Comment by al_borland
3 hours ago
If a startup can be throw together quickly with an LLM, where is the moat? Anything they make could be ripped off by a big player overnight.
If the cost to build drops, it stands to reason that the valuation drops as well, unless they can actually get traction in the market.
I’m not sure if you’ve watch the show Shark Tank, but Kevin brings this idea up a lot. If they have a generic product and no protection around it, it can be easier and cheaper to just spin up a clone with their own team than to take on the risk of an investment.
The market seems flooded with slop startups. I’ve seen many where people use AI to make a site to pitch the idea, but there isn’t even a product. It’s all smoke and mirrors. The industry is full of opportunistic charlatans right now. A good crash is needed to clear the field before real growth can happen.
Those who are building products with AI, probably aren’t advertising the fact. I’ve seen some stuff in the App Store tho I assume nothing of at first, then read the description and it was clearly written by AI, which makes me assume the whole thing was vibe coded. The stuff is out there, but it’s all so small and spread out, that all noise and no signal.
I could be way off, but that’s my read on the situation.
I'm advocating for a mass hiring event and huge growth push, not throwing together MVPs with LLMs!
Big dck money. Big dck ROI -- The next great Batman film, a World of Warcraft 2, autonomous robots on the moon, one of those humanoid robots doing my laundry!
The cost to build has dropped considerably, yes, the barrier to entry has lowered, but the bar is raised and valuations have skyrocketed and set records with trillion+ dollar IPOs too. More capital flowing into individual companies than ever before, albeit a small set of companies.
The potential has gone up, 10-fold, 100-fold.
To me, the market is saturated with pickaxe vendors looking for scrap metal miners, that is, model wrappers hoping to be the next wave of SaaS serving a largely misunderstood - disenfranchised (laid off from their jobs, no hope for the future) - customer base (gen y/z developers) that isn't meeting overall sales expectations. Nobody likes AI. Nobody needs it. They're also being told "Hey, don't be developers anymore". It's very confusing messaging!
So you got Google accidentally dominating most of it anyway just by being in everyone's house and pocket. Deer in headlights they're like "Who me?" They weren't even trying. Gemini surprises everyone. Surpasses everyone. Haha. Don't worry, they're doing a lot worse now that they are trying.
I digress, beyond "AI", what is needed is clearly... <AlexCarp>The Application Layer</AlexCarp>
> Those who are building products with AI, probably aren’t advertising the fact.
Perfectly fine - and gets to the spirit of what I'm talking about. Forget AI, focus on the product (and customer).
Not vibe coded...
But vibe... moated...
Vibe... goated...
If you will
This all assumes the code was the bottleneck. That rarely seems to be the case. I work in a large organization full of bureaucracy. Getting people to agree on what to build, and sorting out dependencies between team, and general communication doesn’t seem to be helped by AI, and those are the bottlenecks. I had the CIO tell my boss project X was the most important thing, just get it done. I ignored all the meetings, made every decision myself, and was done in 1-2 weeks (without AI). Then the bureaucracy entered. Over the next 2 years I was on daily meetings, architects would randomly show up and tell me this or that needed to be changed (always for the worse, imo). Hell, we spent 4+ months debating a list of ports to open. I wanted to throw myself out the window. I started out with a list of ports that were actually required, we could sub in an AI answer for that, and we still spent half a year tinkering. “We”… them, I just had to sit there and listen to it.
Will a great Batman film be written by AI? It seems like it would be a boring and predictable script without and soul, rehashing old themes that have all been done. And the script is only a minor piece of the puzzle. A lot of moving parts have to come together to make a great film. Does AI have taste? Good taste?
If AI can’t solve the bottlenecks, it’s not actually going to speed up delivery.