I do think a lot of startups, especially on HN, are in for a reckoning that your new vibecoded product/service or one with an AI feature or two added will survive. Everything you do is going to feed the model, that's the training data now. That's why Claude is so cheap for what it does.
You cannot prompt Claude better than your customer can. There is no realistic moat there. You will not survive.
> You cannot prompt Claude better than your customer can.
I actually think you still can. We're still in the "centaur chess" phase where a knowledgeable human sometimes needs to know the right things to ask for.
Will you be able to in 6 months? 2 years? I don't know, but it's not looking great.
> Will you be able to in 6 months? 2 years? I don't know, but it's not looking great.
I don't think the person you are replying to meant everyone won't survive as of literally today.
We're still in a somewhat calm period where something fundamental changed in the world but it changed so fast most people have barely reacted to it as of yet so things feel relatively normal, but with a growing sense that they aren't.
In the beginning of 2025 if anyone suggested "You cannot prompt Claude better than your customer can. There is no realistic moat there. You will not survive" most people on HN would have laughed at it, even the people who were considered AI-pilled for the time.
Today that sort of claim may spark some debate and some people are clinging to denial, but nobody who actually uses this stuff is laughing it off anymore. Even the staunchest deniers recognize there is enough to be concerned about there that it isn't a joke anymore.
Tbh I'm not very concerned. Unlike chess, which has very finite state, the "build something appealing" kind of game has a very vast amount of state. And the current architecture of LLMs doesn't make them very "creative" (whatever you define it as). If given a scoped task, they'll relentlessly try to complete it but the design, as we speak, is still your job. You can get AI to clone something already existing, which does decrease moats, yes. Making it do something new is way harder.
All those one-shot games and product demos are clones of existing things, and while they're very impressive, they aren't exactly new ideas, you know?
Of course all this might change and the labs might figure out the secret to creativity, but as things stand today, humans can keep "moving up" the value stack to just make more complex things.
How does that make sense? The expertise is what allows me to tell the LLM what to do in the first place, inspect its outputs, and iterate, which is still faster than coding by hand.
Right now, I can definitely prompt Claude better than my customer. Claude's abilities, when steered, are definitely impressive, but I have never seen it correctly architecture around a problem unless explicitly critiqued.
But I can probably prompt Claude better than your customers too, so can at least 50 of the people I know (advantage of a tech heavy social circle). Good luck turning your prompt into a business when me and 50 of my friends can replicate your business model in about 10 second. Don't believe? Go ask Jev devs how they feel about Clef.
My business is going just fine. Don't underestimate the business value of handling schlep. As I said, "a prompt" is not sufficient to run my business, even on a technical level.
i've been experiencing this as well. It does however make me think that maybe the code architecture doesnt matter if nobody is going to read the code. Like maybe the focus should be on better tests and metric tools to determine quality of code (i.e. performance) along with other tests for security, and then let the code look like whatever claude uses to match those targets.
Right, but iteration has become cheaper. If one gives Claude a shitty prompt and it does a shitty job, one will know soon. Then they can refine the prompt and get to where they want to be.
When iteration had a real costs, you couldn't afford too many mistakes.
I'm scared to find out what systems built using that methodology will be like.
Product design is mostly saying no to ideas. And occasionally yes, but only to a very select cohesive set.
Most people are terrible at that - though I think it's learnable to some extend. And at least current-day agents will generally just do whatever dumb shit the human says it wants.
I expect you’ll find the outputs of those processes to be entirely unconscionable and, baffling, the users will not see a problem with it. Eventually you will conclude that it’s not a lack of information or a resignation to their fate; it is much like the pigs, who just like playing in mud. (This is how I’ve felt twice now, first about AI writing, and then about AI code.)
Steve Jobs' product couldn't be trivially cloned, fast, with a cheap AI subscription available to any one of the billions of people on the planet
A well designed, well built physical product has a far higher barrier to entry
Even if your customers won't do it, there are endless people who are willing to compete with you if they see you making any money
> You cannot prompt Claude better than your customer can
That is simply and obviously not true. Technical expertise is still highly relevant when prompting, reviewing, understanding consequences, and approving.
When it comes to trades it's also a bit of "most people do not want to do this job because it's unglamorous"
Many people would choose not to be a plumber for various reasons. A shocking number of people seem to deem manual work as beneath them. Many others just prefer to do other work.
I have no problem doing plumbing or building. I've installed floors, ceiling fixtures, drywall, whatever. But I am best at software and would prefer to do that for my career.
Yeah and anthropic can't train Claude better than anyone else either so no moat there either. Knowledge is not scarce it just takes work to uncover once uncovered it is not useful if not published. If published it can't be owned.
I've been thinking a lot about this. Many technical barriers that could justify businesses are much lower now, so we are left with other kinds of barriers: red tape, regulatory, legal, etc. If you have access to go past those barriers, you are worth something. If all you do is provide a technical solution, you are probably going to stop making sense.
