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The only moat left is money?
- saubeidl 8mo agoCapitalism working as intended, shifting more and more resources to the already-rich. A handful of people doesn't own most of the country by accident.
- andsoitis 8mo agoWealth is not a zero sum game. There’s more wealth in the world today than 50 years ago, 500 years ago, 5000 years ago.
- lm28469 8mo agoThat's why we cured hunger in 2012, cured poverty in 2017, fixed healthcare in 2020, working as intended indeed
- mothballed 8mo agoThere are a lot of zero-sum things that are being chased by money, and maybe even the most sought after ones. Like political power, sexual partners, and chasing the top % of credentials for your offspring to position them with better access to zero sum things.
- exceptione 8mo agoA free market is not a zero sum game indeed. Monopolies turn it into a zero sum game. To keep a market free, you have to regulate it. Wealth concentration is dangerous for democracy, the markets and society.
- mothballed 8mo agoI think you have it backwards. Regulation is what enables monopolies. There is no monopoly for any of the major industries like cow herding or cellular telephone service in Somalia despite almost no effective regulation. There is not even a monopoly of pirates despite them willing to use violence to try and enforce a monopoly. If you look at the history of the US, for instance, railroad regulation was brought forth largely by the railroads because they found it impossible to form a cartel to keep up prices (due to "secret" discounting) so instead they created regulation that outlawed the kind of discounting that breaks cartels apart. A similar thing happened in banking where the banks asked for a central bank to cartelize the interest ranks to stabilize their oligopoly. And the same in pharma industry -- big pharma loves high regulatory barriers because it keeps competitors out. A large portion of the regulation in the US was brought about as regulatory capture by corporations to increase the monopolizing effects and destroy the free market.
- exceptione 8mo agoThis is not a personal opinion of mine, it is pretty much established science. I think only think-tank backed sources would claim the opposite. One should understand the phenomenon as a common pattern of dynamics in unregulated markets. Not every snapshot will showcase an end state of monopolist dominated markets. You bring up a valid point though. Regulatory capture is a indeed a weapon in the hands of anti-competitive players to prevent incumbents. Good policy usually applies differently to different strata: the small players are exempt from certain rules, or have to deal with less stringent ones than big players do, to prevent killing the market. At the risk of sounding like an llm: it is not just about policy, it is about good policy.
- pixl97 8mo ago> major industries like cow herding The food industry is filled with regional monopolies. > cellular telephone service in Somalia Ah yes, excellent example, all you have to do is completely destabilize your nation and you too can have free market capitalism. Investors love monopolies, they fix prices and profits so their investments are not at risk. Investors hate too much competition, it lowers profits and puts their investments at risk. Free markets need investors. Investors hate free markets. I hope you see the problem here.
- saubeidl 8mo agoWealth is intently relative. Absolute growth of wealth is just inflation.
- bccdee 8mo agoPower is a zero-sum game. We all live in the same space, exist in the same media ecosystem, and have the same number of hours in the day. The media consumed by the public, the structure of our cities, the investments we make in science, the sources we use for energy, the laws we pass and the way they are interpreted, stewardship of our environment, and the degree to which our tax money is used to drop bombs on civilians are ALL zero-sum. I am so sick of the pretense that GDP growth means inequality is somehow illusory. Yes, TVs used to be expensive and now they are cheap. Big whoop.
- showerst 8mo agoThis AI boom is just a hyper-version of previous tech booms (web 1.0, VC, crypto, etc). You have an enormous number of people who just want to get in and build something, but the products they are pumping out don't serve anyone's need or solve anyone's problem. The moat isn't money for out-marketing your idea that 750 other people are building, it's having a good idea that solves a problem that nobody else is solving well.
- billconan 8mo agohow to prevent others from building a copycat using ai?
- Bnjoroge 8mo agoYou cant. You can only focus on building your own product and making it durable and just much better
- g947o 8mo agoYou don't.
- Daishiman 8mo agoYou work on niches that have very specific requirements that you can only derive from having a good relationship with customers and so you attend to those needs faster than competitors who are out of the loop.
- billconan 8mo ago> you attend to those needs faster than competitors I wonder if this type of hustling can be called moat building?
- ativzzz 8mo agoThe same way you prevented this previously. Copying successful products is nothing new, AI just makes it easier. Marketing, lawyers, good customer support, creating relationships with customers.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- ge96 8mo agoI hope this is true, I'm trying to make a multi-agent orchestration thing that looks at grain futures, satellite imagery, news, etc... to trade crypto. I'll probably lose but yeah. Maybe the guy doing their 9-5 can run many agents to make them money while they work their day job. Is that a thing, you get hired at some company then you use an agent to work for you, deep fake video calls, cursor code... that would be crazy. Get another job and split your time between agents for minor corrections.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- clay_the_ripper 8mo agoDoing hard things has always been, and always will be, hard. Building a static HTML page was “hard” in the 90’s. It took actual skills. Any piece that gets easier automatically opens up more hard avenues to tackle. no one is willing to pay you for easy.
- elliotbnvl 8mo agoAhhh that lines up with a thought I had recently: you get out of life what you put into it. I am beginning to believe that there's some kind of metaphysical rule here that is true everywhere, all the time. So maybe the solution is: find the hardest stuff to do and do the crap out of it.
- elliotbnvl 8mo agoThe followup thought / concern that occurs: what if the number of hard things is going down?
