111–120 of 132 posts
You can test this, if you talk about your idea to three people and one of them says we're already doing that and the other two think you're insane, you'd be safe.
Side projects don't die from lack of time. They die from success anxiety. Shipping means facing judgment. An eternal WIP stays safe in the "potential" zone where it can't disappoint anyone including yourself
> Quality is not a metric anyone cares about in 2026. When you write operational critical code, it matters. No one can blame “the AI made me do it” when things go down and hundreds of thousands of people are without service. When your code can hurt people, it matters. You can’t burn someone’s eye with a laser then point to some AI agent when lawsuits start flying in. When millions of dollars in production data is los…
for personal side projects of the "handy SAAS thing that gives all your JSON a lustrous sheen" variety, he's probably more on target that quality seems to have gone by the wayside.
So nobody will ever start another successful software project? People will, what, just stop creating software? I understand people's apprehension because of the pace of change, but this is just silly.
You're overstating the case, but I think there's a strong possibility people will prompt AIs to produce bespoke apps that solve their niche use-case rather than paying a developer to do it. I pay for a SaaS app that tracks my finances, but it's not that great and missing some features I would like. Very soon I expect I'll be able to get a better, local-first replacement tailored to my needs by prompting Claude & Frie…
I’m publishing a very simple app with very little human written code and so far 90% of the actual work has had nothing to do with development. Most of it has been the “business” stuff, especially since the app stores have a lot of compliance and setup requirements.
Your example of a financial app is perfect: maybe one day grandma will be able to vibecode a budget app but then how is she going to set up the integration with banks? Publish it to the App Store? Keep it updated with bug fixes and resolve security issues? Is the AI going to handle security and incident response too?
Maybe you’ll say that one day the AI will just handle all this automatically with zero input or setup, but I think we have to assume that we are still asking grandma to spend time writing down what she wants and interfacing with the AI a pretty substantial amount to get it finished.
The thing is, we are also talking about competing with a SaaS product that is already available for around $5/month, and the professional software developers working on that product also have access to AI (and a whole lot of other skills).
Even making grandma put in a few prompts here and there is going to result in enough wasted time to say “screw this, I’ll just pay $5 a month for Simplifi.”
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The game has change. The ‘how’ we build it is easy. The ‘what’ we build is and always has been the hardest part of any SaaS or business. This is what the promptfondlers don't want to admit: the how has been easy for a long time. This last, I dunno, 35 years or so, Visual Basic, Delphi, whatnot, producing code has been very easy. You don't need a fundamentally fascist probabilistic nightmare to do it. The hard probl…
> This last, I dunno, 35 years or so, Visual Basic, Delphi, whatnot, producing code has been very easy I’m not so sure about that. It’s very easy to take your own knowledge for granted. Most people can’t do what we do. Most of my customers couldn’t even express what they wanted.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every business has secrets. You don’t know why a business succeeds unless you know their edge. Looking at my SaaS you’d think you could copy it. And perhaps you could make something that looks the same. But you don’t know my secrets and there is no way I’m telling you. So you will never beat me
so, uh. What's your secret, then?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is TNotW really the same concept as Harry Potter? It has a university in it, which I guess is similar to a school, and after a while the main character ends up there, but it's a very different concept - it's classic high fantasy that includes a period of learning and study, whereas HP is primarily boarding school fiction with magical elements. Similarly, The Magicians, as I understand it, is also more about a univers…
> This isn't directly relevant to your point Well, that kind of was exactly my point, although I feel now I didn't make it very clearly. Someone might shoot down a prospective author who intends to write a book featuring a young protagonist getting a formal education in magic because it's "been done", but the resulting works are very different. It was a counterpoint to the article saying that we should not try to rea…
To stretch the book analogy beyond breaking point, it would be like if Patrick Rothfuss released The Name of the Wind, and JK Rowling immediately put out "Harry Potter and the Kingkiller Chronicles, now with added Kvothe", and basically used her name and the Harry Potter brand to outcompete Rothfuss selling the same thing. (Obviously for books, you've got copyright, but there's no copyright for your favourite app idea.)
I think the extent to which that is actually true is hard to say, but I think it's a different point to the one you're arguing against here.
I wish i could take back the view i gave to this article, it says nothing. Is there such a thing as an inverse hype machine? Where people take the opposite side of a hyped product and then hype that view just as much but for the same purpose? His footer even admits he's basically just trolling for views so he can reach the status of "thought leader". btw, someone else having the same idea you have for a saas company…