In a way its worse- nothing is stopping claude from decompiling all the things- and then adding the source code it decompiled to the training data, as if it was just another github to crawl. So if one of your installers is out there- you have provided the perfect example of something working.
That's true, but the installers for most of the really valuable proprietary native software are still locked behind paywalls. (Some have been leaked.)
I suspect we'll increasingly see vibe coding targeting assembly language. If humans aren't going to read or write the code then using higher level languages becomes kind of pointless, except for being able to use the toolchains.
You think all companies are going to vibe code and then vibe maintain for years and years all the software they require to do a business that has nothing to do with software? And you think the LLM is going to do it itself?
I fully acknowledge this is a mess right now, but vibe-fixing or vibe-rebuiliding-from-scratch is only going to get better.
More realistically, I think other companies will vibe code and sell these solutions, but the cheapness of building will drive down costs so much that it'll be effectively the same result.
For most yes, but the art of picking the right features that interact in the right way is still a delicate craft. AI is like a sledgehammer. It can demolish technical challenges and it can follow patterns but is still completely blind to the "why".
But yeah the majority of startups don't have well thought out reasoning either. In the end, there's no substitute for hard work. AI can reduce the iteration time maybe.
> the art of picking the right features that interact in the right way is still a delicate craft.
It is.
But after you expend the human-in-the-loop effort to build the right software with the right features using your impeccable judgement, what is going to stop your would-be customer from telling an LLM to analyze your solution and reproduce it feature-for-feature for a few dollars in tokens instead of paying you?
Opportunity cost. AI can help with maintenance but do you want to be on the hook for a service or would you rather pay a monthly fee and have someone else bear the responsibility?
Also most of the software that's really successful has some sort of lock in or network effect. The code is not the only valuable service being provided. To wit, there exist open source off the shelf solutions for hosting your own ridesharing, chat services, social networks, internet search, etc. Why isn't anyone pointing agents at those projects to spruce them up and run them? The network is what's valuable.
I mean we already live in a world where extremely valuable software exists right in the open for free. The actual artifact of code is in abundant supply and does not have a very high price. AI can't bring the price down lower than free.
Sure, there are some network-effect focused bits of software that have such moats, but they are a vanishingly small amount of all produced software and all the ones you mentioned already have locked-in incumbents.
How often does a new Uber/Twitter/Google type of service come around with such a clear moat? How much of a sustainable tech economy is it when you have to be that level of unicorn just to not get LLM-washed away?
> That's why Claude is so cheap for what it does.
That's probably the competition, and
> You cannot prompt Claude better than your customer can.
You may currently have enough technical knowledge about computers and services to collaborate with a customer better than either of you working alone.
Thinking back to a previous discussion, a veterinary clinic likely does know better than you what they need in their CRM, but they may wildly overestimate the hardware required to do that and just accept the first thing Claude comes up with that's scaled for a city hospital with 4000 beds occupied at any given time, when they're actually just one person in a village with 100 pets.
Or the other way around, which is even worse.
Right now, experienced engineers can help with this kind of problem. I don't know how long this will remain true, but right now it seems to be. I think.
> That's why Claude is so cheap for what it does.
The main reason Claude is "cheap" because it has to compete with OpenAI, Deepseek, GLM, Qwen, Muse (who is also massively subsidised their model to get training data), etc. If they increased prices 10x, people would instantly jump ship to the next competitor. There's no moat for Anthropic either, short of constantly training new models in a red queen's race.
If I imagine this as a winner takes all markets are big corporations safe? If you replace all your human labour with a service from a big AI monopoly what leverage do you have when they tell you hey btw your tokens are going up 20% next year? Will it be easier to negotiate with 30k disorganised employees or one of the richest companies the world has ever seen?
tapoxi · · focus · HN ↗
You cannot prompt Claude better than your customer can. There is no realistic moat there. You will not survive.
howunfortunate · · focus · HN ↗
I actually think you still can. We're still in the "centaur chess" phase where a knowledgeable human sometimes needs to know the right things to ask for.
Will you be able to in 6 months? 2 years? I don't know, but it's not looking great.
georgemcbay · · focus · HN ↗
I don't think the person you are replying to meant everyone won't survive as of literally today.
We're still in a somewhat calm period where something fundamental changed in the world but it changed so fast most people have barely reacted to it as of yet so things feel relatively normal, but with a growing sense that they aren't.
In the beginning of 2025 if anyone suggested "You cannot prompt Claude better than your customer can. There is no realistic moat there. You will not survive" most people on HN would have laughed at it, even the people who were considered AI-pilled for the time.
Today that sort of claim may spark some debate and some people are clinging to denial, but nobody who actually uses this stuff is laughing it off anymore. Even the staunchest deniers recognize there is enough to be concerned about there that it isn't a joke anymore.
Pannoniae · · focus · HN ↗
All those one-shot games and product demos are clones of existing things, and while they're very impressive, they aren't exactly new ideas, you know?
Of course all this might change and the labs might figure out the secret to creativity, but as things stand today, humans can keep "moving up" the value stack to just make more complex things.
dofm · · focus · HN ↗
For now you still can outprompt your customer.
