Really interesting solution to the AI PR problem. Keeping the maintainers in the driver's seat for issue prioritization is definitely the right approach.
How are you handling the token allocation under the hood, is this managed via a GitHub App integration, and can backers target specific issues or just the repo as a whole?
I've got a couple good docs in the footer of www.clevercrow.io that will answer the token stuff. GitHub app integration for all repo interaction. Yep, backers can target specific issues or entire repos, their choice.
One of the cool things about code is that you can build stuff out of thin air, basically for free. It's not like woodworking where you have to pay for the wood.
We are moving into a weird time where people are assuming that now we have to pay machines churn out code.
Somehow they packaged up our own ability to think and are selling it back to us. If they can get us to forget how to do it we'll be the perfect customers, dependent forever.
That’s what I don’t get about this whole AI push. It’s a global rug that everyone plans to pull, it’s sold at cost, it already presents major risks, everyone seems to be aware of all that and yet - the consumers and lawmakers are relatively quiet.
Its happening at a global moment of chaotic behavior. When prices are soaring, information and institutions are disintermediated, jobs are hard to come by and layoffs easy, insurance is tied to your job and your kids' well being to your location -- well, most people get real quiet about stuff.
Even then I think a LOT of people are saying something but the narrative mechanism of inevitability is really strong.
Say all the SOTA (remote) LLMs went away tonight, would programmers everywhere suddenly be giving up on programming? Maybe some, but unlikely that most would. It's not so much of a rug-pull if it's an inconvenience at most when it goes away. Maybe some would take some time to readjust (some days/weeks/months?), but then it'd be back to normal again.
> Say all the SOTA (remote) LLMs went away tonight
Most likely that would cause company pulling the rug on their frontier model(s), to fall over themselves. Meanwhile the competition keeps going. Hence no top AI player does that unless forced to.
You can only build it for free if you don't value your time. That is good for personal projects and hobbies but which company can build stuff without costs? There was always an expense to generating code. Plus you have to pay for equipment, electricity, subscriptions to stuff for their staff etc.
I don't really think they are packaging up ability to think abd selling it back to you. There is nothing stopping you from not using AI and even companies, many firms just dont trust AI and don't use it.
But the idea that code could be built of thin air is not true in case of actual businesses.
I like the "maintainer stays in control" part, but isn't that also a problem in a way?
The AI provider gets paid, the platform gets paid (20% is a lot in my opinion!), and the maintainer gets more unpaid work: another PR to plan, review, revise, merge, and then maintain... that's a lot of work.
If people are willing to fund an issue, why should that money mainly cover LLM tokens rather than maintainer effort? Or at least, why doesn't the leftover money go to the maintainer instead of back to the donors?
While I definitely like the Patreon for Software Builders idea, that's got some moving pieces which take additional legal work. My hope is that could come in time as it would be really cool.
Regarding rewarding maintainer effort, I'm shooting for the value prop of "free AI", this only works if reconciliation is per-phase and liquidity is accessible across as many repos as possible. So if I had each reconcile drain the pool, there would be a lot of stalled work and human intervention required.
That said, there are probably some maintainers that don't want "free AI" and that's okay.
At first I was like "i want to use ai but dont have the money to burn for api tokens" cool.
But then I realized the backers are essentially saying "i have money and could support developers but i choose to give the money directly to a mega corp and skip the human".
I recommend you remove the policy of "Whatever the run didn't spend goes straight back to your backers' wallets." and make sure the human behind the wheel gets to eat. Somehow
While we're in the token-equivalent of ZIRP, tokens don't cost what they cost, so there's sort of arbitrage to be had. I have tokens I've been given than I'm not using, but that's not the same as me having been given cash in the first place.
> While we're in the token-equivalent of ZIRP, tokens don't cost what they cost, so there's sort of arbitrage to be had
Do you have a source for this? I believe “personal subscription” plans on OpenAI and Anthropic are likely ran at a net loss or close to it, but all indications elsewhere are that API pricing for these companies and likely Google as well are profitable per API call [1][2]. I would definitely believe that the Chinese players are operating at a loss though if that is what you mean.
Just curious, why is there a login gate before seeing the list of projects that participate in the platform? Usually similar donation(?) websites list those publicly for better visibility and less friction.
Probably an oversight on my part. I was thinking that backers would find out about CleverCrow through the project maintainers so the public pages are repo specific.
As an aside, when you do login, CleverCrow shows projects that you've starred on GitHub to help find things you might want to support.
