5 ms·

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

138 points by grahac 1y ago

SCHiM 1y ago
> Your company can scream to anyone that listens that all the competition is AI SLOP, but when hundreds of companies are pitching the same solution, your one voice will get lost. If you cannot out compete "AI SLOP" on merit over time (uptime? accuracy? dataloss?), then the AI SLOP is not actually sloppy... If your runway runs out before you can prove your merit over that timeframe, but you are convinced that the AI is slop, then you should ship the slop first and pivot onec you get $$ but before you get overwhelmed with tech depth. Personally, I love that I can finally out compete companies with reams of developer teams. Unlike many posters here, I was limited by the time (and mental space) it takes to do the actual writing.
- dmbche 1y ago
  What company did you outcompete
- Tade0 1y ago
  Your comment encourages me to make an AI SLOP version of a product I had in mind.
- contagiousflow 1y ago
  But you're not just trying to out compete one AI slop, you must compete with ALL of them. And over time the AI slop to thoughtful company ratio is only going to increase
- hkon 1y ago
  I don't think it matters for developers. They compete in the short term.
- bee_rider 1y ago
  It certainly seems possible that AI slop could be flawed in some major ways while still competing well in the market: security is usually invisible to users until it isn’t, similar uptime and bugs, accessibility can be ignored if you don’t mind being an unethical person. Then again this is also often a flaw with human-generated slop, so it is hard to say what any of this really means.
  - HappyPanacea 1y ago
    > accessibility can be ignored How good are AI-assisted accessibility tools now? Is the poison also the cure here?
- pyrale 1y ago
  I guess the point is that startups are dead because scaling up becomes harder, doesn’t mean that organic growth is harder. In fact, the potential ways forward offered by the article are not really dependent on VC funding.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
constantcrying 1y ago
The honest reading of this is that everyone is able to deliver "good enough" and caring has become worthless.
- acephal 1y ago
  Yes, this is why the biggest winner of LLMs is off-shoring
andrewmcwatters 1y ago
Bullshit. Practically an AI slop article itself. The rest of us actually building products know reality is different because we’re intimately familiar with our competitors and their limitations. Copying and playing catch up was possible before AI. I really wish we could downvote submissions like this. It adds nothing of meaning to the discussion of the subtleties of competitive product development.
- grahac 1y ago
  Sorry. This is totally not AI slop. AI-edited for grammar, but human-created. What industry are you building in? And have you been building in it a while or is it a new startup?
  - DenisM 1y ago
    On a tangent, I sometimes avoid correcting typos and awkward expressions because it adds non-ai signal. I do t intentionally add any, but I let them be.
    - grahac 1y ago
      I like that this is a meta comment :)
  - cloverich 1y ago
    I think this puts the onus in the wrong direction. I _love_ LLM coding and write probably 70% of my code that way. But having seen its (current) limits, and building a few toy apps myself, I'd love to see examples of successful, complex products that are mostly vibe coded. Until I see that, I'll continue to believe the current crop of LLM is best suited for building prototypes, helping get initial ideas shipped, and helping speed up very experienced developers working in well trodden ground (i.e. mostly CRUD in popular languages / frameworks), because that's what most peoples experience is (at best - many here wouldn't be nearly as generous as my takes).
    - grahac 1y ago
continuational 1y ago
So where are all the successful AI slop products?
- WesolyKubeczek 1y ago
  It's not so much about AI slop being successful, it's about non-slop being drowned in slop so much its voice can't be heard.
gsaines 1y ago
This confirms what I've been discovering. I wrote about the details here: https://www.georgesaines.com/blog/2025/9/8/why-is-b2c-user-acquisition-broken https://www.georgesaines.com/blog/2025/9/8/why-is-b2c-user-a... Maybe it's just that the AI noise has been cranked to 11, but it sure feels like there's something fundamentally different from building and selling software today vs the last time I was building new products back in 2015. A decade is a long time, but it didn't feel nearly so weird even as recently as 2021 / 2022. That makes me think it's the AI slop noise, but maybe I'm incorrect.
- redmattred 1y ago
  I think you may be missing the mark on your conclusions for why your products had difficulty acquiring paid users. People still pay for software, but for high stakes problems like finding a new job, managing your mental health, or caretaking an aging parent, etc. taking the leap on a not quite fully baked product offering seems unrealistic. Also with Skritter you used a completely different customer acquisition strategy. Longform blog content + SEO is a way different beast than SEM.
