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"Be Different" doesn't work for building products anymore

iamcharliegraham.substack.com

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Re: "Be Different" doesn't work for building products anymore

#51

Post by makeitdouble »

advisedwang wrote: post #12

> Where a great idea in a space once had 5-10 competitors, hundreds now appear - all competing for attention. Big companies used to move slowly, but now a ragtag team of two developers at a large firm can whip up something that looks top-of-market to the untrained eye in a matter of weeks. Perhaps I'm out of touch, but I haven't seen this explosion of software competition. I'd LOVE to see some new competitors for MS…

For JIRA competitors are a dime a dozen. A lot of them are targeted at startups and small shops who heard JIRA was hell and think their needs are really basic and will be for a long time.

The funniest I actually had to deal with was Monday. The very premise is that task management is simple and the visual interface will reflect that. Bright colors, low information density, minimal data model and very screenshotable screens. Then when actually using it for a dev team, the first question is how long we decide to try it before giving a verdict.

> Gmail

It really depends on what feature you rely on that aren't IMAP. If it's Google services integration, they might never be a competitor ever, for instance.

Re: "Be Different" doesn't work for building products anymore

#53

Post by sfn42 »

throwaway7783 wrote: post #43
sfn42 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in that boat, everything is just a crud app. I've worked on some fairly complex apps but at their core they were crud apps and most of their complexity were caused by bad developers overcomplicating and fumbling things. That's not to say something like Figma isn't on an entirely different level, but most apps aren't Figma and don't need to be. Most apps are simple crud apps and if they aren't it's usually because…

What makes Figma more complex?

Collaboration and the whole editor UI in general is a much more complex task than your average glorified PDF with some dynamically rendered data.

It's not the Pinnacle of complexity, just more complex than your average app.

Re: "Be Different" doesn't work for building products anymore

#54

Post by airstrike »

trcf22 wrote: post #41
sfn42 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in that boat, everything is just a crud app. I've worked on some fairly complex apps but at their core they were crud apps and most of their complexity were caused by bad developers overcomplicating and fumbling things. That's not to say something like Figma isn't on an entirely different level, but most apps aren't Figma and don't need to be. Most apps are simple crud apps and if they aren't it's usually because…

Why wouldn't figma be considered a crud app? It’s still basically adding and updating things in a DB no? With some highly complex things like rendering, collab and stuff. (Fair question btw)

It's very, very far from a CRUD app or "just updating a DB". GUI-heavy apps are notoriously hard to get right. Any kind of "editable canvas" makes it 10x harder. Online collaboration is hard, so that's another 10x—there are known solutions, but it's an entire sidequest you have to pour a massive amount of effort into.

Custom text editing and rendering is really hard to do well.

Making everything smooth and performant to the point it's best-in-class while still adding new features is... remarkable.

(Speaking as someone who's writing a spreadsheet and slideshow editor myself...among other things)

Re: "Be Different" doesn't work for building products anymore

#55

Post by fny »

spamizbad wrote: post #14

Can't say I agree with this article at all. This has not been my experience. I don't quite know how to articulate this well, but there's something that I'd call a "complexity cliff" in the software business: if you want to compete in certain spaces, you need to build very complex software (even if the software, to the user, is easy to use). And while AI tools can assist you in the construction of this software, it ca…

I'm going to give a very concrete example of this so people can understand.

I built a fitness product eons ago where there a million rules that determined what should happen for prescribing exercises to athletes (college/pro teams).

If you gave this to an agent today, you will get a tangled mess of if statements that are impossible to debug or extend. This is primarily because LLMs are still bad at picking the right abstraction for a task. The right solution was to build a rules engine, use a constraint solver, and use some combinatorics.

LLMs just don't have the taste to make these decisions without guidance. They also lack the problem solving skills for things they've never seen.*

Was 95% of the app CRUD? Sure. But last I checked, CRUD was never a moat.

*I suspect this part of why senior developers are in extremely high demand despite LLMs.

---

Another example: for many probability problems, Claude loves to code up simulations rather than explore closed form solutions. Asking Claude to make it faster often drives it to make coding optimizations instead of addressing the math. You have to guide Claude to do the right thing, and that means you have to know the right thing to do.

Re: "Be Different" doesn't work for building products anymore

#56

Post by airstrike »

Aurornis wrote: post #36
sfn42 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in that boat, everything is just a crud app. I've worked on some fairly complex apps but at their core they were crud apps and most of their complexity were caused by bad developers overcomplicating and fumbling things. That's not to say something like Figma isn't on an entirely different level, but most apps aren't Figma and don't need to be. Most apps are simple crud apps and if they aren't it's usually because…

> Most apps are simple crud apps and if they aren't it's usually because the devs are bad. I heard this a lot from candidates who had only worked on software that could be described as an app. They bounced from company to company adjusting a mobile app here, fitting into a React framework there, and changing some REST endpoints. There is a large world of software out there and not all of it is user-facing apps.

I agree 100%. IMHO this is the software that is vibe-codeable, by the way.

Re: "Be Different" doesn't work for building products anymore

#57

Post by airstrike »

advisedwang wrote: post #12

> Where a great idea in a space once had 5-10 competitors, hundreds now appear - all competing for attention. Big companies used to move slowly, but now a ragtag team of two developers at a large firm can whip up something that looks top-of-market to the untrained eye in a matter of weeks. Perhaps I'm out of touch, but I haven't seen this explosion of software competition. I'd LOVE to see some new competitors for MS…

Some of us are building those... It just takes a little more time than vibe-coded AI slop

Re: "Be Different" doesn't work for building products anymore

#59

Post by beachy »

spamizbad wrote: post #14

Can't say I agree with this article at all. This has not been my experience. I don't quite know how to articulate this well, but there's something that I'd call a "complexity cliff" in the software business: if you want to compete in certain spaces, you need to build very complex software (even if the software, to the user, is easy to use). And while AI tools can assist you in the construction of this software, it ca…

I think there's truth in what you say (though if you are building something where you rely on blog posts you are probably doomed anyway).

But AI has huge value in gratuitously bulking out products in ways that are not economically feasible with hand coding.

As an example we are building a golf launch monitor and there is a UI where the golf club's path is rendered as it swings over the surface.

Without AI, the background would be a simple green #008000 rectangle.

With AI I can say "create a lifelike grass surface, viewed from above, here the individual blades of grass range from 2-4 mm wide and 10-14mm length, randomly distributed, and are densely enough placed that they entirely cover the surface, and shadows are cast from ...".

Basically stuff that makes your product stand out, but that you would never invest in putting a programmer onto. The net result is a bunch of complex math code, but it's stuff no human will ever need to understand or maintain.

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