31–40 of 120 posts
> This isn’t incremental improvement. This is a phase change. > This isn’t about one person copying one idea. It’s about the fundamental economics of software changing. That "this isn't x, it's y" really is a strong tell
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…
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…
The moat for artists hasn't actually gone down though. Even for those in Patreon with their styles directly trained are raking the same subscribers they have.
One underestimated productivity booster is that you can write code on your phone by giving orders to a coding assistant in a spare moment. You can fill extra time that way instead of reading social media or playing a game. I was just coding a personal website the other day while waiting for our number to be called at the DMV. I couldn’t really review the code but it did give me a chance to test on mobile. This is wit…
Ironically a lot of monotonous work that you were forced to do helped you immerse yourself in the problem domain and equipped you for the hard parts. Not just talking about AI btw, in general when people automate away the easy parts, the hard parts will suddenly seem more difficult, because there's no ramp-up.
While I know in some ways AI coding is helpful, the mode of work where you keep getting distracted while the agent works is much less productive when you just grind the problem.
I mean AI also helps you stay in the zone, but this 'casual' approach to work ultimately results in things not getting done, in my personal experience.
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…
But nonfunctional requirements such as reliability, performance and security are still extremely hard to get right, because they not only need code but many correct organizational decisions to be achieved.
As customers connect these nonfunctional requirements with a brand, I don't see how big SaaS players will have a problem.
For new brands, it's as hard as ever to establish trust. Maybe coding is a bit faster due to AI, but I'm not yet convinced that vibe coders are the people on top of which you can build a resilient organization that achieves excellence in nonfunction requirements.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No moat? In the software industry? My decades of experience suggests that the opposite will happen. People will realize that the software industry is 100% moat and 0% castle. People will build great software that nobody will use while a few companies will continue to dominate with vaporware.
Yes, the moat is disappearing. Go look at any stock index of publicly traded saas companies, they have all been selling off 50% in the last six months. This is going to be a bloodbath
Except for the token cost maybe.
There's a hilarious thread on Twitter where someone "built a browser" using an LLM feedback loop and it just pasted together a bunch of Servo components, some random other libraries and tens of thousands of spaghetti glue to make something that can render a webpage in a few seconds to a minute.
This will eventually get better once they learn how to _actually_ think and reason like us - and I don't believe by any means that they do - but I still think that's a few years out. We're still at what is clearly a strongly-directed random search stage.
The industry is going through a mass psychosis event right now thinking that things are ready for AI loops to just write everything, when the only real way for them to accomplish anything is by just burning tokens over and over until they finally stumble across something that works.
I'm not arguing that it won't ever happen. I think the true endgame of this work is that we'll have personal agents that just do stuff for us, and the vast majority of the value of the entire software industry will collapse as we all return to writing code as a fun little hobby, like those folks who spend hours making bespoke furniture. I, for one, look forward to this.
Finally, developers are realizing that it's not how you write code or who writes the code, it's figuring out WHAT to write. LLMs are finally exposing this because the feedback cycle is so short.