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Ideas are cheap, execution is cheaper

davekiss.com

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Re: Ideas are cheap, execution is cheaper

#101

Post by sdf2 »

immibis wrote: post #84

If LLMs are so great at enabling execution, where are all the successful projects enabled by LLMs? Where are they?

They dont exist because Im not sure how to say this in a nice way - most people suck at having a vision and understanding for what people want. Let alone delving into economics and product strategy to beat competitors in a well-defined market.

Frankly Im convinced very few can actually succeed at this game - your mix of characteristics that define your personality are a greater determinant. This increase in acceleration of writing code is noise.

Re: Ideas are cheap, execution is cheaper

#102

Post by sdf2 »

yobbo wrote: post #81

> In that time, I internalized a simple truth: ideas are cheap, execution is everything. This has never been true. To believe this, you would have had to miss the number of functioning apps and games on all the app stores that no one cares about, to just give one example. Or all the excellent but abandoned open source projects. Rewards follow an exponential distribution ("power law ..."). Ideas and execution are impo…

Execution of great ideas is what yield success - the two are joined at the hip. But the great idea precedes the execution. Execution without a great idea is in essence a sunk cost of ones life.

Re: Ideas are cheap, execution is cheaper

#103

Post by sdf2 »

cromka wrote: post #95
pkreg01 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. There's some faux confidence about ChatGPT, this emotionally draining, ruthlessly authoritative prose that is just exhausting to intellectually engage with. It started around o3, and I have no idea what OpenAI is doing to make their models sound like this. Claude and Gemini models have a much more human tone to them.

"This is a classic ChstGPT gotcha". This and the gaslighting "Exactly, now you see why A!=B" when it was ME who pointed out his wrong A=B assumption are driving me crazy. They f*cked it up. I am convinced ChatGPT will be a classic case of an early prodigy which gets surpassed by the better, second generation products. History is full of those. I think Tesla is another, recent one.

They have definitely messed it up, I know people who promised to be lifelong chatgpt users who now use Gemini.

Itll take a bit of time to show up in the numbers overall, but within my reach I see the numbers changing.

Re: Ideas are cheap, execution is cheaper

#104

Post by sdf2 »

mikert89 wrote: post #59
anonu wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Historically, sales was hard because you had to design and refine a sales motion around a product while your statement is true - this is actually a very minor reason why sales is hard.

I’m well aware of what makes sales difficult—I’ve lived it, both in early-stage, venture-backed environments and in long, enterprise sales cycles. In SaaS, almost everything about how sales works ultimately ties back to the cost of building software. Relationships and customer trust absolutely matter, but when building SaaS becomes trivial, the underlying equations change—and many of the old assumptions stop holding.

Only people who rely on things like frameworks live on assumptions. I guess you fit into that group of people.

Re: Ideas are cheap, execution is cheaper

#105

Post by sdf2 »

mikert89 wrote: post #28
jongjong wrote: post #24

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

Lol what a nonsensical post. Stock prices? Your argument would hold more weight in regards to talking about revenues which are a reflection of sales performance. But stock prices? hahaaha.

Re: Ideas are cheap, execution is cheaper

#106

Post by LilBytes »

Bishonen88 wrote: post #82
Denzel wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you mind sharing the repo?

Sure, why not. I'll drop a repo over the weekend

Thank you. I'll keep an eye out too. I've not seen any good examples of 'good vibe coded products' yet.

Good being a difficult term to define but most of not all of us here know what I mean

Re: Ideas are cheap, execution is cheaper

#107

Post by k4roshi »

Actually novel ideas are very rare and very valueable. That said you can build a perfectly viable business with not a single original thought. I.E. a restaurant or a clone of another business.

I'd split execution mainly in two: Building Selling

Building, barring some possibly extremely hard technical challenges, is not as hard as people make it to be, and LLM are definitely a huge help but I would never call vibecoding an entire application "Building a production ready SaaS".

Selling or, to put it better Product/Market fit, is what's actually very very hard and where most ideas fail.

Re: Ideas are cheap, execution is cheaper

#108

Post by bflesch »

immibis wrote: post #85
dgreensp wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By that logic, Microsoft’s brand means nothing when OpenOffice is free.

Have you noticed how rapidly Microsoft is setting its own brands on fire? Most recently by abandoning the brand "Microsoft Office" and renaming that product to "Microsoft 365 Copilot App" instead.

I also cannot understand how they mix up their brands so much, even people working in the MS ecosystem need to learn new brands every year.

Re: Ideas are cheap, execution is cheaper

#109

Post by Rastonbury »

password1 wrote: post #74

It's interesting that the the author created three saas over the weekend as some sort of proof that execution is useless now. But would any company ever buy one of these? No, because for a company to buy your saas you need salespeople or some marketing channel, compliance and regulatory checkmarks, SSO integrations, ability to take and implement special feature requests, SLAs, maintenance and support capacity, etc. T…

You don't need any of that per se, only if you want to sell enterprise or need to make investors happy, you do. But at $99/mo, people can put that on company card easily. Author only needs 10s of customers to make it worth their time and Claude subscription

Re: Ideas are cheap, execution is cheaper

#110

Post by Havoc »

I do think there is still a bit of an execution edge to be had in the brittleness or lack thereof

It’s very easy to vibe code a happy path. Getting it to do the same robustly is a step change in difficulty

I‘m not a programmer by profession and definitely notice that. Some concurrency gotcha or whatever that I didn’t know to look out for and the LLM doesn’t organically cover etc

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