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.
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?