Can you outprompt a developer with your skill level who lives somewhere with a lower cost of living and doesn't need to charge as much?
waffletower · · focus · HN ↗
tapoxi · · focus · HN ↗
bigstrat2003 · · focus · HN ↗
joefourier · · focus · HN ↗
poly2it · · focus · HN ↗
linuxftw · · focus · HN ↗
bluejay2387 · · focus · HN ↗
poly2it · · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html
austinthetaco · · focus · HN ↗
bob1029 · · focus · HN ↗
Steve Jobs built an empire around the idea that the customer is generally terrible at specifying a particular solution.
bena · · focus · HN ↗
When iteration had a real costs, you couldn't afford too many mistakes.
plastic-enjoyer · · focus · HN ↗
vanviegen · · focus · HN ↗
Product design is mostly saying no to ideas. And occasionally yes, but only to a very select cohesive set.
Most people are terrible at that - though I think it's learnable to some extend. And at least current-day agents will generally just do whatever dumb shit the human says it wants.
fwlr · · focus · HN ↗
soperj · · focus · HN ↗
tripleee · · focus · HN ↗
A well designed, well built physical product has a far higher barrier to entry
Even if your customers won't do it, there are endless people who are willing to compete with you if they see you making any money
demibabs · · focus · HN ↗
sisyphus15 · · focus · HN ↗
That is simply and obviously not true. Technical expertise is still highly relevant when prompting, reviewing, understanding consequences, and approving.
cheschire · · focus · HN ↗
nkohari · · focus · HN ↗
bluefirebrand · · focus · HN ↗
Many people would choose not to be a plumber for various reasons. A shocking number of people seem to deem manual work as beneath them. Many others just prefer to do other work.
I have no problem doing plumbing or building. I've installed floors, ceiling fixtures, drywall, whatever. But I am best at software and would prefer to do that for my career.
[deleted] · · focus · HN ↗
[deleted]
micromacrofoot · · focus · HN ↗
morpheos137 · · focus · HN ↗
bdauvergne · · focus · HN ↗
hakunin · · focus · HN ↗
warumdarum · · focus · HN ↗
nradov · · focus · HN ↗
I suspect we'll increasingly see vibe coding targeting assembly language. If humans aren't going to read or write the code then using higher level languages becomes kind of pointless, except for being able to use the toolchains.
0x20cowboy · · focus · HN ↗
howunfortunate · · focus · HN ↗
I fully acknowledge this is a mess right now, but vibe-fixing or vibe-rebuiliding-from-scratch is only going to get better.
More realistically, I think other companies will vibe code and sell these solutions, but the cheapness of building will drive down costs so much that it'll be effectively the same result.
CoolestBeans · · focus · HN ↗
But yeah the majority of startups don't have well thought out reasoning either. In the end, there's no substitute for hard work. AI can reduce the iteration time maybe.
georgemcbay · · focus · HN ↗
It is.
But after you expend the human-in-the-loop effort to build the right software with the right features using your impeccable judgement, what is going to stop your would-be customer from telling an LLM to analyze your solution and reproduce it feature-for-feature for a few dollars in tokens instead of paying you?
CoolestBeans · · focus · HN ↗
Also most of the software that's really successful has some sort of lock in or network effect. The code is not the only valuable service being provided. To wit, there exist open source off the shelf solutions for hosting your own ridesharing, chat services, social networks, internet search, etc. Why isn't anyone pointing agents at those projects to spruce them up and run them? The network is what's valuable.
I mean we already live in a world where extremely valuable software exists right in the open for free. The actual artifact of code is in abundant supply and does not have a very high price. AI can't bring the price down lower than free.
georgemcbay · · focus · HN ↗
How often does a new Uber/Twitter/Google type of service come around with such a clear moat? How much of a sustainable tech economy is it when you have to be that level of unicorn just to not get LLM-washed away?
ben_w · · focus · HN ↗
> That's why Claude is so cheap for what it does.
That's probably the competition, and
> You cannot prompt Claude better than your customer can.
You may currently have enough technical knowledge about computers and services to collaborate with a customer better than either of you working alone.
Thinking back to a previous discussion, a veterinary clinic likely does know better than you what they need in their CRM, but they may wildly overestimate the hardware required to do that and just accept the first thing Claude comes up with that's scaled for a city hospital with 4000 beds occupied at any given time, when they're actually just one person in a village with 100 pets.
Or the other way around, which is even worse.
Right now, experienced engineers can help with this kind of problem. I don't know how long this will remain true, but right now it seems to be. I think.
joefourier · · focus · HN ↗
The main reason Claude is "cheap" because it has to compete with OpenAI, Deepseek, GLM, Qwen, Muse (who is also massively subsidised their model to get training data), etc. If they increased prices 10x, people would instantly jump ship to the next competitor. There's no moat for Anthropic either, short of constantly training new models in a red queen's race.
ungovernableCat · · focus · HN ↗