Comment by lelanthran
3 days ago
> I felt in love with the process to be honest. I complained my wife yesterday: "my only problem now is that I don't have enough time and money to pay all the servers", because it opened to me the opportunities to develop and deploy a lot of new ideas.
What opportunities? You aren't going to make any money with anything you vibe coded because, even the people you are targeting don't vibe code it, the minute you have even a risk of gaining traction someone else is going to vibe code it anyway.
And even if that didn't happen you're just reducing the signal/noise ratio; good luck getting your genuinely good product out there when the masses are spammed by vibe-coded alternatives.
When every individual can produce their own software, why do you think that the stuff produced by you is worth paying for?
That might be true, but it doesn't have to be immediately true. It's an arbitrage problem: seeing a gap, knowing you can apply this new tool to make a new entrant, making an offering at a price that works for you, and hoping others haven't found a cheaper way or won the market first. In other words, that's all business as usual. How does Glad sell plastic bags when there are thousands of other companies producing plastic bags, often for far, far less? Branding, contracts, quality, pricing -- just through running a business. No guarantee it's gonna work.
Vibe-coding something isn't a guarantee the thing is shit. It can be fine. It still takes time and effort, too, but because it can take lot less time to get a "working product", maybe some unique insight the parent commenter had on a problem is what was suddenly worth their time.
Will everyone else who has that insight and the vibe coding skills go right for that problem and compete? Maybe, but, also maybe not. If it's a money-maker, they likely will eventually, but that's just business. Maybe you get out of the business after a year, but for a little while it made you some money.
> That might be true, but it doesn't have to be immediately true. It's an arbitrage problem: seeing a gap, knowing you can apply this new tool to make a new entrant, making an offering at a price that works for you, and hoping others haven't found a cheaper way or won the market first. In other words, that's all business as usual.
I'm hearing what you are saying, but the "business as usual" way almost always requires some money or some time (which is the same thing). The ones that don't (performance arts, for example) average a below-minimum-wage pay!
IOW, when the cost of production is almost zero, the market adjusts very quickly to reflect that. What happens then is that a few lottery ticket winners make bank, and everyone else does it for free (or close to it).
You're essentially hoping to be one of those lottery ticket winners.
> How does Glad sell plastic bags when there are thousands of other companies producing plastic bags, often for far, far less?
The cost of production of plastic bags is not near zero, and the requirements for producing plastic bags (i.e. cloning the existing products) include substantial capital.
You're playing in a different market, where the cost of cloning your product is zero.
There's quite a large difference between operating in a market where there is a barrier (capital, time and skill) and operating in a market where there are no capital, time or skill barriers.
The market you are in is not the same as the ones you are comparing your product to. The better comparison is artists, where even though there is a skill and time barrier, the clear majority of the producers do it as a hobby, because it doesn't pay enough for them to do it as a job.
All fair points, I think I agree with your take overall but we might each be focusing on situations involving different levels of capital, time, and skill: I'm imagining situations where AI use brought the barrier down substantially for some entrants, but the barriers still meaningfully exist, while it sounds to me like you're considering the essentially zero barrier case.
My Glad example was off the cuff but it still feels apt to me for the case I mean: the barrier for an existing plastic product producer who doesn't already to also produce bags is likely very low, but it's still non zero, while the barrier for a random person is quite high. I feel vibe coding made individual projects much cheaper (sometimes zero) for decent programmers, but it hasn't made my mom start producing programming projects -- the barrier still seems quite high for non technical people.
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You're overestimating people's willingness to write code even if they don't have to do it. Most people just don't want to do it even if AI made is easy to do so. Not sure who you're talking to but most people I know that aren't programmers have zero interest in writing their own software even if they could do it using prompts only.