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