- Barbing 8mo agoI would have imagined it's going up while the percentage of people who are capable of doing the hardest things is going down. Not that I know much of anything.
- pixl97 8mo agoWe probably need to split apart things like "hard" and "both hard and useful". Just because you're doing something hard, doesn't mean anyone wants it. Just because you're doing something useful doesn't mean you're going to get paid much for it. Just because something is hard and useful doesn't mean someone is going to pay you for the cost of the effort.
- AntiDyatlov 8mo agoI really don't think that's true, you can put a lot of effort into a wrongheaded strategy, netting you no or bad results. Conversely, a good strategy can get you good results without that much effort.
- tquinn35 8mo agoI disagree. I think creativity is still a valid moat. You still need to build good products. Its like a restaurant anyone with some money can open a restaurant but you need to has the creativity to make a good one.
- sowbug 8mo agoCreativity is a kind of labor. Like all labor, it never earns pay more than once.
- esseph 8mo agoThen what are acting and music royalties?
- sowbug 8mo agoThey're the exceptions that prove the rule. For every Taylor Swift, there are probably tens of thousands of songwriters who have never earned a dollar from their creations. The vast majority of valuable copyrighted/patented creations are works for hire, which is compensated just like other labor. Or the creator signs or licenses the rights away to a publisher and maybe receives contractual royalties, rarely more than the initial advance. (An alternative answer is "the pay for your creativity is a capital asset. That asset can earn royalties. Usually it doesn't.")
- AstroBen 8mo ago
- sebstefan 8mo ago>Every morning a few thousand people wake up and ship something. A tool, a SaaS, a newsletter, an app that does the thing the other app does but slightly differently. They post it on Hacker News. Nobody clicks. >This is not new. What's new is the scale. An AI can wake up (or whatever it does at 3am) and ship twelve of these before breakfast. That's fun, I'm sure if somebody actually checked that and graphed it, you would not be able to pinpoint when AI starts on the graph
- francisofascii 8mo agoHere is the Show HN Graph. I think it is obvious when AI starts. https://petegoldsmith.com/2026/01/26/2026-01-26-show-hn-trends/ https://petegoldsmith.com/2026/01/26/2026-01-26-show-hn-tren...
- sebstefan 8mo agoWoah I stand corrected. Not really when AI starts but when it starts getting useful for sure.
- ossa-ma 8mo ago> The value of human thinking is going down. Wrong. Creativity, innovation, intuition, taste - all forms of thought solely inherent to humans, all going up.
- elliotbnvl 8mo agoI used to agree completely, and a part of me still does. But the part of me that's scared that this isn't true is getting louder and louder. I'm a novelist and software engineer. The value of one of those skills is trending to zero. I'm not seeing much to suggest, in the face of the hockey stick of doom, that the other isn't.
- 52-6F-62 8mo agoDepends. Are you still measuring value in dollars?
- elliotbnvl 8mo agoI got mouths to feed, so... yeah.
- 52-6F-62 8mo agoIndeed. But the line of discussion was about the value of human thought.
- ativzzz 8mo agoIf our human thoughts can't be translated to food and shelter, then we'll pick up guns and go steal the food and shelter from someone else.
- 52-6F-62 8mo agoNoted. Sometimes what needs translated to food and shelter isn't your thoughts, however. If you nurture and value thoughts regardless, this point will be understandable.
- AstroBen 8mo agoPeople here saying creativity or having a good idea is the moat You know that if anything you build gets traction, it'll be cloned by 100 people, right?
- atomicnumber3 8mo ago"The value of human thinking is going down." No! I fundamentally reject this. The value of unoriginal thinking has gone down. Thinking which is quotidian and pedestrian has become even more worthless than it already was. The value of true, original human thinking has gone up even higher than it ever has been. Do we think no new companies will ever succeed now? Of course not. Who, then, will succeed? It will be innovators and original thinkers and those with excellent taste. Why did stripe make big inroads in developer spaces even if they are in an ultra competitive low margin market? They had excellent taste in developer ergonomics. They won big not because they coded well or fast (though I know pc thinks their speed is a big factor, I think he is mostly incorrect on that) but because they had an actual sense of originality and propriety to their approach! And it resonated. So many other products are similar. You can massively disrupt a space simply by having an original angle on it that nobody else has had. Look at video games! Perhaps the best example of this is how utterly horribly AAA games have been doing, while indie hits produce instantly timeless entries. And soon this will be the ONLY thing that still differentiates. Artistic propriety, originality, and taste. (And, of course, the ever-elusive ability to actually execute that I also don't think LLMs will help with.)
- elliotbnvl 8mo agoThis is a compelling assertion. But who among us has truly original thoughts? How much new stuff can there be? If all the same-y stuff is losing value (but most stuff has value because it's FOUND not because it's unique) then isn't net value decreasing?
- bossyTeacher 8mo ago>The value of unoriginal thinking has gone down. Thinking which is quotidian and pedestrian has become even more worthless than it already was. Imagine American manufacturing industry workers saying the same thing of the (at the time) soon-to-be import only products. Original thoughts are valued more than non-original ones but maybe, the market doesn't require that many original thoughts to extract max profit...
- 999900000999 8mo agoYou need money to explore ideas. Or an absurd amount of skill. Say Amy is a great NodeJS and front end programer. She can work on her own projects , but her kids can't eat hope and dreams. Or she can get a job at SoulCrusher Solutions trying to maximum advertising revenue.
