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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

#91

Post by SoftTalker »

tylerg wrote: post #37
ozim wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. This blog entry has vibes of: „I am software developer so I am so smart I can do everything and I can definitely make revolutionary healthcare app”. Ignoring actual complexity of things, regulations and fact that there are areas that no one will take seriously some vibe coder and you really have to breath in out and swim with the right fish to be trusted and considered for making business with.

Umm... Complexity (especially with integrations) and regulations were two areas explicitly mentioned in the article as areas where you can still differentiate.

Also areas where large incumbents will keep upstarts out via regulatory capture.

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

#92

Post by samrus »

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.

Agree

I work on a vision based traffic monitoring system, and modelling the idea of traffic and events goes into so much complexity without a word of code written

These people are working on problems that have tutorials online and dont know that someone had to make all that

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

#93

Post by samrus »

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)

You should look into figma. Its one of the few marvels of software engineering made in recent times.

If you want to know how tough realtime editing is, try making a simple collaborative drawing tool or something. Or an online 2 player text adventure game

Theres a reason tutorials for those arent common

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

#95

Post by gatinsama »

sarchertech wrote: post #78
jatins wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would actually be interesting to see if there is some product hunt or Launch HN stats that prove/disprove this

There was an article that made it the front page of HN a few weeks ago that showed that there hasn’t been an explosion of new software.

I think you mean this one:

Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45120517

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

#96

Post by tracker1 »

kakacik wrote: post #90
Aurornis wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 haven't done anything with an UI for decade and a half. Backend integrations, data transformations, piping, transfer protocols and so on. Javascript hell avoided so far. No thank you

Just to interject one bit... I actually really like JS/TS for basic data transformations, piping and ETL type work in general. If you understand how type coercion works with JS it can be really powerful as a tool for these types of workloads.

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

#97

Post by tracker1 »

sfn42 wrote: post #84
bawolff wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's also worth noting that a crud app can be quite complex too. There can be a lot of complexity even if the core is simple. I suppose technically a database is just a CRUD app

Yeah, that's essentially what I mean when I say crud app. It's basically a web api written in something like C# or whatever you prefer, which receives HTTP requests and translates them into DB operations. CRUD and views basically. For this type of development you want the DB to handle basically all the heavy lifting, the trick is to design the DB schema well and have the web API send the right SQL to get exactly the…

I prefer to just use Dapper for most DB interactions with C#... EF (and ORM tooling in general) can come with a lot of gotchas that simply understanding the SQL you are generating can go a long way to avoid.

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

#98

Post by bodhi_mind »

Aurornis wrote: post #22
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…

> 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) I recognized something similar when I first started interviewing candidates. I try to interview promising resumes even if they don't have the perfect experience match. Something that becomes obvious when d…

Saying everything is a CRUD app is a reflection on the level of abstraction a developer usually works in.

Someone who worked more in embedded systems may say something like “everything is ‘just’ a state machine.”

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

#99

Post by tracker1 »

sfn42 wrote: post #53
throwaway7783 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd say the multi-user aspects and level of scale add quite a lot of complexity in to the mix.

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

#100

Post by tracker1 »

karmakaze wrote: post #50

Buying a vibe coded app is like buying something that looks like what you want from AliExpress. There's a small chance it might be good enough for your needs and you get a good deal. I might buy some small thing there that I don't care much about, or take a chance if I can't find anything close anywhere else. But for things I do care about I'll go through curated channels to filter out the fluff.

Or you pay $39 for what is supposed to be a hand tool, but is something the size of an earing that gets delivered.
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