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What is a product?

roge.onwrite.app

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Re: What is a product?

#71

Post by foxtrot8672 »

Agreed. legitimate products are being washed out by AI, because every person thinks they can just build whatever the product does themselves. And, maybe they could, but it still takes a while to build something that transcends a weekend mock up.

AI obviously is powerful and quick to build, but intellect, intelligence, and creativity will still lead to disproportional outcomes for users. After all, AI still relies on effective prompting to build well.

The real danger, then, is not AI churning out endless slop, it's actually that the slop degrades the perceived quality of actual products and legitimate effort.

Measuring by users is one metric, yes, and a good one. But, quality of output and performance beyond a simple prompt is what will make the difference. Products couldn't only be measured by the number of users, but also by quality and ingenuity.

Lastly, the products of tomorrow will not defy AI, but will build on top of them. AI will build and perform a higher level of compute, yes, but the products will orchestrate AI workflows, rather than deterministic outputs. Guided reasoning, orchestration, and value creation are human qualities, not AI.

Re: What is a product?

#72

Post by juped »

keiferski wrote: post #15

I think it ultimately just comes down to laziness. People are increasingly loathe to make multi-year plans and stick to them, for various reasons. Building something like a YouTube competitor is theoretically doable by a small team. It’s vastly more possible with AI tools than it was a decade ago. But the “muscle” of doing difficult things has atrophied for many people, in large part because the AI tools themselves r…

A youtube competitor is a CDN problem, i.e., business deals

Re: What is a product?

#73

Post by 47282847 »

darkwater wrote: post #46
uxhacker wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate the ‘product’ word. In the 90’s I was involved in a travel startup, and the software people would be talking about ‘product’ meaning the website that we where building, and the travel people meant what we where offering in the way of hotels, insurance, flights and excursions. The word ‘product just left everyone confused. If one uses a word like platform, application, prototype, offering, ‘products’ this makes…

> I hate the ‘product’ word. In the 90’s I was involved in a travel startup, and the software people would be talking about ‘product’ meaning the website that we where building, and the travel people meant what we where offering in the way of hotels, insurance, flights and excursions. In that case (but IMO it applies to almost everything that's not selling a software or technical solution per se) the product IS the h…

> There is no other way. The website was never the product

I find that quite often teams responsible for part of the infrastructure speak of their part as the “product”, with the consumer of that product possibly being a different team in the same company, not necessarily outside of it. I can totally see how for the website team, the website is “the” product under most circumstances.

Re: What is a product?

#74

Post by RSHEPP »

TrackerFF wrote: post #22

My office has cut down SaaS costs by a couple of tens of grand a year, simply by making our own versions using LLMs. It is not that we didn't have the expertise to do so to begin with, but it would simply have been too expensive and time consuming. That was solved once the models became good enough. There's a lot of money in the SaaS world, where the products are both unglamorous and one-trick pony-ish. Making your p…

For my small team we are not creating our versions, we're just more likely to find a self hostable version and use an LLM to help setup in production. For us it's a middle ground between the build your own SaaS and paying $10ks. But in some instances we do still pay for the other company to own the on call.
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