  - gsaines 1y ago
    Thanks for engaging with this. I'm not trying to troll or be sarcastic. Could well be the case that painted door testing just doesn't work on B2C. What I learned on Skritter and CodeCombat is that if you have a couple of years to devote full time to building, it's almost always possible to power through bad channel / market fit with good product and build a small company. The problem is that it's not a very good idea to invest in that way if you both like money and can hold down a corporate job (not saying everyone meets these two criteria BTW). The 4 steps to epiphany is outdated, and The Mom Test is great if you have existing deep industry expertise and credibility. If you lack either, though, it's really not obvious how anyone tests product ideas without 12+ months of investment.
advisedwang 1y ago
> 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 Office, Gmail, Workday, Jira, EPIC, Salesforce, WebKit, Mint, etc etc but it doesn't seem to be happening.
- Eric_WVGG 1y ago
  You're right. The iOS app store would currently be flooded with newcomers in niche spaces — workout apps, notes, reminders, etc. And games, my god, there would be vibed clones of every game imaginable. It's simply not happening.
  - bad_haircut72 1y ago
    Because writing code hasnt been the bottleneck for success on the app store in probably a decade, its all how to game algorithms / find someone with the power to boost your app
    - hobs 1y ago
      And the same is true for almost all those names the GP posted - they are big because of network effects - most people dont have time to evaluate the "quality" of software. In the long term the "quality" of software can be extremely variable, so mostly people just hitch their wagons to existing tools because if everyone else is doing it, it must make sense.
  - wyre 1y ago
    Could Apple's $99 fee to get on the App Store be contributing to with holding this flood, or their app review process?
  - dpark 1y ago
    App Store is already flooded with competitors for every simple niche. That’s why this article makes no sense to me. The “Cambrian explosion” was the introduction of the app stores on phones. There are 2 million apps on Apple’s store.
spamizbad 1y ago
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 cannot be "vibe coded" or copied whole-cloth - complexity, scale, and reliability requirements are far too great and your potential customer base will not tolerate you fumbling around. You eventually reach a point where there are no blog posts or stackoverflow questions that walk you through step-by-step how to make this stuff happen. It's the kind of stuff that your company and maybe a few dozen others are trying to build - and of those few dozen, less than 10 are seeing actual success.
- grahac 1y ago
  If the software is doing complicated integrations, that may be a barrier as said in the article. And to be clear, this is people using teams of Claude Code agents (either Sonnet 4.5 or Sonnet 5 and 5.5 in the future). Reliability/scale can be mitigated with a combination of a senior engineer or two, AI Coding tools like the latest Claude Code and the right language and frameworks. (Depending on the scale of course) It no longer takes a team senior and mid-level engineers many months. The barriers even for that have been reduced. Completely agree that using Lovable, Bolt, etc aren't going to compete except as part of noise, but that's not what this article is saying.
- Aurornis 1y ago
  > 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 doing this is that many developers have only operated on relatively simple projects. They would repeat things like "Everything is just a CRUD app" or not understand that going from Python or JavaScript to C++ for embedded systems was more complicated than learning different syntax for your if blocks and for loops. The new variant of this is the software developer who has only worked on projects where getting to production is a matter of prompting an LLM continuously for a few months. Do this once and it feels like any problem can be solved the same way. These people are in for a shock when they stray from the common path and enter territory that isn't represented in the training data.
tylerrobinson 1y ago
This article is based on vibes just like the trends it hypothesizes. To pick just one claim: “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.” This is just pure speculation with no consideration of success or longevity. Big companies are going faster now? Where? Which ones? AI coding allows you to build prototypes quickly. All the reasons big companies are slow haven’t budged.
- rafaelero 1y ago
  Even with all these tools available, big companies would still be unable to compete in speed simply because in 99% of cases they don't have the required culture set in place.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- nonethewiser 1y ago
