Even before AI, writing software isn’t even the “hardest” part. This is new enough that I wouldn’t be waving Mission Accomplished flags just because someone was able to dump out a react front end, wire up some managed services, and get paying users. Let’s see how this pans out long term when someone grapples with cost, reliability, security, growth, competition, and all the other actually hard parts. Also, using “I’ve heard this all before” and pointing to cloud, mobile, whatever as the basis of your argument is a bit awkward… yeah a lot of folks made a shit ton of money but the current tech landscape is increasingly a wasteland of broken and harmful things. I’m not sure I’m thrilled that we invented a machine to accelerate decline.
But the underlying point, I think, is that the right tool in the right hands is an extraordinary thing, especially when you bring execution closer to smart visionaries who aren’t otherwise technical. I can’t sit here in denial that LLMs have drastically changed things to that effect, whether I like it or not.
Why would you invest in a vibe app though? What's the moat that will protect your investment? That somebody "had an idea"? Conventional wisdom is that ideas are a dime a dozen
Same reason you invest in any seed stage startup: the founder has a vision, you believe they have researched the topic more than anyone else, there's a meaningful total addressable market, and they have the focus and ability to get there. More importantly, you believe they have the resilience to endure for the next 10-15 years, even if they have to pivot a dozen times until they succeed.
Software - at seed stage - was never a moat. It was just a prerequired (and scarce) resource. Classic example: Dropxbox in 2007 [1].
That's not the case anymore (or won't be, at some point soon).
good software (and hardware) was a moat in many cases, google had the best software, others tried to copy pageRank, but google scaled better and faster and killed them. Amazon, youtube, netflix. Many such cases. OSs, Browsers, those are huge moats and moneymakers.
If it can be commoditized, why not just steal the idea and give it to a tried-and-true professional CEO
reads like chatgpt talking to claude about imaginary things.
While this may be a real human reality, the way it's presented is in the golly-gee-whiz, I'm just a farm-folk engineer.
If you meant this to be convincing, it's not. It looks like copy-paste-find-replace of all these other tech blogs where they found $SHINYNEWEVIDENCE of $MODUS_OPERANDI and you should too.
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But the underlying point, I think, is that the right tool in the right hands is an extraordinary thing, especially when you bring execution closer to smart visionaries who aren’t otherwise technical. I can’t sit here in denial that LLMs have drastically changed things to that effect, whether I like it or not.
Software - at seed stage - was never a moat. It was just a prerequired (and scarce) resource. Classic example: Dropxbox in 2007 [1].
That's not the case anymore (or won't be, at some point soon).
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
If it can be commoditized, why not just steal the idea and give it to a tried-and-true professional CEO
While this may be a real human reality, the way it's presented is in the golly-gee-whiz, I'm just a farm-folk engineer.
If you meant this to be convincing, it's not. It looks like copy-paste-find-replace of all these other tech blogs where they found $SHINYNEWEVIDENCE of $MODUS_OPERANDI and you should too.
But is it possible to build real apps that work well? I can absolutely confirm. Deploying software that's used by household names.
I think people are making a lot of false dichotomy around this, just because there's AI slop doesn't mean that it never works.