> And they're better than you at SEO
Based on Louis Rossmann's rant 3 days ago [1], it seems Gemini has got you covered on that front too.
The Sideprocalypse
61–70 of 132 posts
Re: The Sideprocalypse
#62I got out of software and into physical products a couple of years ago. I wish I could say I was prescient, but honestly it's just so much easier to sell physical items. Margins are worse, but selling is easier. If you've got a thing you can be sure that someone somewhere will give you money for it.
Kind of looks like vibecoding is doing to SaaS what Chinese mass manufacturing did to physical products two decades ago. Only the marketing and distribution matter in a world where it's very easy for others to clone something and sell it at a lower price.
> Only the marketing and distribution matter in a world where it's very easy for others to clone something and sell it at a lower price
Great point. AI remixes and rips-off existing code-bases in a manner that is impossible to attribute copyright violation making it legal. ie, Perfect cloning. In a world where cloning is legal, the engineering cost of product drops to zero. That is where software production could be headed. What remains is marketing/distribution/sales.
There will remain niches solving "hard problems" which cant be cloned, but those will be rare. Hard problems are where a lot of engineering complexity resides, involving interacting components for which there are no examples in training datasets to copy from. For example, a complex distributed system or hardware with multiple nuanced tradeoffs.
Re: The Sideprocalypse
#63> 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 lost or corrupted, who is responsible? Not AI. Quality matters.
I keep hearing this one phrase about code quality again and again. Sure, no one cares about the dumb little linter failing your builds, but when code quality comes to responsibility, it goes hand in hand. It’s either that or your all working on hobby projects.
Re: The Sideprocalypse
#64I got out of software and into physical products a couple of years ago. I wish I could say I was prescient, but honestly it's just so much easier to sell physical items. Margins are worse, but selling is easier. If you've got a thing you can be sure that someone somewhere will give you money for it.
Kind of looks like vibecoding is doing to SaaS what Chinese mass manufacturing did to physical products two decades ago. Only the marketing and distribution matter in a world where it's very easy for others to clone something and sell it at a lower price.
> Only the marketing and distribution matter
Don't forget liability & compliance :)
Re: The Sideprocalypse
#65I 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…
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?
Re: The Sideprocalypse
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just like the tide of fast fashion caused people to seek out local-sewn clothes made from high-quality materials, right? Right? Quality isn’t a differentiator if the market is saturated with indistinguishable garbage. Everything is made in sweatshops out of the cheapest plastic available, and I don’t see why software isn’t next in line.
Actually: There’s been a noticeable uptick in the last decade+ of better-made clothing for shoppers who are open to paying somewhat higher prices. Not boutique prices, but also more expensive than H&M. For a long time the stereotypical “young professional” look was tied closely to just a few mainstream retailers (Banana Republic for example), but over the last ~15 years a wider range of smaller or more specialized br…
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Re: The Sideprocalypse
#67I think what is left is that understanding pain points and knowing what problems needs solved is more important now than ever. If anyone can create a product now then the one who knows what product to actually create is the winner. And who might this be? Well it might just be the people who spent the last 10 years speaking to customers, building a SaaS. They have 10 years of taking to customers finding out what to bu…
> 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.
Re: The Sideprocalypse
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mainly, a friendly and simple UI. Feedly looks like it hasn't gotten much love recently. Inoreader is too cluttered for my taste, though it has a feature set I can't match any time soon. I have plenty of other ideas for what to build on top of it: offering an SDK and APIs so you can vibe-code the UI you want, a built-in podcast listener, using news from aggregated feeds to build a personalized AI feed. But the first…
I'm using (self-hosted) Nextcloud News, what would your... service? Tool? Product? ... offer beyond what NN does? It is quite simple as well, offers an uncluttered interface, keeps my subscriptions as private as RSS subscriptions can be. I suspect you're targeting a different market from the one catered by self-hosted services like Nextcloud?
I am not familiar with Nextcloud News. In the first version, it probably won't offer much for you, besides having a catalog of feeds, the ability to search them, and subscribe with one click, which is usually not offered by non-cloud RSS readers.
For people who do not want to use self-hosted services (which generally includes me), it offers simplicity. Open the page, choose Google as auth provider, confirm, and you will get a friendly start page. Click on 'follow' on one of the feeds, and you can start reading immediately. The UI is more like Facebook or X, so basically, you just need to scroll. Either in a feed of your choice, or all your feeds. It's designed to work well on small mobile screens, tablets, and desktops, with great keyboard support on the latter. Larger screens use two or three columns.
Re: The Sideprocalypse
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ot to the article, but I just feel I need to strongly recommend The Hierarchy by James Islington. It's pretty much the same idea as the above titles but omg it's so well written. Absolute must read!
oh thanks, I'll check that out! BTW, The Magicians TV series might be the best thing SyFy ever made. It's got so much heart, it's properly funny, it's creative, it's epic despite a shoestring budget, and the characters stay with you long after you finish.
Agreed I loved it! Right up until they turned it into a musical for some reason. Me and my wife call it "doing a magicians" when a TV show suddenly starts singing for no reason.
But yeah up until that point it was great!
Re: The Sideprocalypse
#70I 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…
Exactly. If someone pitched you a book about a young kid who goes to a school of magic to learn how to use his powers, makes friends and enemies and ultimately battles evil, you might shoot down their dreams because "some cocaine-addled sales critter" already had that idea, and she's called J K Rowling and she's worth billions and shes so successful she can't even be cancelled because she makes so much money. And yet…
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 university, and is perhaps closer in lineage to Buffy or Charmed than to Harry Potter - it has more of that focus on the interpersonal relationships between characters, and a more complex morality.
The better comparison is probably with Percy Jackson, which isn't quite the same concept (being an American series, where boarding school fiction isn't quite as well-known a genre) but matches the ages, sense of discovery, and relationships to authority figures far better.
This isn't directly relevant to your point, but I really find it wild that people see two stories that have magic and a school in them and go "look, it's the same thing", especially when the genres and tropes of the two books are so utterly different. For that matter, Harry Potter is also nothing like Earthsea, which is another common reference point. I wonder if Americans just don't have as much experience with boarding school fiction to be able to categorise Harry Potter as a series?