Ideas are cheap, execution is cheaper

When software becomes cheap to build, a lot of strange second-order effects kick in. It’s not just that products are easier to create; sales, marketing, and every other business function can iterate faster alongside them. That speed erodes moats. As this reality sinks in, I think we’re headed for a brutal shakeout in SaaS.

People still argue that distribution is the real bottleneck now. But when the product itself is trivial to build and change, the old dynamics break down. Historically, sales was hard because you had to design and refine a sales motion around a product that evolved slowly and carried real technical risk. You couldn’t afford to pour resources into distribution before the product stabilized, because getting it wrong was expensive.

That constraint is gone. The assumptions and equations we relied on to understand SaaS no longer apply—and the industry hasn’t fully internalized what that means yet.

>> The evidence is overwhelming

> provides none

I'm pro LLM/AI, but most of hype are just pure vibes. There's no evidence, there are only anecdotes.

All the hype-men that I follow either have a stake at it (they either work for LLM provider or have an AI startup) or post billions of examples and zero revenue.

I'm now several years out of a career as a web designer and running my own retail business on Shopify and so while I've always had a background in working with devs and having a vague idea of how to plan and spec something, my previous job was design and writing HTML and CSS and I always wanted to be able to make small tools or little fun projects for me but the other parts of the project - the js, caching, api integration etc were always beyond my skillset.

While I wouldn't say execution is necessarily "cheap" for everything, ChatGPT and Gemini helped me build out a little Spotify playlist generator [1] recently that scans my top 100 artists in the last 12 months then generate a playlist based on their bottom 50% of songs in terms of popularity with an option for 1 or 2 songs per artist.

Sadly the Spotify API limits will never allow me to offer it to more than 25 people at a time but I get so bored of their algorithm playing me the same top songs from artists it's a fun way for me to explore "lesser lights" and something I'd have absolutely never have been able to build before, let alone spin up in a couple of evenings.

It's quite liberating as a non-dev suddenly having these new tools available that's for sure.

[1] https://github.com/welcomebrand/Spotify-Lesser-Lights

> I’m not exaggerating. And neither is anyone else.

> Stack Overflow, the site that defined a generation of software development, received 3,710 questions last month. That’s barely above the 3,749 it got in its first month of existence. The entire knowledge-sharing infrastructure we built our careers on is collapsing because people don’t need to ask anymore.

"Because people don't need to ask anymore."?!

Yeah, I wouldn't call it exaggerating, I think I would call it a fundamental misunderstanding.

I wanted to comment on the code examples he shared. But they're they're all closed source. Which is a decision given the premise of the whole article, err I mean ad, that implementations are free these days.

Would you mind sharing the repo?