Comment by donatj
1 month ago
I think it's more complicated than that.
Anything someone can vibe code that gains any level of mild traction can then easily duplicated by all their competitors and in a fraction of the time because the actual hard part, determining the products edges, has already been done for them.
Agreed. This is why I think that platform/network effects will be mandatory to stay afloat in a lot of the tech market pretty soon. (Or other types of unfair advantages that are truly hard to overcome)
Even with network effects, it's still a race between you building a ecosystem and your competitors catching up to you.
However, if you DO have some sort of network effect moat and your competitors DON'T (yet), then you have the only advantage that matters in the world, because remember, vibe-copying goes both ways. You can copy your competitors feature-by-feature just like they can copy you. So you'll just always keep up feature parity while everyone only uses you because you're the established player with the biggest ecosystem, and soon enough you'll turn your temporary advantage into a permanent one.
Note: legacy platforms can't really benefit from this because you probably need to rewrite your product from scratch to fit any sort of cutting-edge AI dev workflow. Whoever creates a AI-native platform and scales it first wins.