Jeff Triplett ✨
PRO
@jefftriplett
The lawyer normally works, but sadly, once you get this far, they might be running on vapors. Good luck with it. We haven't had many of these over the years with my agency, but it's sadly non-zero. Long term, we have more than made up for it, even with former employees giving us referrals or work with their new companies over the years. I know a few who have got put in bad situations when the company ran out of money and couldn't pay them either. Bad deal.
Unfortunately, we learned this person has been following this practice with other vendors in the past too. Seems like a pattern.
Good luck and lawyer up then. Make sure you add damages to what is owed if you have to go to court. Might be worth reaching out to other vendors too.
You probably have three options. Work something out with the CEO that looks like a payment plan, hire a collection agency (expect to only recover 25% to 50% of it), or hire a lawyer to send them a letter and possibly take them to court. The letter is worth every penny, but taking them to court might not be.
In the future, make sure you get enough upfront that saves you from the last bit, and I would work out some level of, if we don't get paid, this code never going into production.
I would avoid all drama and if you have access still to anything. Delete that access and don't do anything that gets you in trouble. Short and long term, it's not worth it.
Thanks Jeff. We have attempted the payment plan but he is just ghosting us.
They were paying on schedule, invoices were rendered bi-weekly to avoid this kind of situations.
We're bringing a lawyer in to send them a letter.
The lawyer normally works, but sadly, once you get this far, they might be running on vapors. Good luck with it. We haven't had many of these over the years with my agency, but it's sadly non-zero. Long term, we have more than made up for it, even with former employees giving us referrals or work with their new companies over the years. I know a few who have got put in bad situations when the company ran out of money and couldn't pay them either. Bad deal.
Unfortunately, we learned this person has been following this practice with other vendors in the past too. Seems like a pattern.
Good luck and lawyer up then. Make sure you add damages to what is owed if you have to go to court. Might be worth reaching out to other vendors too.
No, not in a while.
I liked Windsurf's side panel for prompting though. That's a step in the right direction. I used it to add a new view and it checked the right boxes for a Django project.
Overall, I am a fan of the LLMs powering these tools, but I don't think anyone has nailed the UI. I suspect in five years what that solution should be will be more obvious.
TIL Windsurf. I will give this a look and see.
Overall, I have never found Copilot or these apps to helpful. I think they can be excellent for some people, but I find myself fighting suggestions and getting distracted instead of focusing on the problem at hand.
Claude Projects I find to be mindblowingly productive, and I have several apps that are >90% written and updated by Claude. I also fine code generation via the raw APIs with both Claude and o1 to be worth the effort, but it's a big lift if you aren't sure what you want.
@jefftriplett did you get to try Copilot latest release? They offer the ability to select Claude, o1, etc now
No, not in a while.
I liked Windsurf's side panel for prompting though. That's a step in the right direction. I used it to add a new view and it checked the right boxes for a Django project.
Overall, I am a fan of the LLMs powering these tools, but I don't think anyone has nailed the UI. I suspect in five years what that solution should be will be more obvious.
RE: exposing your time zone to the public - Ideally, anyone who is logged in with would only see times through the context of whichever timezone they selected. The rest should be UTC or whichever you pick. The point of the website is to work-in-public so I'm not sure why it would get more complicated then that.
People have to do something while they wait for results. So launch and write up how it goes.
The quality varies by the video. The only difference between the two is that captions include timestamps with the transcriptions.
I'm glad you found a working solution. Check that API out if the pypi project ever goes out on you. It should be quick to get it back up and running with it.
I manage some via their Captions API unless there is some nuance that I'm missing. We pay for transcription services or use Whisper and then upload them via the Captions API.
Well, I didn't know that and I spoke too fast!
If you are comfortable with Python or JS, I would call the YouTube Data API. They have native APIs for this, plus a bunch of other useful data. It's also very ChatGPT friendly.
They don't offer transcripts via their API unfortunately.
I manage some via their Captions API unless there is some nuance that I'm missing. We pay for transcription services or use Whisper and then upload them via the Captions API.
Well, I didn't know that and I spoke too fast!
I looked into it, but it doesn't seem like they have transcript available. They only have captions which I'm not so sure are accurate. Are the captions as accurate as in the case of uploading a audio extract to whisper?
The quality varies by the video. The only difference between the two is that captions include timestamps with the transcriptions.
I'm glad you found a working solution. Check that API out if the pypi project ever goes out on you. It should be quick to get it back up and running with it.
Good luck and lawyer up then. Make sure you add damages to what is owed if you have to go to court. Might be worth reaching out to other vendors too.