Roo or Cline? We're building a superset

Summary

At our company we have a strange mantra: “don’t innovate!” Let me explain.One approach to building software is to build an innovative product. You think of entirely new features, which users might like better than the current ways of doing things. You then build those features into your product, and hopefully, you were right. But often you weren’t right, and the new features don’t work as well as you hoped. In that case, you iterate, refine, and it might eventually work. Or sometimes, you have to throw it out, and think of something completely different.In the current landscape of AI tools, there is a lot of innovation already! There are a gazillion different tools, all of which try to stand out. This is great! But if we’re going to add value to the space with another tool, we can’t follow the same strategy.Instead, we’ve decided to not innovate, but to look at the most successful ideas in other products, and build those as quickly as possible. This is not a new idea—in fact, you could say we’ve not even innovating here 😉:Steve Jobs famously said (quoting Pablo Picasso): “‘good artists copy, great artists steal’—and we at Apple have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”Indeed, Apple famously stole the idea of the graphical user interface from the Xerox PARC research group. And subsequently, Microsoft stole it from Apple. Now those are two of the biggest companies in the world!Kelsey Hightower updated the quip to “Good developers copy. Great developers paste.”And in business, this is now called (more charitably) a “fast follow” strategy.To many people, copying and stealing sounds gross or dirty, as if it’s not right. It feels like cheating on an exam by copying answers from your smarter friend. But it starts feeling different when done in the context of open source. Then you’re not doing this for the benefit of your own private company, but to the benefit of the whole community. After all, we’d make it possible—even encourage—for others to steal right ba...