Comment by M4R5H4LL
1 day ago
Why not finish, publish it to the store and get income if it was that straightforward? There's a long way to go between a toy application to demonstrate a product, and something on shelves actually selling. In other words, you can most often quickly tackle the concept or trivial parts of an app, but it's much harder to get a real product out, even if the implementation looks straightforward on surface.
This is like the story of the businessman and the fisherman.
Why on earth are you going to build out a whole product: doing marketing, security, incorporation, customer support, etc… just so you can finally arrive at the end result of… teaching yourself a language?
The toy app is 100% of the value. You don’t need all that other shit, you just need a really good prompt. It’s exactly how you don’t need to search websites anymore, just ask AI for the answer and get it immediately. You don’t need a full app, just ask AI exactly what you want.
you think a chat UI is the apex UX? Most of us don't agree with that. On top of that, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini apps all sucks.
You don’t get it, you can just tell an AI to build you a UI as some html page and use that.
5 replies →
That's exactly my point. This is at best a toy application driven by a prompt that many people will be able to extract and recreate. Putting the pieces together is easy and letting someone talk to an AI is not a particularly difficult problem. Creating magic and making people come back to learn the language is entirely different and I don't see anything magical here.
I think you're missing the point entirely. Yes, it's easy to reproduce 5% of the effort. But it doesn't make sense to call the whole 100% of the effort a toy application. Given market pressure, and if it was the case, we'd be flooded with applications like that. Being the master of 5% of the effort doesn't amount to much, and dismissing the other 95% as a toy when it requires a lot more work and as much expertise throughout doesn't make much sense. Drawing an airplane doesn't make it fly.
> Putting the pieces together is easy and letting someone talk to an AI is not a particularly difficult problem
Exactly! Not difficult, right? Making and selling a product out of it is called marketing. It is not rocket science, but many engineers can't grasp it.
GPT Wrappers are the new CRUD. There is no innovation in Trello, Jira and any other SaaS, they are just marketed products that thousands of people here in HN could code better, but they don't, because they are wasting their time pointing that other people's products are not a difficult problem to solve.
Be honest though, what’s the difference between this and a good system prompt in Claude to be a language tutor?
I worked for an Edtech startup before that had a novel approach to mastery (as opposed to Anki) and it’s not something you can put in a prompt.
1 reply →