Coding agents are good, but once the complexity is high they're not good enough. Eventually your agent won't be able to make changes to your code base without introducing bugs with every change. In my experience, the agents aren't very good with abstractions yet, and no amount of testing can completely paper over that problem. So yes, the industry is changing dramatically and at a breathtaking rate, but I don't think money is the only moat left.
The only moat left is money?
141–150 of 398 posts
Re: The only moat left is money?
#142Kith looks interesting, but the main problem there is verifiability. How would it keep bad actors out? How does it verify posts by invitees aren't AI generated?
Re: The only moat left is money?
#143> When creation was hard, skill was the differentiator: you had to actually be good to make something worth showing. Now the barrier is near zero, so you need reach. Reach costs money or it costs years. Probably both. Creation has progressively been getting easier since the invention of the computer, it is not a new phenomena. This naturally pushes the boundary on what needs to be delivered in order to find paying cu…
You've basically chosen to ignore the whole AI argument as if it was just another tool and we had business as usual. Given how pervasive and fast developing it is, there should be an argument why it can be dismissed so easily.
Re: The only moat left is money?
#144This AI boom is just a hyper-version of previous tech booms (web 1.0, VC, crypto, etc). You have an enormous number of people who just want to get in and build something, but the products they are pumping out don't serve anyone's need or solve anyone's problem. The moat isn't money for out-marketing your idea that 750 other people are building, it's having a good idea that solves a problem that nobody else is solving…
Not really. It's money/resources. I had some really useful apps I built for myself. I looked at releasing them, but there were companies whose business model was waiting for people like me to release apps that solve a problem, and then just instantly jump on creating a solution and outcompeting the independent app.
It's trivial for competitors with bigger pockets to outcompete you on your idea, and there are companies whose business model is just that. And with AI customers are trying to do it themselves as well. The only startup I wouldn't be nervous about as a small team without large financial backing would be ones where we start out partnered to multiple companies in the targeted industry so that we can leverage that connection.
Historically this is why we have copyright/patent laws. To make it make sense for people to try to bring their ideas to the world. But with everything changing we are back to everyone just sitting on their concepts/solutions unless they have big money behind them.
Re: The only moat left is money?
#145This AI boom is just a hyper-version of previous tech booms (web 1.0, VC, crypto, etc). You have an enormous number of people who just want to get in and build something, but the products they are pumping out don't serve anyone's need or solve anyone's problem. The moat isn't money for out-marketing your idea that 750 other people are building, it's having a good idea that solves a problem that nobody else is solving…
how to prevent others from building a copycat using ai?
by keeping the how part a secret
Re: The only moat left is money?
#146This AI boom is just a hyper-version of previous tech booms (web 1.0, VC, crypto, etc). You have an enormous number of people who just want to get in and build something, but the products they are pumping out don't serve anyone's need or solve anyone's problem. The moat isn't money for out-marketing your idea that 750 other people are building, it's having a good idea that solves a problem that nobody else is solving…
> The moat isn't money for out-marketing your idea that 750 other people are building, it's having a good idea that solves a problem that nobody else is solving well. An idea is not a moat. Execution is only a moat if being nimble is part of the ongoing offering.
Historically, during booms like this (for example the industrial revolution), it was, because we had patent protections in order to encourage ideas to be brought to market. I don't see how you can have an AI revolution that doesn't just funnel everything to the top without something similar.
Why invent the cotton gin, find investors, and bring it to market if the steel company with the infinite worker machine can instantly compete with you?
Re: The only moat left is money?
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the products they are pumping out don't serve anyone's need or solve anyone's problem. This isn't true though. Yes, there are too many products being build that don't serve anyone's needs or solve anyone's problems. However, many of the AI products do solve problems and serve needs. You're right though, to compare this to other booms, which also had the same problem. This is very much a "hyper" version, which is pr…
I don't mean that _all_ AI built stuff is useless, just that the number of products where 'marketing budget' is the bottleneck is dwarfed by the number of tools that aren't that special in the first place. If you have a product that: 1. Solves a real problem people would pay for 2. Is not trivially replicable by your potential customers or competitors 3. Does not have a natural discovery mechanism by potential custom…
Ok but pick any category of human endeavor and 80% of it is garbage in the beginning. There were 3000 car companies in the 1920s, and most of them sucked, and so they died. The market over time will sort out who survives and who does not.
It will take a few years for investors to figure this out, but in the meantime, everyone is spreading their bets around like peanut butter in order to be in the game.
Re: The only moat left is money?
#148This is certainly one conclusion that could be drawn. Another conclusion could be that as building software gets easier (like it did for ex in the 90s and again in the 2010s), opportunities are created for new entrants to displace Bad Old Software. Those expensive Enterprise apps that everybody hates? Are absolutely begging to be replaced by something better for half the money. We still live in a world where most ind…
> as building software gets easier [...] new entrants to displace Bad Old Software
This didn't happen for music.
It is much easier to create/record music today than in the 70s and 80s, but the music created today is mostly boring AI music and not new exiting/inventing music.
Re: The only moat left is money?
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
A free market is not a zero sum game indeed. Monopolies turn it into a zero sum game. To keep a market free, you have to regulate it. Wealth concentration is dangerous for democracy, the markets and society.
I think you have it backwards. Regulation is what enables monopolies. There is no monopoly for any of the major industries like cow herding or cellular telephone service in Somalia despite almost no effective regulation. There is not even a monopoly of pirates despite them willing to use violence to try and enforce a monopoly. If you look at the history of the US, for instance, railroad regulation was brought forth l…
> major industries like cow herding
The food industry is filled with regional monopolies.
> cellular telephone service in Somalia
Ah yes, excellent example, all you have to do is completely destabilize your nation and you too can have free market capitalism.
Investors love monopolies, they fix prices and profits so their investments are not at risk. Investors hate too much competition, it lowers profits and puts their investments at risk.
Free markets need investors. Investors hate free markets. I hope you see the problem here.
Re: The only moat left is money?
#150Doing 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…
Building static pages that worked in both Netscape and IE 4, and could function well with constrained dial up speeds, may not have been "hard", but it did come with a number of challenges.