I saw Peter Steinberger whose creativity is huge and made a difference.
Yeah you can say he's already rich.
But I also saw many people like him including the author of Flask. Also the author of XcodeBuildMcp, tailwindcss
The only moat left is money?
21–30 of 398 posts
Re: The only moat left is money?
#22Doing hard things has always been, and always will be, hard. Building a static HTML page was “hard” in the 90’s. It took actual skills. Any piece that gets easier automatically opens up more hard avenues to tackle. no one is willing to pay you for easy.
Ahhh that lines up with a thought I had recently: you get out of life what you put into it. I am beginning to believe that there's some kind of metaphysical rule here that is true everywhere, all the time. So maybe the solution is: find the hardest stuff to do and do the crap out of it.
The followup thought / concern that occurs: what if the number of hard things is going down?
Re: The only moat left is money?
#23> The value of human thinking is going down. Wrong. Creativity, innovation, intuition, taste - all forms of thought solely inherent to humans, all going up.
I used to agree completely, and a part of me still does. But the part of me that's scared that this isn't true is getting louder and louder. I'm a novelist and software engineer. The value of one of those skills is trending to zero. I'm not seeing much to suggest, in the face of the hockey stick of doom, that the other isn't.
Depends. Are you still measuring value in dollars?
Re: The only moat left is money?
#24Doom and gloom nonsense.
Re: The only moat left is money?
#25Doing hard things has always been, and always will be, hard. Building a static HTML page was “hard” in the 90’s. It took actual skills. Any piece that gets easier automatically opens up more hard avenues to tackle. no one is willing to pay you for easy.
The entire pitch of LLM companies is that that’s not true. The LLM does the hard work, and you pay the LLM company for the tokens. So the gate is just, can you afford enough tokens.
Not saying that’s what will happen in reality, but that is the marketing pitch
Re: The only moat left is money?
#26I disagree. I think creativity is still a valid moat. You still need to build good products. Its like a restaurant anyone with some money can open a restaurant but you need to has the creativity to make a good one.
Your creativity will be copied within days
Re: The only moat left is money?
#27While building has becomes way cheaper (and probably is going to become even cheaper in the future), is building something exceptional really that much cheaper now?
AI has certainly made it so much simpler to just pump "something" out (slop), but did it actually make building something that went through hundreds and thousands of iterations significantly cheaper?
I also like to think AI is really raising the bar for everybody. In the past, you could easily get away launching a product with a crappy landing page and a couple of bugs here and there, is that still the case? Don't people just expect a perfect landing page at this point (when's the last time anybody specifically talked/ thought about responsiveness?) paired with a flawless onboarding etc.?
Re: The only moat left is money?
#28Doing hard things has always been, and always will be, hard. Building a static HTML page was “hard” in the 90’s. It took actual skills. Any piece that gets easier automatically opens up more hard avenues to tackle. no one is willing to pay you for easy.
I was there in the 90s. I built a few bad static HTML pages. It wasn’t hard. There are lots of stories of non-CS / non-technical people making stuff from the dotcom era.
Making a dynamic page was harder. Integrating with a payment system was almost magical; there’s a reason PayPal became big.
But what was truly hard, and continues to be hard, is building a page, either static or dynamic, that people actually want to visit.
Re: The only moat left is money?
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to agree completely, and a part of me still does. But the part of me that's scared that this isn't true is getting louder and louder. I'm a novelist and software engineer. The value of one of those skills is trending to zero. I'm not seeing much to suggest, in the face of the hockey stick of doom, that the other isn't.
Depends. Are you still measuring value in dollars?
I got mouths to feed, so... yeah.
Re: The only moat left is money?
#30I disagree. Customer relationships, taste, creativity, tenacity, execution excellence, industry relevance, reputation, non-public data, etc... are all hard earned or intrinsic capabilities that matter a lot more than feature development speed/cost.