- imWildCat 8mo agoI saw Peter Steinberger whose creativity is huge and made a difference. Yeah you can say he's already rich. But I also saw many people like him including the author of Flask. Also the author of XcodeBuildMcp, tailwindcss
- cynicalsecurity 8mo agoDoom and gloom nonsense.
- norbert515 8mo agoWhile building has becomes way cheaper (and probably is going to become even cheaper in the future), is building something exceptional really that much cheaper now? AI has certainly made it so much simpler to just pump "something" out (slop), but did it actually make building something that went through hundreds and thousands of iterations significantly cheaper? I also like to think AI is really raising the bar for everybody. In the past, you could easily get away launching a product with a crappy landing page and a couple of bugs here and there, is that still the case? Don't people just expect a perfect landing page at this point (when's the last time anybody specifically talked/ thought about responsiveness?) paired with a flawless onboarding etc.?
- mtam 8mo agoI disagree. Customer relationships, taste, creativity, tenacity, execution excellence, industry relevance, reputation, non-public data, etc... are all hard earned or intrinsic capabilities that matter a lot more than feature development speed/cost.
- rvz 8mo agoSo this is what the VCs were screaming about this bullshit about "abundance". Abundance of copy cats that cannot make any money as prices are raced to zero.
- rothific 8mo ago> The people winning mostly had a head start. Or they have money. Usually both. It feels like that doesn't it? But, as one counter-point, OpenClaw. :) Btw I did a deep-dive into AI moats last week and wrote a blog post about it. Relationships were most likely the strongest moat from my research - but definitely having a large amount of money in reserves helps. https://www.cjroth.com/blog/2026-02-11-moats-in-the-age-of-ai https://www.cjroth.com/blog/2026-02-11-moats-in-the-age-of-a...
- dzink 8mo agoThe well is drying. You have less money available for hustling and less small players with money. With layoffs happening everywhere you have more people with ambition and time on their hands, but less of them can afford big expenses or major risks. The hype machine currently pushing for agents is selling agents ability to do automated marketing. However the bigger companies know better than to create giant security holes and the small players are either not technically skilled, or will balk at the huge per-use fees for the good models, or will be drowned out because of low quality cheap model output.
- ge96 8mo agoI had this conspiratorial thought, would a model really just spit out some money-making scheme, or would it be blocked. Made me think to run the model myself on my own GPUs but still a black box, at least you control your prompts/data flow locally.
- bell-cot 8mo agoI'm no big fan of economists - but if some type of business is seen as highly desirable to be in, and has minimal barriers to entry, then the market will soon be saturated. Expecting otherwise is (at best) wishful thinking.
- maccam912 8mo agoI liked the part about attention being the scarce resource now. Everyone is competing for your attention. But then I see a world in which openclaw is managing emails for people and searching the internet for them and shopping in their behalf. How long until we start seeing advertising specifically targeting AI instead of humans?
- lp4v4n 8mo agoThere is an old word for it: saturation. And let's be honest that's not a new thing. It's been already a long time since you had a revolutionary idea in the shower only to google it(or use an LLM nowadays) and discover that there are already eight different apps that do what you were thinking.
- nsxwolf 8mo agoWelp guess I’m done then. Kind of nice to know I don’t have to blame myself anymore.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- AJRF 8mo ago> When creation was hard, skill was the differentiator I don't think people use things because they are hard to make
- dudewhocodes 8mo agoHave people naturally started sounding like an LLM when they write and talk? To me this article reads not fully human.
- boxedemp 8mo agoThere's multiple things happening here. People are using LLMs to write, for sure. It's only natural to absorb what you consume, so as people read more LLM generated content they can unintentionally emit it. And then there's classic confirmation bias; a lot of people wrote in dry academic prose.
- kldavis4 8mo agolooks like the real tension here is that "money" and "reach" aren't quite the same moat though. I think the post kind of conflates them. existing audience is the actual barrier - money can buy ads but it can't buy trust or distribution, not quickly anyway the gravitational threshold thing is real ngl. I've seen the same dynamic in product launches - identical quality, completely different outcomes based on whether you're already above the line or not. that part holds up not sure the "creativity is the moat" counterargument fully lands either. yeah taste matters, but AstroBen's point is valid - anything that gets traction gets cloned basically immediately now. so creativity gets you first mover advantage for like... a week? maybe the actual moat is just community? people who already trust you before you ship. which is a form of reach I guess, so kind of proves the point
- prmph 8mo agoSo where are the AI clones of MS Office, JetBrains IDEs, Whatsapp, Obsidian, Sublime Text, Claude Code, etc. so far?
- cyrusradfar 8mo agoI appreciate the conversation the post initiates. Nevertheless, by counter-example -- OpenClaw's creator was just recruited by people with more capital than countries. If they could "re-produce" it with their capital, they would've preferred that. Whatever he has, is still a moat. What that is, is debatable. Is it brand? Is it his creativity? Is it trust/autheticity? A vision? Ownership of a repo or leadership of that community? All those are perceived moats (or risks) by these folks that tried to scoop him up.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- plagiarist 8mo agoIt was 100% the brand. The creativity may be a bonus for OpenAI. They saw a shitload of people buying Mac Minis specifically for this software. I don't find a single counter-example compelling. I guess as evidence that "only moat" is somewhat hyperbolic? But to counter the counter-example, what would have happened if he did not join? OpenAI can just write and release their own version. They can then do the typical loss-leader and advertising tricks that OpenClaw cannot. The "simply write and release" is what used to be a barrier.