  >This is just pure speculation with no consideration of success or longevity. Big companies are going faster now? Where? Which ones? Yes but there is a more fundamental problem. The claim doesnt even make sense: >“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.” That was never the problem. I mean really, what is the implication of this? That big companies moved slowly because the developers were slow? What? No one thinks that, including the author (I imagine). Its from many layers of decision-making, risk aversion, bureaucracy, coordination across many teams, technical debt, internal politics, etc. This manifests as developers (and others) feeling slowed down by the weight of the company. Developes (and others) being relatively fast is precisely how we know the company is slow. So adding AI to the development workflow isn't going to speed anything up. There are too many other limiting factors.
  - mierz00 1y ago
    Whenever people ask me about my job, I always say it’s about 20% programming, 80% dealing with people and I’m not even in a leadership position. AI has not helped me at all in my corporate job, however on my start up it has been a game changer.
Dig1t 1y ago
I see this as a great thing. Venture Capital has been way too focused on software for a long time. It’s time for the money in tech to start flowing to other things like hardware, biotech, etc. we’ve seen this start happening for a little while already with companies like Anduril, but hopefully it will continue accelerating because of this.
- nradov 1y ago
  VC money never stopped flowing to biotech. It just doesn't get as much attention on HN. https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/fierce-biotech-fundraising-tracker-25 https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/fierce-biotech-fundrai...
kibwen 1y ago
> The result is a Cambrian explosion of software launches. This software... Is it in the room with us right now?
- mlinhares 1y ago
  People have been using chatgpt so much they completely disconnected from reality.
- jatins 1y ago
  Would actually be interesting to see if there is some product hunt or Launch HN stats that prove/disprove this
  - sarchertech 1y ago
    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.
    - gatinsama 1y ago
      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-why-ai-coding https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45120517 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45120517
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- Kiro 1y ago
  10% of all new websites are built with Lovable. I presume it's mostly broken shovelware but still an explosion of launches.
- lunias 1y ago
  I've seen the phrase, "Cambrian explosion" multiple times in the last week... it seems mostly to be used incorrectly.
danjl 1y ago
> Where a great idea in a space once had 5-10 competitors This article feels like it is targeted at drop shippers, competing on brand or maybe derivative features, rather than ideas.
rchaud 1y ago
Vibe coded apps might do OK in the $5/mo product space (assuming people pay that instead of staying in the free tier) but will fall apart for anything even resembling B2B. Buying business tools comes with the expectation of support and customization, the complexities of which become unmanageable when the lead developer is AI. You don't hear much about WYSIWYG app builder platforms like Bubble.io anymore because once the hype subsided, it was clear that it wasn't scalable beyond extremely limited CRUD functionality.
gitmagic 1y ago
> So what does work? I would add hardware products to that list. While they also have become somewhat easier and cheaper to create, the threshold is still much higher than for software and SaaS products.
- makeitdouble 1y ago
  An asterisk to this: SEA competition is way fiercer than people in the west give it credit for. There's more and more product that I wish existed, and one search in AliExpress returns me what I exactly wanted plus some more. 5 years ago the product just existed and quality was meh, nowadays it's pretty much on par. I had to recently look for camera gear, and the amount of adapters or quirky tripods is just great. Ulanzi for instance is a pretty well known brand at this point.
calmbonsai 1y ago
I completely disagree. "Be Different" was never an actual selling point. Being "simple and effective" for the user was and still is. While one can vibe-code simple CRUD at scale, one can not vibe-code the complex infrastructural coordination, security guardrails, and reliability externalities that maintain an effective business model at scale.
thenanyu 1y ago
there's this things that happens where blog boys love to say Big Important Stuff (that isn't true) and in the 1% chance that it becomes true they point back on it and say "I am a goddamned genius" and if it hits the 99% no one remembers their bullshit.
karmakaze 1y ago
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.
- tracker1 1y ago
  Or you pay $39 for what is supposed to be a hand tool, but is something the size of an earing that gets delivered.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
Joel_Mckay 1y ago
Most modern software are a type E-program : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lehman's_laws_of_software_evolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lehman's_laws_of_software_evol... AI Slop only has relevance to those that imagine meaning in syntactically correct nonsense. =3
