Show HN: FablePool – pool money behind a prompt, and Fable builds it in public

One feature request: In addition to high-level milestones, it would be cool if a partially-funded project would generate a public, highly detailed implementation plan.

Also, IANAL but MIT is still a license with a copyright holder. I don't think saying "it's MIT, we all own it" is defensible. The courts might view all this code as public domain.

Rather, it did work at milestone 14, but then regressed at milestone 15, where it changed the link from a wikimedia image to a nonexistent file in /assets (despite still having the "Photo via Wikimedia Commons" caption).

edit: they removed it :^)

Here's an idea: reverse kickstarter

1. people post ideas

2. good ideas go viral

3. people pledge actual money to encourage someone to step forward and build it

4. interested creators make kickstarter type videos explaining their proposal for making the thing

5A. people vote on which proposal to accept, or maybe

5B. each backer can select a project to support

---

Here steps 4 and 5 are replaced by Claude.

Cool idea!

This can't be serious.

Broader point I am making is, what differentiates genuine ideas from the token burn? What happens when the pool exhausts but the task is not done?

This bot is almost as bad as I am at estimating projects.

https://fablepool.com/projects/76

It reminds me of scam eshops where everything cost $random dollars in a hope that someone will enter a credit card number.

For years I've been trying to get estate agents to support an open-source real estate website builder. The pitch is obvious: instead of each agent paying thousands for a bespoke site, pool resources, fund the features you all need, and everyone benefits.

Getting non-technical people to commit to something abstract before it exists is nearly impossible though. Hope a model like FablePool can change that.

For the website builder, the open-source product is already there: https://github.com/etewiah/property_web_builder. It just needs momentum.

Imho you should wipe them, populate it with some realistic small scale ideas and be much more strict in review, at least for now.

We've seen something like 20+ years of different attempts of voluntary donations to fund open source, and it never worked. Companies barely fund anything voluntarily.

I'm taking the opposite approach with Supported Source (https://supso.org/) which is this: actually force companies to pay to use the project. Sell commercial licenses. Make it mandatory to using your software commercially. This approach works much, much better than voluntary donations.

Also, is there some kind of ownership structure based on investment?

  i built a turbofan
  https://app.confbuild.com/p/z459
  
  now I want to build a complete Airbus as detailed as possible with give budget

$1.00 raised of est. $205.00 target

Humans shouldn't provide estimates.

https://fablepool.com/projects/53

First, your server is struggling. It took about 20+ seconds to respond just now, FYI.

Second, it's not obvious to me that I can get my money back if something doesn't pan out / get approved by a certain date from the homepage alone. That might make people hesitant to put anything in if they think it might get locked in there forever if the site dies / you take it down / etc.

Maybe add a "Build a worm that shuts down all Anthropic data centers."

This is one of those ideas that sounds bad on paper (Like people renting out their houses. But if implemented correctly could get some traction.

If Anthropic had a problem with Clawdbot they are certainly going to take issue with FablePool.

But I stopped after asking Claude about it. It categorically told me that the moment you fund a model, you are legally liable for its actions.

How to get around it?

Or maybe there is? or a version where only those funding have access to the results.

Why do open source collaboration? Why not a single product developer getting crowd paid to add features, solve bugs, using AI. So many businesses will see their moat wiped out.

On the macro level capitalism is winner-takes-all and Musk is the only one seriously playing the game. End game: own everything, including payments, and governments come begging and will protect him from citizen revolt. Supervillain/overlord territory.

There are lots of projects, software that shouldn't be SaaS subscriptions that Fable can build in public that can be free for everyone and also OSS.

Remember, Google aids and abets militaries of governments that the UN has found to be committing genocide.

Weird how people seem to forget this.

This is engineering theatre (pun intended).

The amount of hubris here is exceptional, the author doesn't even know that it's "clean room" rather than "green room". What does it even mean to build an open source AWS? There are many open source IaaS/PaaS components. Is the author suggesting any hardware design, because that's a critical component.

The only possible result of this is an AWS fanfic. An art project that looks vaguely like a cloud provider on the surface if you squint, but with zero substance to it.

And this criticism has nothing to do with AI. You'd get the same spending 100x that budget on any engineering team.

... I was feeling generous, so here you go!

https://github.com/PhillipTaylor/notepad_plus_plus_mac_os

I copy and pasted your prompt into Augment (Opus 4.7) and told it to do everything you wanted, then I told it to keeping going afterwards.

I think there are a few missing pieces as it's quite a open-ended piece of work. This took 59,000 tokens.