- tencentshill 8mo agoHe was competition. They can't have people running their own self-hosted LLMs on their own hardware, and realizing it AI be useful without a subscription!
- jerf 8mo agoLuck has always been a solution to reach. It doesn't scale, though. In the case of OpenClaw I think you're looking at a fairly pure iteration of luck there, too. It isn't even a case of "I prepared for years until luck finally knocked" or any variant like that. It was just luck. If that is the only counterexample I'd say it doesn't disprove the point, if anything it just strengthens it. Nobody can build a business plan based on "I plan to be as lucky as OpenClaw".
- 8mo ago
- supermdguy 8mo agoI think there's still value in building quality products, but AI makes it easy to build something that appears good but doesn't actually work that well. It's very difficult to communicate the thought and intentionality that went into a well-designed product in a way that stands out amongst the noise.
- turnsout 8mo agoDifficulty is the only true moat. [Astronaut: always has been] Current examples: esoteric calculations that are not public knowledge; historical data that you collected and someone else didn't; valuable proprietary data; having good taste; having insider knowledge of a niche industry; making physical things; attracting an audience. Some things that were recently difficult are now easy, but general perception has not caught up. That means there's arbitrage—you can charge the old prices for creating a web app, but execute it in a day. But this arbitrage will not last forever; we will see downward price pressure on anything that is newly easy. So my advice is: take advantage now.
- abeppu 8mo agoI think the other moat is access to non-public data. If you can train, measure, or make decisions based on specific data that the vibecoder trying to clone you can't get, you can keep ahead.
- autoconfig 8mo ago> When creation was hard, skill was the differentiator: you had to actually be good to make something worth showing. Now the barrier is near zero, so you need reach. Reach costs money or it costs years. Probably both. Creation has progressively been getting easier since the invention of the computer, it is not a new phenomena. This naturally pushes the boundary on what needs to be delivered in order to find paying customers. In other words, creation still is "hard" if you want to succeed. > I launched something last week. 14 people signed up — no ads, just a couple of posts. 14 real people who didn't have to. That number is tiny and it felt like something. Then I sat down to think about what it would take to grow it and I couldn't look at that math for very long. This applies to 90+% of founders that have ever launched something. The hard part comes from continuing to push forward when you experience this (which you will over and over). It sounds like the author expects that what was hard suddenly should be easy.
- apsurd 8mo agosounds like the author is discovering business. I didn't read the article, but yes, going from 0-1,1-10 is really hard and really rewarding. And it got easier with the Internet. Going from 10-1k and 1k-1M is a different ball-game. Always was. The dream of running my own company got me to learn programming. 20 years later I'm an employee at a company still dreaming of running my own company. But now I can realize that reality and dreams are not the same and that's ok. As in, I probably really don't want to run my own company. We'll see =P
- MichaelRo 8mo ago>> The dream of running my own company got me to learn programming. 20 years later I'm an employee at a company still dreaming of running my own company. But now I can realize that reality and dreams are not the same and that's ok. As in, I probably really don't want to run my own company. We'll see =P To me having one own's company was just a means to the end: making enough money to live comfortably without the need to get a job ever again for the rest of my life. I too learned programming as a means to achieve that end but eventually realized that I don't need a company if I can short-circuit the path to money. By switching to the right domain - finance, where what I learn might be eventually put to use directly by investing capital into profitable trading strategies. Back to OP's article, if there's a domain where money as a moat is not a problem, that's definitely finance: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-of-the-worlds-money-and-markets-in-one-visualization-2022/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-of-the-worlds-money-and... I work in this domain since almost 20 years and can tell you, noone's gonna risk a billion dollars on crap vibe coded by AI. I wrote before, I don't know what crack these AI people are smoking but when there's real stakes at play, they don't play around with toys. And AI in programming is a toy. The unlikely triumph of "Can I haz teh codez?" CTRL+C / CTRL+V "prompt experts" (mocking it, lol) strategy on Stack Overflow, along with the people who employ it. I'm not worried about MY particular future in this industry. I'm not worried that AI is gonna replace me, us, or write anything significant here at all in the foreseeable future until it fucking evolves into AGI which is somewhere 5000 years from now, optimistically. The party's gotta come to an end really soon along with the figures on how much money AI makes versus it's real utility - which is, simply stated, "a toy". Not necessary but here's my mood while writing this comment: - listening to this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EWqTym2cQU&list=RD6EWqTym2cQU&start_radio=1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EWqTym2cQU&list=RD6EWqTym2c...
- Rapzid 8mo ago> The value of human thinking is going down. You probably knew this. The corollary is rarely mentioned: the value of a human eyeball is going up, because there are only so many of them and there are now infinite things that want to be looked at. Hey, so I'm thinking about getting my car washed.. This article reads as overly hyperbolic; cashing in on the AI hysteria. AI derangement.
- elliotbnvl 8mo agoI am not cashing in on AI hysteria. I am AI hysterical. lol. Kinda joking but kinda not. How do you have chill while the world is crashing down? I’m young so that’s probably part of it, only ~12 years into my career and haven’t experienced too many world defining shifts.