carabiner 1y ago
The audience is everything bit is so true. In 2016, people paid $100k to dig a hole: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/11/27/503502142/people-donated-nearly-100-000-to-dig-a-big-pointless-hole-in-the-ground https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/11/27/503502142...
nonethewiser 1y ago
I guess the argument they make for why "Be Different" doesnt work any more is because people can use AI to copy it. I actually think AI just makes products converge onto whatever the AI averages out to. It would be interesting to see this explored further. It seems like being different might actually have an even more pronounced effect now (for good or bad).
keiferski 1y ago
At some point, the idea of a verified, trustworthy review platform will need to make a comeback. The easier it is to make a software product, the harder it will be to differentiate between what’s good and what’s hastily assembled.
- ErigmolCt 1y ago
  When hundreds of tools look polished but behave inconsistently, trust becomes the differentiator
nachox999 1y ago
maybe 'Being different' for building products means doing physical products in 2025
roncesvalles 1y ago
>The result is a Cambrian explosion of software launches. Citation needed. There was a HN post a few weeks ago (I've lost it since) that said there isn't actually a measurable increase in App Store submissions and other such metrics to indicate that more software applications are being launched, in the last few years. Also, in my view one of the most overlooked moats that incumbent software companies have is product quality. You can't upset Uber and Lyft primarily because you don't have the resources/skills to build an app of that quality (and your VC doesn't trust you can build one even given the resources). It's not due to business dev, marketing or "network effect" reasons; a lot of drivers tag-team both Uber and Lyft anyway, it doesn't cost them anything to onboard into a 3rd app even if it initially yields them 1 passenger a week.
Animats 1y ago
Would someone please name a few products in this space, where there's a glut of vibe-coded apps? Thanks.
- WA 1y ago
  Not names, but categories: Habit trackers, period calendars, journaling apps, calorie trackers, workout tracking apps, symptom trackers, budget planning apps, tax/tip calculators, meditation apps, productivity timers, recipe collection apps, affirmation / inspiring quotes apps, SaaS boilerplates, social media scheduling tools, AI chat bot, AI wrappers for all of the above. You'll find hundreds of apps for every single keyword. But on the other hand, it's still a winner takes all market, so the top 1-5 per category make ~95% of revenue. Edit: To clarify, imho these categories have been popular forever, because that's what every new indie dev thinks about first when they have a "great" idea. They're not necessarily tied to vibe coding and would've been released even without AI.
  - thomashabets2 1y ago
    There are a billion copies of simple apps. As you say, this is not new. We already had a cambrian explosion of flashlight apps and GPS apps. What is the article talking about?
SeeManDo 1y ago
The first sentence in this article made it unreadable as it contained "red ocean" tldr; typical corporate software development babblespeak slop
jiveturkey 1y ago
It's quite hilarious to see the top comment thread is the "punch is just a punch" (or now: bell curve meme) unfolding in real time.
autonomousErwin 1y ago
I'm becoming more convinced that this kind of rhetoric is usually peddled by individuals who haven't actually built anything notable (granted, that's most of us). If all you're doing is using AI to build products, by definition, you're gravitating to the mean. The AI doesn't care about a delightful product, it cares about satisfying its objective function and the deeper you go the more the two will diverge simply because building a good product is really complex and there are many many paths in the decision maze.
mfdupuis 1y ago
> The best way to avoid the red ocean is to build for an obscure and complex niche. This seems like the counter-argument... You need to build something incredibly different. You need to message differently, you need to distribute differently. If the argument is that convincing the world that you're different is harder than ever I buy that. So much fluff and noise out there that it's harder than ever to break through that noise and cut through the skepticism. But for that, it's more important than ever to be different.
- abnercoimbre 1y ago
  Are you working towards this? What examples do you have in mind? (I agree with your thesis btw)
ghc 1y ago
I think this is meant to be satire, but it's subtle enough that it went over a lot of heads here. Well, that or I'm reading too much into it, but... Everything the author said was just as true pre-GPT. He's imparting basic business knowledge under the guise of "oh, now that there's this AI thing, you can't just build it have users show up."