I always thought that the donate tokens thing would be done by sending some tokens from your personal sub to the maintainer's pool with some sort of proxy for tokens with rules, in a more direct way without doing it in cash, but yeah that's where the sweet fees live.
If this gets any traction, the "share tokens with a friend" could be good PR for the labs, instead of buy me a coffee, buy me a clanker.
Better yet: give them cold hard cash instead of what is arguably monopoly money for many OSS devs. Ironically this is something GitHub made "easy" with sponsorships several years ago.
You don't sponsor people or projects to complete specific issues or build specific features in the first place. Sponsorship is a reward and token of appreciation for doing good work.
Some don't mind doing the overall reward and appreciation thing. And some just have that particular issue that they want handled so the project works - better - for them. Both cases are valid.
I'm not sure how that's related to your initial question of "How do you ensure that funds ear-marked for a donor-specified issue goes toward that issue and not something else?"
The point is to get something funded. That's the goal. And negotiation doesn't scale. You can bet that nobody will negotiate contracts with 20 maintainers if they want particular features/fixes for 20 different projects that they're using. Otherwise it would be a thing today.
But instead we have these attempts and stopgaps, some of which have had some success here and there. This is something else in that pool making it easier to fund stuff, and if it gains traction than we'll know that it's serving its purpose. I think it has good potential.
I wasn't thinking about companies at all. Companies tend to only contribute to well-known projects, which leaves a very long tail.
I'm thinking about the far more random regular people using random projects that may not be that popular. Like I just did a rough count of the OSS apps on my phone: 60+. Of those there are 5 that I can immediately think of improvements that I'd like. One of them I've actually made improvements to already because it was a dead project that I really like and so had to revive anyway. And I used Claude to work on it as I'm not a mobile dev; been planning to republish but haven't gotten around to it. I won't bother to check my laptop but there's even more there.
Now imagine if I (and others interested in those projects) could contribute to small funding pools for various projects of interest, with the assurance that said funds go to that feature/fix which is of interest or gets refunded. I think that'd result in the general OSS support needle being pushed that much further over time.
You hit up the maintainer and negotiate a deal for that?
If all you’ve got is relative pocket change they probably aren’t going to agree but if you put real money behind it and it doesn’t go against their vision of the project then most people would be willing to accept actual contracting work to expand their project.
Pretty straight-forward solution: donors or maintainers don't use the service if it isn't good. But the maintainer is "accountable" (to the extent one maintaining a OSS project is) as they're the one actually providing the prompts and doing QA.
100% expected, in fact, desired (maintainers should be/are in charge). My goal is to create enough surface area that backers see their tokens going to many of the things they care about, not necessarily all.
It does seem like a worse version of a FOSS donation platform that uses regular old money. I guess one advantage is that you can ensure your money goes directly to using AI to solve specific problems on the codebase, but what does that solve? Are people genuinely worried that if they donate to some FOSS platform that their dollars would go to something else? It seems to me like this removes agency from the FOSS maintainer and gives donators more control over their donation, even though it's explicitly designed not to.
Its efficiency also relies on being better than whatever other platform/harness the maintainer is already using. It's limited to whatever the harness the platform provides, and they're taking a 20% platform fee on top. So I have to, instead of taking $10 from a donor, i take $10 worth of tokens, which may or not be spent more efficiently than me just going in with my claude subscription and fixing it, and I get $8 of those to run in a platform I don't control? In what world as a FOSS maintainer would I sign up for this? It just seems strictly worse than just having a platform that can back resolution of issues with real money... which already exists.
Howdy Solar_Fields, these are great questions and I can give you my thoughts on how I feel it's different than cash donations (which are great if you can get them!). I look at this less like patronage and more an exchange of a resource to meet the needs of both parties. I want to support the projects I care about, some I'll give carte blanche, but some I have no connection to and really just want a bug fixed. Rather than fire up my own Claude Code and throw a PR at that maintainer, instead I'm saying, "hey, you know this codebase and can use this resource (tokens) better than me, please fix it with 'free' tokens." The platform fee is really just for AWS costs and is based on modeling, but I'm sure that's not the final form. Does that make sense?