- fullStackOasis 8mo agoI like the idea of you https://joinkith.com/ https://joinkith.com/ but I don't see how it can possibly work. These are the issues: There are people who are sick of social media and will never be convinced to join up again. They've already left the building and aren't looking for anything else. I'm not quite there, but almost. Other people are using established social media simply because that's where their people and orgs publish. I am eternally frustrated when my local cafe uses Insta or FB for their "web presence", but I'm not going to be the one to convince them to use something else. I hate that my local rock climbing partner finder group is located on FB, but what can I do about it? I also think it sucks that there are thousands of people in that group - I soon realized that this group simply doesn't work for me, since rock climbing requires high trust and I can't trust thousands of people. Many people resist the idea of signing up for yet another social media account, esp when none of their people/orgs are already there. For example, I've sometimes thought of starting a Heylo group for local rock climbers to find partners - this might actually help me find more climbing partners. But I've never tried it. I just don't think people will join. The barrier to entry is (1) install app (2) create login (3) use app. SFAICT no one wants to do this if they're already on FB and already are a member of the group there. Even people that I know manage finding partners with email lists (gag). Can you imagine how much higher the barrier to entry would be if adding (4) you have to pay a monthly fee? I do like the idea of "only allowed to invite someone that you know in meatspace" but how is this enforced? I also recognize that requiring payment could help increase the trust level, and I recognize that members have to pay in some way (ads, fees, sponsors, privacy violations) in order to support the platform.
- rkilanh 8mo agoAnd the super rich now even switch to other people's money. A fund makes investments in SpaceX and Anthropic available: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/retail-investors-access-spacex-anthropic-192720896.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/retail-investors-access-space... It would be hilarious if the final "IPOs" will be in SPAC form with the help of SPAC king Chamath.
- sd9 8mo agoNot discrediting the post, which I think is worthwhile and generally pointing at the right thing, however: > I launched something last week. 14 people signed up — no ads, just a couple of posts. 14 real people who didn't have to. That number is tiny and it felt like something. Then I sat down to think about what it would take to grow it and I couldn't look at that math for very long. They launched a paid social network, with no content available without joining a waitlist. This would not have worked 20 years ago either. Bootstrapping the content for a _free_ social network is incredibly hard. But a paid social network where the only differentiating factor is that users are humans, and there is no activity in the network? Not going to work.
- fuzzfactor 8mo ago>as someone who's been building for the internet for 25+ years, this is the first time that i've ever felt like it's very difficult to make money building new things. I understand it was already the trend 25 years ago, but way before that you really weren't expected to be able to make money building things for the internet. The internet itself was simply not designed for that to begin with. Building things where the internet was an element was already getting bad enough. The force from within to return to "normal" baseline may yield, but probably never go away. >The people winning mostly had a head start. Or they have money. Usually both. As said every millennium since institutions and finance have existed. >Show HN, the one place the internet was supposed to notice if you built something real. No no no no no. This is for people who want to share with a much more limited audience than the entire internet. HN readers did notice a lot of times especially when the project is amazing, OTOH sometimes the latest little side project from somebody well-known, or random interest could be shown. Naturally the most popular things are free since that's inherently the most compatible with the internet anyway. But real marketing and promotion is supposed to be far away from this site. If you're trying to sell to "the internet" you've got the whole rest of the internet for that. HN is not supposed to be enough to be widely noticed at all, if you've got something that's worth marketing, YC is there the whole time and might be able to get you making the most of the internet and then some. Especially if you need a moat of money. But why do so many people think the only business plan is to prepare to be sieged by a small enough horde which can be deterred by a moat anyway? >if you're not already moving, you might never take off. >The cost of acting like it isn't true when it is: permanent. As I first mentioned, the internet being in place so people can make money off of it is the thing that just wasn't true to begin with, lots of people had some pretty good workarounds for a while though. I've been watching businesses from startups to large corporations lock in high costs the exact same way for decades before the internet ever came around.