138 points by grahac 1y ago

> Your company can scream to anyone that listens that all the competition is AI SLOP, but when hundreds of companies are pitching the same solution, your one voice will get lost. If you cannot out compete "AI SLOP" on merit over time (uptime? accuracy? dataloss?), then the AI SLOP is not actually sloppy... If your runway runs out before you can prove your merit over that timeframe, but you are convinced that the AI is slop, then you should ship the slop first and pivot onec you get $$ but before you get overwhelmed with tech depth. Personally, I love that I can finally out compete companies with reams of developer teams. Unlike many posters here, I was limited by the time (and mental space) it takes to do the actual writing.

dmbche 1y ago
What company did you outcompete
Tade0 1y ago
Your comment encourages me to make an AI SLOP version of a product I had in mind.
contagiousflow 1y ago
But you're not just trying to out compete one AI slop, you must compete with ALL of them. And over time the AI slop to thoughtful company ratio is only going to increase
hkon 1y ago
I don't think it matters for developers. They compete in the short term.
bee_rider 1y ago
It certainly seems possible that AI slop could be flawed in some major ways while still competing well in the market: security is usually invisible to users until it isn’t, similar uptime and bugs, accessibility can be ignored if you don’t mind being an unethical person. Then again this is also often a flaw with human-generated slop, so it is hard to say what any of this really means.
- HappyPanacea 1y ago
  > accessibility can be ignored How good are AI-assisted accessibility tools now? Is the poison also the cure here?
pyrale 1y ago
I guess the point is that startups are dead because scaling up becomes harder, doesn’t mean that organic growth is harder. In fact, the potential ways forward offered by the article are not really dependent on VC funding.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

constantcrying 1y ago

The honest reading of this is that everyone is able to deliver "good enough" and caring has become worthless.

acephal 1y ago
Yes, this is why the biggest winner of LLMs is off-shoring

andrewmcwatters 1y ago

Bullshit. Practically an AI slop article itself. The rest of us actually building products know reality is different because we’re intimately familiar with our competitors and their limitations. Copying and playing catch up was possible before AI. I really wish we could downvote submissions like this. It adds nothing of meaning to the discussion of the subtleties of competitive product development.

grahac 1y ago
Sorry. This is totally not AI slop. AI-edited for grammar, but human-created. What industry are you building in? And have you been building in it a while or is it a new startup?
- DenisM 1y ago
  On a tangent, I sometimes avoid correcting typos and awkward expressions because it adds non-ai signal. I do t intentionally add any, but I let them be.
  - grahac 1y ago
    I like that this is a meta comment :)
- cloverich 1y ago
  I think this puts the onus in the wrong direction. I _love_ LLM coding and write probably 70% of my code that way. But having seen its (current) limits, and building a few toy apps myself, I'd love to see examples of successful, complex products that are mostly vibe coded. Until I see that, I'll continue to believe the current crop of LLM is best suited for building prototypes, helping get initial ideas shipped, and helping speed up very experienced developers working in well trodden ground (i.e. mostly CRUD in popular languages / frameworks), because that's what most peoples experience is (at best - many here wouldn't be nearly as generous as my takes).
  - grahac 1y ago

continuational 1y ago

So where are all the successful AI slop products?

WesolyKubeczek 1y ago
It's not so much about AI slop being successful, it's about non-slop being drowned in slop so much its voice can't be heard.

gsaines 1y ago

This confirms what I've been discovering. I wrote about the details here: https://www.georgesaines.com/blog/2025/9/8/why-is-b2c-user-acquisition-broken https://www.georgesaines.com/blog/2025/9/8/why-is-b2c-user-a... Maybe it's just that the AI noise has been cranked to 11, but it sure feels like there's something fundamentally different from building and selling software today vs the last time I was building new products back in 2015. A decade is a long time, but it didn't feel nearly so weird even as recently as 2021 / 2022. That makes me think it's the AI slop noise, but maybe I'm incorrect.

