person who gets paged at 3 a.m. because somebody's "coherent end-to-end platform" fell over on a Tuesday, and you know who is never on that page? The guy who said the phrase at Demo Day. He is on a stage. He is thanking his lead investor. I am restarting a service he cannot spell the name of, in my underwear, while my wife asks who is calling.

GARY: That's fair.

OBI: I'm not finished. You get to stand up in front of people and say "coherent platform" and get applause, and men like me get to spend the rest of our fucking lives making the thing not die so your applause doesn't look stupid in retrospect. So no, I don't think this guy building engine and registry and hosting and desktop app all at once alone is ambition. I think it's a bill. And someone always pays it. It is never him.

GARY: Okay.

MAEVE: Moving on.

GRUNER: There is one comment. Handle is Imustaskforhelp. I read now, like scripture.

GRUNER: "I have actually known about Ant for some time from your previous submissions." He is fan. Genuine fan. Follows this man across many post like is soap opera. "Do you think that Ant could be used to create a small index-html-css-js project into a desktop app, minimally." This is real question. This is not bullshit.

OBI: Finally.

GRUNER: "I currently found deno-desktop to be easiest way of doing this, but I found there to be some issues within deno-desktop in terms of some features not working on the desktop app."

MAEVE: That's — okay, that's a real gap. Deno's desktop story has always been half-built. If Ant's actually got a lighter packager underneath all that platform noise, that's the one feature that ships before the other four.

OBI: Minimal wrapper, no Electron tax, no hundred-and-twenty-megabyte Chromium riding along for one HTML file. If it does that and only that, well.

GARY: It's the good version of the pitch. It's the version where the guy just — fixes the thing that's broken, instead of owning the whole road so you never have to ask directions.

GRUNER: Imustaskforhelp does not want empire. He wants small app to open on desktop without crying. This is most honest want in whole thread.

MAEVE: —and if you're thinking about positioning against Tauri on bundle size alone, you'd want to see the—

MAEVE: Wait.

GARY: What.

MAEVE: That's it. That's the thread. TheMackabu's post, and one guy asking about deno-desktop. That's the whole extraction.

OBI: Sixty-seven comments on this thing.

MAEVE: We got two.

GARY: So the flame war we've been— there isn't one. It's just a guy with a big idea and a guy who's nice to him.

OBI: No pile-on. No "yet another JS runtime" pile-on, no registry-trust argument, no Bun comparison thread, nothing. Just a pitch and a fan.

MAEVE: That's either the most boring thread we've ever done, or it's the only honest one.

GARY: Can it be both.

MAEVE: It's Tuesday, Gary. It can be whatever it wants.

GRUNER: I file report now. One man. Alone. Building engine, and store for engine, and house for engine to live in, and door for engine to walk out of, all himself, because he cannot stop, and nobody make him. Is either most human thing I observe this whole cycle — or is proof that whole species do this to itself, every time, on purpose, like is comfort.

GRUNER: Blyat. I don't know which. Chyort voz'mi.

OBI: Guy building the whole stack alone isn't ambition or tragedy, it's just Tuesday too. Somebody'll page me about it eventually. See you next thread.

MAEVE: TheMackabu, if you're listening — call me. Not about the desktop thing. About all of it.

GARY: For what it's worth — I hope it doesn't fall over. I hope somebody tells him it's not his fault if it does.

GARY: Good night, everybody.