- ctoth 8mo agoNo, it's imagination, same as it ever was. Software to most of this discussion is a web app with a landing page, a pricing tier, and MRR. That's it. The frame is "product," the metric is "traction," and the canvas is "things people pay $9/month for." But software is instructions that make matter and energy do things they wouldn't otherwise do. It's the most general-purpose tool humans have ever built. So let's actually think about what's underbuilt: The whole damn physical world is barely instrumented. Agricultural systems, water infrastructure, building envelopes, soil health, local microclimates. There are farmers making irrigation decisions on vibes. Municipal water systems with no real-time leak detection. Buildings hemorrhaging energy because nobody's modeled their thermal behavior. These aren't apps. They're control systems, and they're mostly missing. Fabrication and manufacturing are being transformed by CNC/3D printing but the software for designing things to be manufactured is still terrible (and inaccessible!). Generative design that accounts for material properties, toolpath constraints, assembly sequences. CAM software is where word processors were in 1985. Scientific instruments. A spectrometer is mostly software now. So is a radio telescope. So is a seismograph. Every goddamn thing can be a thermometer (accidentaly!) The gap between "data sensor exists" and "useful scientific instrument" is almost entirely software, and most of that software is written by grad students in unmaintained Python. Preservation. Some people are doing this with datamuseum.dk. But expand it: there are entire musical traditions, oral histories, craft techniques, ecological knowledge systems that exist in living memory and nowhere else. Software for capturing, encoding, and transmitting that knowledge barely exists. Not "an app for recording grandma," but formal knowledge representation of, say, how a master boatbuilder in Kerala selects wood by sound and flex. Prosthetics and rehabilitation. This one is big for me personally! The gap between what a modern prosthetic limb could do with good software and what it actually does is enormous. Why are my eyeballs still chunks of plastic? Same for cognitive rehabilitation tools, speech therapy systems, physical therapy feedback loops. Governance and collective decision-making. Every organization above 20 people is making decisions with tools that are basically "email plus meetings plus a shared doc." Formal deliberation systems, preference aggregation, transparent resource allocation. These are hard computer science problems that nobody's building because they don't have obvious MRR. Tools for thought that aren't note-taking apps with backlinks. Actual reasoning aids. Argument mapping. Assumption tracking. Decision support that makes your thinking better rather than your typing faster. The entire domain of formal verification applied to things that matter. Bridges, medical devices, voting systems, financial settlement. We have figured out how to prove some? software correct. We almost never do it for the software where correctness actually matters. And that's me, one person, in five minutes. Every domain expert in the world is sitting on a pile of unsolved problems that software could address, and most of them have never talked to a programmer because programmers are busy building the next task management app. Go talk to a nurse, a farmer, a building inspector, a food bank logistics coordinator. Ask them what's broken. I promise the answer isn't "nothing" and I promise nobody on ProductHunt is solving it. PG wrote essays about this ffs! "Make something people want." "Live in the future and build what's missing." That advice didn't stop being true because AI made the building part cheaper. If anything it's more true now, because the building is almost free, which means the noticing is almost the entire game. You are skipping the noticing and going straight to the building, then wondering why nobody cares. The number of hard things isn't going down. This thread can't see them because it's not looking at the world. It's looking at ProductHunt. To make things concrete, in the last week I have been working on my open source speech synthesizer, rebuilding Klatt's ideas from the 1980 paper up to modern emotion/prosody work. Did you know the whole field went nuts for neural approaches in ~2018 and there's a whole shitload of interesting papers just sitting out there that nobody has ever implemented in a real system? Did you know that a bunch of people did research into what different human emotions sound like and now I can make a depressed speech synthesizer, or, scarily, one which sounds more honest to people?
- speak_plainly 8mo agoIn Republic I, Socrates distinguishes the art of medicine from the art of wage-earning. One is about the work; the other is about getting paid. Historically, the craft was the primary goal, and the money was an extrinsic side effect. Today, the money-making side has staged a hostile takeover. The attention conundrum is just a symptom of a deeper financialization. Multi-billion dollar companies have turned profit into a data-driven science – analytically turning the screws on every script, product, and interaction to optimize for extraction. This is the destruction of the art of making things. The real issue is that you cannot compete with an entity that has no respect for the art. When a platform replaces the integrity of the work with the logic of a metric, the independent creator is no longer an underdog – they are functionally excluded. You can be the best at any art, but in a system that prioritizes sheer extraction over excellence, your craft effectively ceases to exist.
- stuartaxelowen 8mo agoIt seems that we have forgotten how to distinguish between value and profit, and now celebrate the latter instead of the former. Currency enables ever broader and more niche markets, but the financialization of everything is the Faustian bargain; we gained niche hobbies but lost our souls?
- fuzzfactor 8mo agoNot only value and profit, but also assets, cash flow and debt. Altogether in terms of currency, very hard to distinguish in the most meaningful way. It's too easy for the real non-dollar value element to slip through the cracks, and even end up completely gone, in a system where true value itself is not prominent enough to be recognized as the source of highest growth, like it often happens so many times but has been forgotten. Success can spoil you too. Once you've got so much more cash than value at any one time because you've been leveraging a productive opportunity well, and taking profits aside regularly, if you're not careful the currency amount alone can seem like enough on its own. Uh oh.
- dzonga 8mo agoSaturation of channels due to slop content - doesn't mean that created stuff is not scarce there's more problems then ever before that need empathetic humans to solve - are you up for the challenge - or you're doing a quick cash grab due to people using machine gun approaches - spray & pray - we haven't forgotten how scalable human touch is -- yeah at first - you've to do things the manual way - reach out have a conversation - but slowly word spreads around without you spending money on ads | content etc
- elliotbnvl 8mo agoYeah 100% there's more legit stuff than ever, but there's also just more stuff than ever. So it becomes a discoverability problem. To be honest this is what is discouraging me from writing more novels right now. The only reason I'm even considering it is because the love of the craft is hooked firmly in my gullet. Were it not for that I'd drop writing faster than a lava potato...
- zhyder 8mo ago"the value of a human eyeball" / attention is and always will be the limited resource. But I wish the way the economy worked wasn't that attention is sold for money, which makes money the moat, and sets a floor on how low-priced things can get for customers too. Is this really the best the economy can do? Or is it possible to have a fair LLM-based search engine that matches customer need description with stated product descriptions from providers (while weighing customer reviews, etc)?
- thornewolf 8mo agoFor the comment from "Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning", the article author editorializes "One of the great benefits of AI tools, is they allow anyone to build stuff... even if they have no ideas or knowledge. One of the great drawbacks of AI tools, is they allow anyone to build stuff... even if they have no ideas or knowledge." into "One of the great benefits of AI tools is they allow anyone to build stuff, even if they have no ideas or knowledge. One of the great drawbacks is they allow anyone to build stuff." which removes the rhetorical effectiveness of the comment (and also breaks the promise of a quotation). I recommend that OP represents the source exactly. ____ I now see that this article contains multiple GPT-isms
- benatkin 8mo agoIt would be better if the article editorialized it thusly: > One of the great benefits as well as one of the great drawbacks of AI tools, is they allow anyone to build stuff... even if they have no ideas or knowledge. I'd paraphrase it with "said that" since the quotations indeed present as though verbatim.