redmattred 1y ago
I think you may be missing the mark on your conclusions for why your products had difficulty acquiring paid users. People still pay for software, but for high stakes problems like finding a new job, managing your mental health, or caretaking an aging parent, etc. taking the leap on a not quite fully baked product offering seems unrealistic. Also with Skritter you used a completely different customer acquisition strategy. Longform blog content + SEO is a way different beast than SEM.
- gsaines 1y ago
  Thanks for engaging with this. I'm not trying to troll or be sarcastic. Could well be the case that painted door testing just doesn't work on B2C. What I learned on Skritter and CodeCombat is that if you have a couple of years to devote full time to building, it's almost always possible to power through bad channel / market fit with good product and build a small company. The problem is that it's not a very good idea to invest in that way if you both like money and can hold down a corporate job (not saying everyone meets these two criteria BTW). The 4 steps to epiphany is outdated, and The Mom Test is great if you have existing deep industry expertise and credibility. If you lack either, though, it's really not obvious how anyone tests product ideas without 12+ months of investment.

advisedwang 1y ago

> 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 Office, Gmail, Workday, Jira, EPIC, Salesforce, WebKit, Mint, etc etc but it doesn't seem to be happening.

Eric_WVGG 1y ago
You're right. The iOS app store would currently be flooded with newcomers in niche spaces — workout apps, notes, reminders, etc. And games, my god, there would be vibed clones of every game imaginable. It's simply not happening.
- bad_haircut72 1y ago
  Because writing code hasnt been the bottleneck for success on the app store in probably a decade, its all how to game algorithms / find someone with the power to boost your app
  - hobs 1y ago
    And the same is true for almost all those names the GP posted - they are big because of network effects - most people dont have time to evaluate the "quality" of software. In the long term the "quality" of software can be extremely variable, so mostly people just hitch their wagons to existing tools because if everyone else is doing it, it must make sense.
- wyre 1y ago
  Could Apple's $99 fee to get on the App Store be contributing to with holding this flood, or their app review process?
- dpark 1y ago
  App Store is already flooded with competitors for every simple niche. That’s why this article makes no sense to me. The “Cambrian explosion” was the introduction of the app stores on phones. There are 2 million apps on Apple’s store.

spamizbad 1y ago

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 cannot be "vibe coded" or copied whole-cloth - complexity, scale, and reliability requirements are far too great and your potential customer base will not tolerate you fumbling around. You eventually reach a point where there are no blog posts or stackoverflow questions that walk you through step-by-step how to make this stuff happen. It's the kind of stuff that your company and maybe a few dozen others are trying to build - and of those few dozen, less than 10 are seeing actual success.

grahac 1y ago
If the software is doing complicated integrations, that may be a barrier as said in the article. And to be clear, this is people using teams of Claude Code agents (either Sonnet 4.5 or Sonnet 5 and 5.5 in the future). Reliability/scale can be mitigated with a combination of a senior engineer or two, AI Coding tools like the latest Claude Code and the right language and frameworks. (Depending on the scale of course) It no longer takes a team senior and mid-level engineers many months. The barriers even for that have been reduced. Completely agree that using Lovable, Bolt, etc aren't going to compete except as part of noise, but that's not what this article is saying.
Aurornis 1y ago
> 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 doing this is that many developers have only operated on relatively simple projects. They would repeat things like "Everything is just a CRUD app" or not understand that going from Python or JavaScript to C++ for embedded systems was more complicated than learning different syntax for your if blocks and for loops. The new variant of this is the software developer who has only worked on projects where getting to production is a matter of prompting an LLM continuously for a few months. Do this once and it feels like any problem can be solved the same way. These people are in for a shock when they stray from the common path and enter territory that isn't represented in the training data.

tylerrobinson 1y ago

This article is based on vibes just like the trends it hypothesizes. To pick just one claim: “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.” This is just pure speculation with no consideration of success or longevity. Big companies are going faster now? Where? Which ones? AI coding allows you to build prototypes quickly. All the reasons big companies are slow haven’t budged.

