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What kind of barrier/moat/network effects/etc would prevent someone with a Claude Code subscription from replicating whatever "innovation" is so uniquely valuab
by toraway 8mo ago
What kind of barrier/moat/network effects/etc would prevent someone with a Claude Code subscription from replicating whatever "innovation" is so uniquely valuable here?
It's somewhat strange to regularly read HN threads confidently asserting that the cost of software is trending towards zero and software engineering as a profession is dead, but also that an AI dev tool that basically hooks onto Git/Claude Code/terminal session history is worth multiples of $60+ million dollars.
- elif 8mo agoThe same moat that git had on svn, a better mental paradigm over the same fundamental system, more suited to how SWE changed over a decade.
- _heimdall 8mo agogit didn't succeed based on the mental model. It got a foot in the door with better tooling and developer experience then blew the door open when GitHub found a way to productize it.
- delusional 8mo agoGit doesn't have a moat. Git isn't commercial software, and doesn't need to strong arm you into accepting bad license terms.
- dasil003 8mo agoI wouldn’t characterize it as a moat exactly. svn/cvs just had a braindead data model. Linus started git with a fundamentally better one. I definitely see the potential of AI-native version control, it will take a bit more to convince me this is a similar step-level improvement though.
- YetAnotherNick 8mo ago> HN threads confidently asserting I have never seen any thread that unanimously asserts this. Even if they do, having HN/reddit asserting something as evidence is wrong way to look at things.
- toraway 8mo ago> if you can't see the value in this, I don't know what to tell you Okay, but I'm legitimately unclear on the argument for $60M - $300M value here, given it isn't articulated at all.
- N_Lens 8mo agoHN is full of AI agents hype posts. I am yet to see legitimate and functional agent orchestration solving real problems, whether it is scale or velocity.
- YetAnotherNick 8mo agoHN is full of anti hype posts as well. If I were to estimate there are more posts of anti hype than of hype.
- elif 8mo agoYou're confused. If you hype AI here you lose karma.
- AlexeyBelov 8mo agoThe top comment here is one by straydusk. Their profile says: data expert, AI explorer.
- jameslk 8mo ago> What kind of barrier/moat/network effects/etc would prevent someone with a Claude Code subscription from replicating whatever "innovation" is so uniquely valuable here? You are correct, that isn't the moat. Writing the software is the easy part
- jwbron 8mo ago[dead]
- auggierose 8mo agoYou cannot test your software without Claude Code?
- jwbron 8mo agoThe software collects the network traffic of distributed Claude code instances.
- LeafItAlone 8mo ago>what's the value of paying someone for a product like this vs just building it myself? Same thing it’s always been. Convenience. Including maintenance costs. AI tools have lowered the bar significantly on some things, so SaaS offerings will need to be better, but I don’t want to reinvent every wheel. I want to build the thing I want to build, not the things to build that. Just like I go to restaurants instead of making every meal myself.
- jwbron 8mo agoRight, but paying for food at a restaurant doesn't get me any closer to owning a restaurant. If promises are delivered on for these agentic coding platforms (which I do believe in), it seems the most reasonable path forward is to use those platforms to build your own platform.
- psandor 8mo agoIf they had wanted a moat for this part of their offering, they wouldn’t have open-sourced it. This is not their offering, this is a tool to raise interest.
- ryanjshaw 8mo agoThis comment feels word-for-word the legendary DropBox critique on HN.
- jacquesm 8mo agoIt was only legendary because DropBox hit it out of the park. In hindsight it is easy to see this. And it's the default HN response to anything.
- AndrewKemendo 8mo agoA broken forum is right twice a day
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- cush 8mo agoThere's no way this company is just a few git and claude hooks with a CLI. They're definitely working on a SASS - something else that isn't open source that this primitive is the basis of. Like a GitHub for agent code
- raincole 8mo agoGitHub doesn't have a "moat" either besides network effect. Just like most SaaS. And it was sold to Microsoft at $7B.
- sarchertech 8mo agoWell that was in the era of free money for one. And the primary value was in all the human made content for AI training. I’m sure there’d be some value to extract from the agent produced code in this thing, but I doubt it’s anywhere near as much.
- pjmlp 8mo agoMostly because "Microsoft <3 FOSS" phase, and what better manouver than owning Github and dump Codeplex? Look at Xamarin, almost everything that they had is now gone in modern .NET.
- pipes 8mo agoI sort of agree with you. But the sentiment reminds me of the hacker news dropbox launch response. Which was pretty much "pfft! I could set all this up myself with a NAS xyz". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
- everforward 8mo agoThere’s a difference between “this concept has value” and “a company can capture that value”. I do see value in this, but like you I think it’s too trivial to implement to capture the value unless they can get some kind of lead on a model that can consume these artifacts more effectively. It feels like something Anthropic will have in Claude Code in a month.