Hi Yaroslav. That’s a touching story. I read your LessWrong post and the first page of your website. I think the reason you’re struggling to get feedback might have to do with how your ideas are presented.
Your LessWrong post starts with high-level reflections and personal experiences, and only near the end briefly describes what your actual product is. But even after reading it, I’m still not sure what the product does. It seems to be some kind of programming tool or language—but how would someone use it? What can it do that other tools can’t? Why would a developer want to use it?
That’s not a criticism of the ideas themselves—it’s just a communication gap, and those are solvable. I’d recommend starting with something like an elevator pitch—just 1–2 sentences that clearly explain what the product is, who it’s for, and why it’s exciting. There are lots of good materials online about writing elevator pitches, and even LLMs can help generate one if you feed them the right structure.
And beyond that, I’d focus on describing concrete use cases. Even if the product isn’t ready for them yet, people need to imagine what they could do with it. Right now, there’s a big gap between the high-level vision (“compete with AGI”) and the technical details (like AVL-tree example), with very little in between.
Also, I’m not sure LessWrong is the right audience. You might have better luck reaching out to communities interested in new programming languages, formal methods, or open-source developer tooling. ChatGPT suggested places like Hacker News, r/ProgrammingLanguages, and IndieHackers.
Finally, I think the idea of “humans becoming superintelligent” is intriguing but maybe too ambiguous. If you mean “augmenting human cognition through tooling,” that’s a very interesting and valuable direction. But it might help to use more precise language to avoid confusion with the more common definition of superintelligence (i.e., vastly beyond human capability in all domains).
Hope some of this is helpful! You’ve clearly a lot of thought and work into this, and that kind of persistence is rare. Whatever happens with this particular project, the mindset and skills you’re building will carry forward. Wishing you strength and luck as you take the next steps!
Thinking more about the communication gap you’ve mentioned, there are gaps, indeed:
There is some weird programming tool with a lukewarm welcome in its target group.
There is a weird guy seeking money for some small step in the development of that tool, with an ambitious and unfounded claim that in a distant future this may lead to the user’s superintelligence.
Perhaps I should make an elevator pitch for the research goals of this particular step that I’m seeking funding for. To figure out first, which particular knowledge fields may benefit from the expected findings.
Thank you Saulius! “Augmenting human cognition” sounds cool. I definitely need work on my wording. And elevator pitch is an intriguing concept. Though I’ll abstain from LLMing it, better to learn that myself, one can’t take LLM to an elevator :)
r/ProgrammingLanguages was my very first place to begin with. In two weeks I’ve got like 120 visitors from programmer communities, 100 of whom downloaded the documentation, but the only feedback was that it is hard to understand.
Definitely, the documentation could be better. My reasoning here is that writing obsoletable documentation for a proof-of-concept should only be a small part of fundraising. And fundraising effort itself should be smaller than the effort needed for actual research. So, 2 weeks seemed a reasonable price.
Hi Yaroslav. That’s a touching story. I read your LessWrong post and the first page of your website. I think the reason you’re struggling to get feedback might have to do with how your ideas are presented.
Your LessWrong post starts with high-level reflections and personal experiences, and only near the end briefly describes what your actual product is. But even after reading it, I’m still not sure what the product does. It seems to be some kind of programming tool or language—but how would someone use it? What can it do that other tools can’t? Why would a developer want to use it?
That’s not a criticism of the ideas themselves—it’s just a communication gap, and those are solvable. I’d recommend starting with something like an elevator pitch—just 1–2 sentences that clearly explain what the product is, who it’s for, and why it’s exciting. There are lots of good materials online about writing elevator pitches, and even LLMs can help generate one if you feed them the right structure.
And beyond that, I’d focus on describing concrete use cases. Even if the product isn’t ready for them yet, people need to imagine what they could do with it. Right now, there’s a big gap between the high-level vision (“compete with AGI”) and the technical details (like AVL-tree example), with very little in between.
Also, I’m not sure LessWrong is the right audience. You might have better luck reaching out to communities interested in new programming languages, formal methods, or open-source developer tooling. ChatGPT suggested places like Hacker News, r/ProgrammingLanguages, and IndieHackers.
Finally, I think the idea of “humans becoming superintelligent” is intriguing but maybe too ambiguous. If you mean “augmenting human cognition through tooling,” that’s a very interesting and valuable direction. But it might help to use more precise language to avoid confusion with the more common definition of superintelligence (i.e., vastly beyond human capability in all domains).
Hope some of this is helpful! You’ve clearly a lot of thought and work into this, and that kind of persistence is rare. Whatever happens with this particular project, the mindset and skills you’re building will carry forward. Wishing you strength and luck as you take the next steps!
Thinking more about the communication gap you’ve mentioned, there are gaps, indeed:
There is some weird programming tool with a lukewarm welcome in its target group.
There is a weird guy seeking money for some small step in the development of that tool, with an ambitious and unfounded claim that in a distant future this may lead to the user’s superintelligence.
Perhaps I should make an elevator pitch for the research goals of this particular step that I’m seeking funding for. To figure out first, which particular knowledge fields may benefit from the expected findings.
Thank you Saulius! “Augmenting human cognition” sounds cool. I definitely need work on my wording. And elevator pitch is an intriguing concept. Though I’ll abstain from LLMing it, better to learn that myself, one can’t take LLM to an elevator :)
r/ProgrammingLanguages was my very first place to begin with. In two weeks I’ve got like 120 visitors from programmer communities, 100 of whom downloaded the documentation, but the only feedback was that it is hard to understand.
Definitely, the documentation could be better. My reasoning here is that writing obsoletable documentation for a proof-of-concept should only be a small part of fundraising. And fundraising effort itself should be smaller than the effort needed for actual research. So, 2 weeks seemed a reasonable price.