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