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.
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.
tapoxi · · focus · HN ↗
You cannot prompt Claude better than your customer can. There is no realistic moat there. You will not survive.
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 ↗