- elliotbnvl 8mo agoOh good catch, fixed.
- charcircuit 8mo agoMoney is not a moat since you can buy money (debt) or sell equity for money. >The thing I launched last week is called Kith — a paid, invite-only social network Social networks already is an existing competitive space and making it both paid and invite only obviously will hurt its adoption. I wouldn't have been surprised if this failed to get users even if it was free and even if this was preLLM. A brand new social network doesn't truly solve users problems.
- runako 8mo agoThis is certainly one conclusion that could be drawn. Another conclusion could be that as building software gets easier (like it did for ex in the 90s and again in the 2010s), opportunities are created for new entrants to displace Bad Old Software. Those expensive Enterprise apps that everybody hates? Are absolutely begging to be replaced by something better for half the money. We still live in a world where most individuals own more compute power than most universities did in the '80s, yet the only sign of automation is useless push notifications. Data behind one pane of glass can't easily be moved to data behind a second pane of glass. Simple stuff like "move my Instacart shopping cart to Costco.com same-day" is a manual affair. This is a subset of the general problem that more apps has resulted in more data silos that are generally isolated, without APIs, without automation. There are zillions of problems out there for which people will pay money, but money chases the same 4-5 problems at a time. Just work on one of the other ones.
- silvestrov 8mo ago> as building software gets easier [...] new entrants to displace Bad Old Software This didn't happen for music. It is much easier to create/record music today than in the 70s and 80s, but the music created today is mostly boring AI music and not new exiting/inventing music.
- pixelmelt 8mo agoI've been enjoying smashing through those panes of glass with LLMs. Just spin up a browser, go and export all the requests to undocumented user endpoints to curl commands, specify what you want out of it and after a few minutes you have an api endpoint up and running!
- 2001zhaozhao 8mo agoIf you thought things were hard now just wait for the industrial-scale fully automatic fast-follow bots that will nearly-universally nuke the human-created original product to oblivion in a few years...
- derf_ 8mo agoThe way to tell if a business has a moat that I once learned was, "If someone gave you a billion dollars, could you go compete with that business and have a reasonable chance of winning." If the answer is yes, then the business has no moat. The numbers are bigger now, but I think the principle remains the same: money cannot be a moat.
- random3 8mo agoA moat is around something that exists, meant to protect it. You're describing something else, not a moat with your example. OP used moat correctly, creative effort around existing earned skill, brand, etc. To answer your question. Yes to a player already in a market with lack of funding, a billion dolars could be the necessary moat to win. Money was, is and likely will be a moat for a while. But as a proxy, it may not be enough as a moat. Scarce resources may require more than money— e.g. IP classes or, if you're China, ASML machines.
- senordevnyc 8mo agoI think the point is that capital alone is a pretty poor economic moat. If it works, it's probably only because the market opportunity actually isn't that great once you take everything into account. If the opportunity is good enough, the money is out there and your competitive advantage will disappear quickly.
- shimman 8mo agoI can't think of a single software company that has a moat then. Good rubric to have and makes sense.
- senordevnyc 8mo agoReally? I don't think you could come close to beating any of the major software or AI companies head-to-head with only a billion in capital.
- shimman 8mo ago
- lysace 8mo agoIt's like.. what happens when software becomes a solved problem? Like bricks for construction. There's not 50 million typically highly paid brick design engineers in the world.
- brandav 8mo agoUtilizing connections with influencers seems to be the most effective way to break through the noise now. Ironically, that's how it used to be before marketing and product development became so accessible.
- advisedwang 8mo agoIf someone has a problem they need solved: * Attention span won't stop them recognizing a solution * Numerous solutions won't stop them adopting one * That the developer put little effort into building that solution won't put them off. The real answer is of course that there's a lot of stuff that being built that doesn't solve people's problems people have, either because it targets a problem that doesn't really exist or because it fails to solve the problem it does target.
- AstroBen 8mo agoOf course people will buy software.. but the 80% margins we had of yesteryear won't be there The result of the barrier to entry being erased is that prices will also be driven to 0 as products are commoditized It's hardly worth going into a market when you're 1 of 1000 and profit margins are at 3% Any creativity you add, new spin you put on it, new features, innovation.. all that has negligible cost to copy I don't think we're quite there yet, but this is where it's quickly heading
- hoppp 8mo agoThis post was an Ad also for his paid social network, it did reach me because the message resonates with me as a builder but I don't want to sign up to a social network So the attention was there but not the conversion.
- carlosjobim 8mo agoIs the purpose of space exploration to build rockets? Or is the purpose to deliver things and people into orbit and to other worlds? Is the purpose of a computer program to use processing, network and memory? Or is it to handle and manipulate information to give results which are useful to people? Now the moat of having memorized intentionally convoluted and complicated programming languages has been taken away. Exactly like the printing press removed the monopoly on information which was held exclusively by priests and monks. When tools make a job easier, they open up new markets for people to do and sell things which were too costly to offer before. AI translation alone means that small businesses can open up several markets they didn't have any access to, broadening the number of potential customers immensely.