rafaelero 1y ago
Even with all these tools available, big companies would still be unable to compete in speed simply because in 99% of cases they don't have the required culture set in place.
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nonethewiser 1y ago
>This is just pure speculation with no consideration of success or longevity. Big companies are going faster now? Where? Which ones? Yes but there is a more fundamental problem. The claim doesnt even make sense: >“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.” That was never the problem. I mean really, what is the implication of this? That big companies moved slowly because the developers were slow? What? No one thinks that, including the author (I imagine). Its from many layers of decision-making, risk aversion, bureaucracy, coordination across many teams, technical debt, internal politics, etc. This manifests as developers (and others) feeling slowed down by the weight of the company. Developes (and others) being relatively fast is precisely how we know the company is slow. So adding AI to the development workflow isn't going to speed anything up. There are too many other limiting factors.
- mierz00 1y ago
  Whenever people ask me about my job, I always say it’s about 20% programming, 80% dealing with people and I’m not even in a leadership position. AI has not helped me at all in my corporate job, however on my start up it has been a game changer.

Dig1t 1y ago

I see this as a great thing. Venture Capital has been way too focused on software for a long time. It’s time for the money in tech to start flowing to other things like hardware, biotech, etc. we’ve seen this start happening for a little while already with companies like Anduril, but hopefully it will continue accelerating because of this.

nradov 1y ago
VC money never stopped flowing to biotech. It just doesn't get as much attention on HN. https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/fierce-biotech-fundraising-tracker-25 https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/fierce-biotech-fundrai...

kibwen 1y ago

> The result is a Cambrian explosion of software launches. This software... Is it in the room with us right now?

mlinhares 1y ago
People have been using chatgpt so much they completely disconnected from reality.
jatins 1y ago
Would actually be interesting to see if there is some product hunt or Launch HN stats that prove/disprove this
- sarchertech 1y ago
  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.
  - gatinsama 1y ago
    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-why-ai-coding https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45120517 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45120517
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Kiro 1y ago
10% of all new websites are built with Lovable. I presume it's mostly broken shovelware but still an explosion of launches.
lunias 1y ago
I've seen the phrase, "Cambrian explosion" multiple times in the last week... it seems mostly to be used incorrectly.

danjl 1y ago

> Where a great idea in a space once had 5-10 competitors This article feels like it is targeted at drop shippers, competing on brand or maybe derivative features, rather than ideas.

rchaud 1y ago

Vibe coded apps might do OK in the $5/mo product space (assuming people pay that instead of staying in the free tier) but will fall apart for anything even resembling B2B. Buying business tools comes with the expectation of support and customization, the complexities of which become unmanageable when the lead developer is AI. You don't hear much about WYSIWYG app builder platforms like Bubble.io anymore because once the hype subsided, it was clear that it wasn't scalable beyond extremely limited CRUD functionality.

gitmagic 1y ago

> So what does work? I would add hardware products to that list. While they also have become somewhat easier and cheaper to create, the threshold is still much higher than for software and SaaS products.

makeitdouble 1y ago
An asterisk to this: SEA competition is way fiercer than people in the west give it credit for. There's more and more product that I wish existed, and one search in AliExpress returns me what I exactly wanted plus some more. 5 years ago the product just existed and quality was meh, nowadays it's pretty much on par. I had to recently look for camera gear, and the amount of adapters or quirky tripods is just great. Ulanzi for instance is a pretty well known brand at this point.

calmbonsai 1y ago

I completely disagree. "Be Different" was never an actual selling point. Being "simple and effective" for the user was and still is. While one can vibe-code simple CRUD at scale, one can not vibe-code the complex infrastructural coordination, security guardrails, and reliability externalities that maintain an effective business model at scale.

thenanyu 1y ago

there's this things that happens where blog boys love to say Big Important Stuff (that isn't true) and in the 1% chance that it becomes true they point back on it and say "I am a goddamned genius" and if it hits the 99% no one remembers their bullshit.

karmakaze 1y ago

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.

tracker1 1y ago
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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Joel_Mckay 1y ago

