Show HN: CleverCrow: give tokens to your favorite projects
Howdy all. I'm Zack :wave:. I've been thinking about the problem of misguided AI pull requests and figured I'd throw a possible solution out there for feedback. Basically, CleverCrow lets supporters give tokens to a GitHub repo (or set of issues in that repo) for the maintainers to use to build/fix stuff. The fun implementation challenges have been around implementing the pooling dynamics and keeping the maintainers in charge while the backers are motivated to support their work.
Discussion Highlights (17 comments)
dom96
Is this just basically a bountysource? or are there ways to give projects tokens without just sending them money?
MuffinFlavored
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.
AKSF_Ackermann
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.
tfrancisl
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.
accountrequired
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
fragmede
I had this idea! Happy to see someone actually made it.
adamddev1
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.
logged4upvoting
Shameless plug, I submitted a similar thought in here the other day. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48503555 I like your approach of pooling resources around specific issues. That seems a practical missing piece for aiding the maintainers.
tadfisher
Congratulations, you've fulfilled one of ThePrimeagen's predictions! (A donation platform for AI tokens)
holistio
Give them money.
KomoD
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?
Zopieux
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.
ljcoco
interesting idea
dofm
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.
thih9
What if the maintainer doesn’t want to implement a particular feature at the moment? I suppose this is the most common scenario - I doubt features are not getting implemented because maintainers are lacking tokens.
throwatdem12311
Tokens don’t come with CV clout which is what the vast majority of the slop PRs are really about.
frangonf
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.