Your reasoning is logical, but fails to pass the bar of "better than or even equal to just literally using some existing platform to attach a $X bounty to some issue I want resolved". There are several popular solutions that exist already to do that, your solution doesn't materially improve there, so what is the value add? It certainly gives the donor more confidence that the issue is being resolved in the way the donor wants it to, but if your problem is to make FOSS maintainer's life easier it doesn't move the needle in that direction, because it gives more power to already demanding FOSS users and less agency to the FOSS maintainer. And even if you solve that problem, does that value add cover a very-steep 20% platform fee?
I think it's a cool idea, don't get me wrong. But it has to be a very good solution to get adopted, like, it would have to significantly streamline the operations of getting bugs resolved by a FOSS maintainer, and I think it's going to be tough for you to try to beat "fire up my favorite agent in my terminal with an already optimized setup and give it this issue that has $X attached" rather than "I have perhaps inefficient token spend from a platform I have no control over and I have to take 20% less of a donation for that privilege"
In other words, I think you've built this solution for donors, and not FOSS maintainers, but really the bottleneck and problem and who you would be selling this solution to is not donors, but rather FOSS maintainers, and that's who you need to solve for if you want a platform like this to work. The donors have the easy job: they throw money at the problem to help it get solved faster. The FOSS maintainers have the hard job: They have to understand, accept the issue, propose a sensible solution, build it out, test it, etc. And your solution just makes it harder for those end users, because now they have two paths in their development workflow to getting issues resolved that they have to maintain, the non paid path and the paid path. So you're significantly increasing the overhead burden on these people and the material gain promised to those end users as the tradeoff is not convincing at all.
I hear you. I'm trying to balance the needs of backers and builders and it's admittedly a tough one. 20% is too high and I'll be adjusting that. The numbers I'm getting from usage today are really helpful in calibrating, so I'm sure I can get something more balanced there.
My hope is that maintainers can offload some busy work to helpful agents and create a more connected community. Likewise, that people otherwise unable to afford the high end frontier models would get to use them for free. Also not something everyone wants, but I know some do. I really do appreciate your feedback and your passion.
Can’t help thinking that if HN had a Black Mirror version (if this isn’t it), this would be one of the ideas in it.
If you like a project enough to donate to them, give them the money directly and let them decide how to spend it. This is just convoluted, weird and vaguely dystopian.
Well then, I'm hoping it's more of a San Junipero/Hang the DJ episode where good stuff happens by the end.
I think there's a trust continuum that culminates at giving money no strings attached, but it starts somewhere else. If my goal (as creator of CleverCrow) is to get more people to support maintainers, then I have to open the funnel wide and connect with where people start (transactionally, I'm assuming).
I think I've read from a few different sources that the Claude Code $100-$200/mo plans are subsidized so hard that it's basically $2k-$8k/mo in "would-be" equivalent API token usages.
This kind of makes sense in that space while the subsidies (if true) last?
Unrelated, "tokens" feels very like... back-then blockchain to me. All the craze.
Or the API is massively overpriced. What Anthropic/OpenAI are charging for tokens says almost nothing about their actual costs, just what people are willing to pay.
It’s just an obvious example of market segmentation by charging enterprise customers many times more than personal users while selling the same product
Yeah, rising token costs definitely played into my thinking too. I want builders to be able to use the best models and it seems like they are getting more expensive. But maybe local models will get there?
Ah yes, clearly the one thing I want from my favorite projects is for them to embrace AI coding and immediately deskill such that their value-add or passion for the craft evaporates in the next 3 months.
How are you handling the token allocation under the hood, is this managed via a GitHub App integration, and can backers target specific issues or just the repo as a whole?
We are moving into a weird time where people are assuming that now we have to pay machines churn out code.
Somehow they packaged up our own ability to think and are selling it back to us. If they can get us to forget how to do it we'll be the perfect customers, dependent forever.
Even then I think a LOT of people are saying something but the narrative mechanism of inevitability is really strong.
Most likely that would cause company pulling the rug on their frontier model(s), to fall over themselves. Meanwhile the competition keeps going. Hence no top AI player does that unless forced to.
I don't really think they are packaging up ability to think abd selling it back to you. There is nothing stopping you from not using AI and even companies, many firms just dont trust AI and don't use it.
But the idea that code could be built of thin air is not true in case of actual businesses.
The AI provider gets paid, the platform gets paid (20% is a lot in my opinion!), and the maintainer gets more unpaid work: another PR to plan, review, revise, merge, and then maintain... that's a lot of work.
If people are willing to fund an issue, why should that money mainly cover LLM tokens rather than maintainer effort? Or at least, why doesn't the leftover money go to the maintainer instead of back to the donors?