Most modern software are a type E-program : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lehman's_laws_of_software_evolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lehman's_laws_of_software_evol... AI Slop only has relevance to those that imagine meaning in syntactically correct nonsense. =3

carabiner 1y ago

The audience is everything bit is so true. In 2016, people paid $100k to dig a hole: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/11/27/503502142/people-donated-nearly-100-000-to-dig-a-big-pointless-hole-in-the-ground https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/11/27/503502142...

nonethewiser 1y ago

I guess the argument they make for why "Be Different" doesnt work any more is because people can use AI to copy it. I actually think AI just makes products converge onto whatever the AI averages out to. It would be interesting to see this explored further. It seems like being different might actually have an even more pronounced effect now (for good or bad).

keiferski 1y ago

At some point, the idea of a verified, trustworthy review platform will need to make a comeback. The easier it is to make a software product, the harder it will be to differentiate between what’s good and what’s hastily assembled.

ErigmolCt 1y ago
When hundreds of tools look polished but behave inconsistently, trust becomes the differentiator

nachox999 1y ago

maybe 'Being different' for building products means doing physical products in 2025

roncesvalles 1y ago

>The result is a Cambrian explosion of software launches. Citation needed. There was a HN post a few weeks ago (I've lost it since) that said there isn't actually a measurable increase in App Store submissions and other such metrics to indicate that more software applications are being launched, in the last few years. Also, in my view one of the most overlooked moats that incumbent software companies have is product quality. You can't upset Uber and Lyft primarily because you don't have the resources/skills to build an app of that quality (and your VC doesn't trust you can build one even given the resources). It's not due to business dev, marketing or "network effect" reasons; a lot of drivers tag-team both Uber and Lyft anyway, it doesn't cost them anything to onboard into a 3rd app even if it initially yields them 1 passenger a week.

Animats 1y ago

Would someone please name a few products in this space, where there's a glut of vibe-coded apps? Thanks.

WA 1y ago
Not names, but categories: Habit trackers, period calendars, journaling apps, calorie trackers, workout tracking apps, symptom trackers, budget planning apps, tax/tip calculators, meditation apps, productivity timers, recipe collection apps, affirmation / inspiring quotes apps, SaaS boilerplates, social media scheduling tools, AI chat bot, AI wrappers for all of the above. You'll find hundreds of apps for every single keyword. But on the other hand, it's still a winner takes all market, so the top 1-5 per category make ~95% of revenue. Edit: To clarify, imho these categories have been popular forever, because that's what every new indie dev thinks about first when they have a "great" idea. They're not necessarily tied to vibe coding and would've been released even without AI.
- thomashabets2 1y ago
  There are a billion copies of simple apps. As you say, this is not new. We already had a cambrian explosion of flashlight apps and GPS apps. What is the article talking about?

SeeManDo 1y ago

The first sentence in this article made it unreadable as it contained "red ocean" tldr; typical corporate software development babblespeak slop

jiveturkey 1y ago

It's quite hilarious to see the top comment thread is the "punch is just a punch" (or now: bell curve meme) unfolding in real time.

autonomousErwin 1y ago

I'm becoming more convinced that this kind of rhetoric is usually peddled by individuals who haven't actually built anything notable (granted, that's most of us). If all you're doing is using AI to build products, by definition, you're gravitating to the mean. The AI doesn't care about a delightful product, it cares about satisfying its objective function and the deeper you go the more the two will diverge simply because building a good product is really complex and there are many many paths in the decision maze.

mfdupuis 1y ago

> The best way to avoid the red ocean is to build for an obscure and complex niche. This seems like the counter-argument... You need to build something incredibly different. You need to message differently, you need to distribute differently. If the argument is that convincing the world that you're different is harder than ever I buy that. So much fluff and noise out there that it's harder than ever to break through that noise and cut through the skepticism. But for that, it's more important than ever to be different.

abnercoimbre 1y ago
Are you working towards this? What examples do you have in mind? (I agree with your thesis btw)

ghc 1y ago

I think this is meant to be satire, but it's subtle enough that it went over a lot of heads here. Well, that or I'm reading too much into it, but... Everything the author said was just as true pre-GPT. He's imparting basic business knowledge under the guise of "oh, now that there's this AI thing, you can't just build it have users show up."