Andrew Moorcroft

Software engineer, STEM, live music, sport, all sorts

[Andrew Moorcroft @amoorcroft1]

@mattforde @richardpbacon Well said Matt 👏🏼

[Andrew Moorcroft @amoorcroft1]

Hey @davidfowl / @shanselman - what .Net project excites you for 26?

[Andrew Moorcroft @amoorcroft1]

@brankopetric00 Take a look at https://t.co/Co0uniIxSu it basically does exactly the same thing as NAT gateway for just the price of a tiny EC2 instance. Saved us a tonne when we deployed it

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

DeepSeek just proved the 'worthless' GPT wrapper startups are actually the ones with real moats.

A week ago, nothing was more LOW status than being a 'GPT wrapper' startup.

But I think we're learning that's DEAD wrong. Turns out they were just early to the only game that matters

While DeepSeek, Meta, Anthropic and Microsoft battle over benchmark scores, these 'wrapper' companies have been quietly building the only moat that matters: interface loyalty.

Because of how big owning the LLM is for national defense and the economy, the next breakthrough model is always 2 weeks away. DeepSeek launches today, someone else drops a better one tomorrow.

But getting millions of people to make your product part of their daily workflow - that's the real barrier to entry. ChatGPT didn't win because it had the best model. It won because it was dead simple to use. And I think it has staying power because of that.

This is why all those AI startups we dismissed are actually positioned to win. They're not competing on model performance - they're competing on being the default way humans interact with AI.

Frontier models are becoming commodities. User habits aren't. While everyone obsesses over the next architecture breakthrough, the real game is being played in the interface layer. The moat isn't in the model - it's in being the tool people reach for without thinking.

Technology advantage is temporary. Interface lock-in is forever.

Keep shipping those wrappers, my friends.

[Andrew Moorcroft @amoorcroft1]

@davidfowl Ah sorry I missed that 🫠🤣

[Andrew Moorcroft @amoorcroft1]

@davidfowl Makes sense. Yeah I’ve just used GitLab self hosted for years and have always found it very powerful, has most of what I need out of the box.
There’s basic templated CI pipelines you can use or you can build more complicated if needed.
Assume at MS you’re restricted to GitHub!

[Andrew Moorcroft @amoorcroft1]

@davidfowl Can you replace docker compose with it (by pulling in images as opposed to local projects)?

[Andrew Moorcroft @amoorcroft1]

@davidfowl GitLab for source control and CI. Pipelines set up to build and push to AWS ECR. Then a templated Cloud Formation stack to take that and update AWS ECS

[Andrew Moorcroft @amoorcroft1]

@levelsio @adamwathan Not really a tool though is it?

[Andrew Moorcroft @amoorcroft1]

@idlesband what a night, surely the best UK band currently touring? Spent the last 45 in the pit 🥵

[David Fowler @davidfowl]

🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀

#dotnet

[Andrew Moorcroft @amoorcroft1]

@Tim_Burgess Go on then 😆

[Andrew Moorcroft @amoorcroft1]

@bretajohnson @davidfowl @JamesNK @Microsoft Microservice architecture over mainly HTTP. The local dev experience involved running ~10 sln’s (even moved to Rider from VS to help with this). Aspire has enabled us to just run one solution and provision all the dependencies, as well as db / redis / rabbit, need to dig further

[Andrew Moorcroft @amoorcroft1]

we added .Net Aspire to an existing project today, was surprisingly easy to integrate, and get instant actionable feedback. Shout out to @davidfowl / @JamesNK and others at @Microsoft for the hard work

[Andrew Moorcroft @amoorcroft1]

@Camelboy2Meow @davidfowl @JamesNK @Microsoft @reubenbond yeah sorry, wasn't sure who all the big hitters were!

[Andrew Moorcroft @amoorcroft1]

@kieranmch Sorry assumed you meant ChatGPT.. Maybe don’t look up Dr Gupta AI if you think this is bad btw!

[Andrew Moorcroft @amoorcroft1]

@dylanbeattie @dgkimpton An example being @browserstack. Every now and again I’d like to run some manual cross device tests. I’d happily pay for an hour or day access, but I’ve found a way to get it free for a few mins at a time using temp emails.
The only paid plan locks me in for monthly recurring

[Andrew Moorcroft @amoorcroft1]

@dylanbeattie @dgkimpton From experience it’s usually the licensing. 95% of the time you’re having to buy in to a recurring subscription for something you’d happily pay for to use for a week or two