Regarding rewarding maintainer effort, I'm shooting for the value prop of "free AI", this only works if reconciliation is per-phase and liquidity is accessible across as many repos as possible. So if I had each reconcile drain the pool, there would be a lot of stalled work and human intervention required.
That said, there are probably some maintainers that don't want "free AI" and that's okay.
sounds like you do not support other people that have nothing to do with the code that you like
Do you have a source for this? I believe “personal subscription” plans on OpenAI and Anthropic are likely ran at a net loss or close to it, but all indications elsewhere are that API pricing for these companies and likely Google as well are profitable per API call [1][2]. I would definitely believe that the Chinese players are operating at a loss though if that is what you mean.
[1] https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/anthropic-growth-and-b...
[2] https://martinalderson.com/posts/are-openai-and-anthropic-re...
As an aside, when you do login, CleverCrow shows projects that you've starred on GitHub to help find things you might want to support.
If this gets any traction, the "share tokens with a friend" could be good PR for the labs, instead of buy me a coffee, buy me a clanker.
I like your approach of pooling resources around specific issues. That seems a practical missing piece for aiding the maintainers.
If you want that, negotiate a contract.
But instead we have these attempts and stopgaps, some of which have had some success here and there. This is something else in that pool making it easier to fund stuff, and if it gains traction than we'll know that it's serving its purpose. I think it has good potential.
I'm thinking about the far more random regular people using random projects that may not be that popular. Like I just did a rough count of the OSS apps on my phone: 60+. Of those there are 5 that I can immediately think of improvements that I'd like. One of them I've actually made improvements to already because it was a dead project that I really like and so had to revive anyway. And I used Claude to work on it as I'm not a mobile dev; been planning to republish but haven't gotten around to it. I won't bother to check my laptop but there's even more there.
Now imagine if I (and others interested in those projects) could contribute to small funding pools for various projects of interest, with the assurance that said funds go to that feature/fix which is of interest or gets refunded. I think that'd result in the general OSS support needle being pushed that much further over time.
If all you’ve got is relative pocket change they probably aren’t going to agree but if you put real money behind it and it doesn’t go against their vision of the project then most people would be willing to accept actual contracting work to expand their project.
I suppose this is the most common scenario - I doubt features are not getting implemented because maintainers are lacking tokens.
Its efficiency also relies on being better than whatever other platform/harness the maintainer is already using. It's limited to whatever the harness the platform provides, and they're taking a 20% platform fee on top. So I have to, instead of taking $10 from a donor, i take $10 worth of tokens, which may or not be spent more efficiently than me just going in with my claude subscription and fixing it, and I get $8 of those to run in a platform I don't control? In what world as a FOSS maintainer would I sign up for this? It just seems strictly worse than just having a platform that can back resolution of issues with real money... which already exists.
I think it's a cool idea, don't get me wrong. But it has to be a very good solution to get adopted, like, it would have to significantly streamline the operations of getting bugs resolved by a FOSS maintainer, and I think it's going to be tough for you to try to beat "fire up my favorite agent in my terminal with an already optimized setup and give it this issue that has $X attached" rather than "I have perhaps inefficient token spend from a platform I have no control over and I have to take 20% less of a donation for that privilege"
In other words, I think you've built this solution for donors, and not FOSS maintainers, but really the bottleneck and problem and who you would be selling this solution to is not donors, but rather FOSS maintainers, and that's who you need to solve for if you want a platform like this to work. The donors have the easy job: they throw money at the problem to help it get solved faster. The FOSS maintainers have the hard job: They have to understand, accept the issue, propose a sensible solution, build it out, test it, etc. And your solution just makes it harder for those end users, because now they have two paths in their development workflow to getting issues resolved that they have to maintain, the non paid path and the paid path. So you're significantly increasing the overhead burden on these people and the material gain promised to those end users as the tradeoff is not convincing at all.
If you like a project enough to donate to them, give them the money directly and let them decide how to spend it. This is just convoluted, weird and vaguely dystopian.
I think there's a trust continuum that culminates at giving money no strings attached, but it starts somewhere else. If my goal (as creator of CleverCrow) is to get more people to support maintainers, then I have to open the funnel wide and connect with where people start (transactionally, I'm assuming).
This kind of makes sense in that space while the subsidies (if true) last?
Unrelated, "tokens" feels very like... back-then blockchain to me. All the craze.
It’s just an obvious example of market segmentation by charging enterprise customers many times more than personal users while selling the same product