What is a product?

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 product LLM-proof can be challenging today, unless you happen to own a lot of data or lots of compute, and those two are the drivers behind your product.

What happened to HN's new queue? What changed? I only watch homepage so I wouldn't know.

Also, dang ought to make a new tab "Trends" (or just name that "AI") and move all AI/LLM/etc posts there. We might possibly see something other than AI then.

> So building is faster, but marketing—not so much

Producers are AI/agents now but consumers are still human beings. Maybe it will be different when it will be: by the AI, for the AI, of the AI… etc and humans will be safely out of the consumption loop.

In real terms a product is the delivery of a service or other item of value. Specifically within the realm of software it is the promise of the delivery of software that will do what it says it will do, and then maintain or fix it where it falls short.

E.g. it's now about the delivery of a service rather than the challenge of building it (e.g. the moat) and then the delivery of service of it afterwards. Non functional requirements like data management and security, legal requirements and hosting are still valuable things that aren't front of mind for most developers creating their own tooling.

The issue is most of these demo are created by developers. Most of the developers don't have interests or skills in product and design. So they use AI to write code, not build product.

Another mistake everyone making is not building better and bigger products. What is used to take a month to develop is now possible in few days but most don't put the same effort as before to make bigger and better products. They just do they same as what they used to do before but quickly. This is a mistake. AI uplifted everything so products built with AI should go to next level.

I'm an indie mac app developer. My first product took me 6 months to develop without much AI. I just released my second app ( https://www.vinaa.ai/ ) but took the same time to develop as I wanted it to be the best AI chat app. So I spent a month building my own markdown renderer in TextKit as existing library are not fast enough. I wouldn't done this if I don't use AI.

Please add to your prompt: "Make it concise" and "Do not use '—'"