Anduril is one of these companies I would leave my own startup for to work for. I love what they are doing.
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What is good about this company is that we build things fast and there's not of lot of slacking going on that you see in most of the defense industry. We make things fast and cheap, but they're very poor quality.
To give one example take a look at our counter UAS:
https://www.anduril.com/capability/counter-uas/
Watch the video it will give you chills. What the video won't show is how ineffective this product is. The enemy sends one drone, maybe it will work. If the enemy sends 3 or 4 we're done. This shit barely works, I wouldn't trust my life with it at all. All tests and demonstrations showed utter failure and STILL even though we failed on all the tests we STILL got a contract from the government. There's for sure money changing hands behind the scenes.
It also doesn't show you how crappy the UI is. You think we have a custom UI device to control this thing? No. It's react running in chrome on windows. It's also really poorly designed. The initial UI was made by some kid straight out of school and it was just poorly optimized. And despite this... The government still bought it, simply because a crap product is the only available option.
And to be real with you, we can't beat China tech. In terms of the quality, price and speed ratio, China dominates anduril by a landslide. The US can dominate on quality, but we we give up speed and price as a result. And if you want quality, anduril is not at the forefront of this at all.
I mean, obviously. Anduril is one company, and still a relatively small company at that.
> And if you want quality, anduril is not at the forefront of this at all.
The US, as you mention, already has quality. We need speed and things that are "good enough" right now, not quality. Anduril seems to be heading pretty good in that direction.
That's why there isn't a single video of a live demonstration against enemies. It's not that good. Palmer "suggested" our stuff is being used in Ukraine but how come I see tons of videos cheap drones operating in Ukraine and no anduril products? Because cheap drones are > then anything anduril has built.
>I mean, obviously. Anduril is one company, and still a relatively small company at that.
I meant that the average company in China operating in the same space can beat out anduril. Take DJI for example. Not even primarily a military company, their products BETTER than ours in the field of battle. There products were so effective in Ukraine that DJI had to write safe guards to prevent usage. Anduril can't hold a candle to this.
Anyway, a front end UI can still work even though it's not ideal, but there's huge performance issues with what we have. Huge. The thing doesn't even run webgl for rendering, it's layering svgs on top of mapbox and those svgs are redrawn every frame with no caching. It's poorly designed and clunky and slow and buggy.
It's insane to think it would make sense to build on anything other than the best existing commercial technology and expect it to be reliable, affordable and maintainable. The military would not and should not change everything from Windows/Linux and Chrome to some completely custom OS and UI. (In the places we do provide products with the latter, we are more than state-of-the-art.)
Avionics have been piggybacking off of commercial electronics due to the sheer scale since at least the 1980's because it just makes sense, while the primes have been slow to do the same in software, partly due to mindsets like yours.
And the fact is, when creating software, everything starts out buggy, because nothing exists. That's why you develop, test and fix it. Normally we of course wouldn't ship anything that's not perfect, but our customers have begged us for products, saying they have nothing that can deal with some of the threats they face and so are okay with having to restart an app every now and then until it's ironed out.
Plus, if you can see through Anduril's marketing, how can you not see through China's marketing?