Comment by roli64

> It deals with the accumulated cruft of software for me.

And creates more at record speeds!

The work is mysterious and important.

As someone else implied in their comment...

If execution no longer matters, then what possible ideas exist out there that both are highly valuable as well as only valuable to the first mover? If the second person to see the value in the idea can execute it in a weekend using AI tools, what value is there in the idea to begin with?

In fact the second mover advantage seems to me to be even larger than before. Let someone else get the first version out the door, then you just point your AI bot at the resulting product to copy it in a fraction of the time it took the original person to execute on it.

If anything, ideas seem to be even cheaper to me in this new world. It probably just moves what bits of execution matter even more towards sales and marketing and hype vs. executing on the actual product itself.

I think there might be some interesting spaces here opening up in the IP combined with "physical product" space. Where you need the idea as well as real-world practical manufacturing skills in order to execute. That will still be somewhat of a moat for a little while at least, but mostly at a scale where it's not worth an actual manufacturer from China to spin up a production line to compete with you at scale.

While that’s theoretically correct, as soon as your idea is a product, that’s done deal now everyone can just execute at a stupid speed.

You might get head start but just like a bicycle race the one behind you will be more efficient because you already solved the domain problems and figured out the UX.

Believe me mate, everyone has ideas. Even if you have a good one I guarantee a thousand other people have thought of it first.

Ideas are always cheap.

Eventually you will have to tell people what the idea is, even if it is at product launch. And then, if execution is as cheap and easy as they claim, then anyone can replicate the idea without having to engage with the person in the first place.

Ideas will never not be cheap.

This has been a fallacy for as long as businesses have been built, and it will still be a fallacy in the AI era.

Ideas are cheap and don't need to be protected. Your taste, execution, marketing, UX, support, and all the 1000 things that aren't the code still matter. The code will appear more quickly now: You still need to get people to use it or care about it.

I've found almost without fail that you have more to gain in sharing an idea and getting feedback (both positive and negative) before/while you build the thing than you do in protecting the idea with the fear that as soon as someone hears it they'll steal it and do it better than you.

(The exception I think is in highly competitive spaces where ideas have only a short lifetime -- eg High Frequency Trading / Wall Street in general. An idea for a trade can be worth $$ if done before someone else figures it out, and then it makes sense to protect the idea so you can make use of it first. But that's an extremely narrow domain.)

I understand your concern. The copycat problem is real.

But if you come from a technical background and this is your first time building a product, you'll soon learn that it is so damn hard to get users, especially *paying* ones.

I was there. I built something, shared it, prayed people would notice. The truth is most of the time your product fails. Better explore the problem you are trying to solve first, share your idea if necessary, and collect feedback. You'll have a much clearer picture of what you need to do from there.

I've heard this a thousand times and I have not once seen a person give an example of this actually happening. I'm more likely to believe the crocodiles coming out of sewer pipes urban legend at this point.

I don't think it's about ideas or even the code. It's about execution, marketing, talking to your customers and doing sales. This is something AI can't do...yet