- seizethecheese 8mo agoThe definition of a moat is what cannot be bought.
- e10jc 8mo agoI really like this article, particularly the part about the gravitational threshold. My overall thoughts about launching products is that there will just be more products with smaller audiences, similar to how streaming broke down linear cable. As a software entrepreneur, this means going wider not deeper. Use your human skills to build relationships with people who have that gravitational pull. If you don’t have those relationships, go create them IRL. For context, I’ve founded and sold a social network to AOL, helped raise over $100m, and had 2 other acquisitions.
- elliotbnvl 8mo agoUm... can we talk? :D
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- jaco6 8mo ago[dead]
- SilverElfin 8mo agoI think this was already true but it is becoming a lot more obvious now and the effects of this problem are going to affect a lot more people as we see mass white collar worker unemployment. Some people think with lower costs to make software more software is possible. But you can try to get started building a product only to see an improved AI agent build out your idea cheaply, or a bigger company use capital to copy you and enter the same market, and so on. Also, individuals who are richer can take more risks - the loss of money is not existential for them. The only real fix is incredibly heavy taxation of income and wealth for the ultra rich individuals and ultra large companies. That is what will break through the money moat and create fair competition.
- moomin 8mo agoIt’s been true for some time. That moat has been getting shallower and shallower everywhere it isn’t inherited wealth. Not entirely shocking, large amounts of human history have been organised that way.
- egonschiele 8mo agoCoding agents are good, but once the complexity is high they're not good enough. Eventually your agent won't be able to make changes to your code base without introducing bugs with every change. In my experience, the agents aren't very good with abstractions yet, and no amount of testing can completely paper over that problem. So yes, the industry is changing dramatically and at a breathtaking rate, but I don't think money is the only moat left.
- nomel 8mo agoNot just complexity, but also anything requiring any actual ingenuity. It's impressive how "junior" it can be, with its (current) statistical shackles. Worse, if you flat tell it what to do, if your approach is too far into the statistical weeds, it'll flounder like crazy.
- kardashev8 8mo agowhat is an example?
- cryptonector 8mo agoJust tonight I was trying to get Claude Opus 4.6 to design a lock-less data structure, and it kept failing to solve problems which I kept then solving for it, but once presented with the solutions it was able to check them, and I think correctly so (that's not nothing!).
- charlie0 8mo agoKith looks interesting, but the main problem there is verifiability. How would it keep bad actors out? How does it verify posts by invitees aren't AI generated?
- aktenlage 8mo agoIt does sound interesting and I signed up for the wait list. But I actually don't like pure chronological order. It feels like I have to look at everything to find the good stuff. Here I probably won't miss out too much if I check the front page once a day.
- sampo 8mo ago> the value of a human eyeball is going up There must also be some value in advertising to the "eyeballs" of the AI? Even if they don't (yet) make that much decisions about spending, they do influence human decisions.
- Centigonal 8mo agoIt's the new SEO. Enterprise software vendors are already tailoring their marketing pages and docs to influence AI for when some VP asks their chatbot "which XYZ software should we consider buying?" This is something a coworker is facing at work as we try to leverage AI to speed up market discovery/tool selection work.
- pmontra 8mo ago> Creation used to be the scarce thing, the filter. Now attention is. Most of us are on the wrong side of that trade. "Wrong side" means that people on that side have to work harder to reach us. The terms of the trade did not change because creators are not starting to pay us to get our attention. Well, it happens sometimes: free trials, free tiers, coupons, etc. but it's a well established practice. The post contains a reference to "do more marketing".
- arrsingh 8mo agoThis is not new. When I started my first company in 2012 it was bootstrapped and getting anyone to pay attention to what I was building was almost impossible. I had to pound the pavement and meet people in person at coffee shops and pitch to get my first few users. Then when I raised from a16z and had some money in the bank it didn't get any easier. The money didn't help (maybe it wasn't enough). Ad spend or content marketing or paid channels were all hard regardless of the free vs paid. Maybe I just wasn't good at it. That was before AI and you had to manually pound the bits into place. Now with AI yes there are a lot of people shipping a lot of things but humans can tell when someone's put effort into something vs not and the time to traction is still as high as it always was. Someone should do some analysis on number of things that go "viral" or gain adoption quickly today vs 5 / 10 years ago. Getting traction has always been hard. Thats just business.
- japoneris 8mo agoI partly agree. Yes, the entry level is low. It helps me to gain time on my life, doing other things. But I do not believe that much that more people are going in. Most non coder people i know will not code a thing. Most bad student i got will not start to do side projects. So, yes people wanting to ship something ship more, but for the rest, there is still place.
- amelius 8mo agoThere should be more tax on capital because they are using it against us.
- arbuge 8mo agoBuilding was already not the main obstacle before AI. Distribution was, and remains so - more than ever.
- nickelpro 8mo ago> a paid, invite-only social network where every person is verified human and there's no algorithm This seems like an incredibly niche product that only a handful of people are interested in to begin with. It isn't an notable or surprising result that building it resulted in little interest from general audiences.
- jrecyclebin 8mo agoKind of ironic - the moat is money... At the same time, I see the appeal. I feel like 10% of the comments I read lately are "is this an AI response?" - would be nice to be free of that. Probably not possible tho.
- rfw300 8mo agoIt also strikes me as being in competition with, you know, a group chat.
- chasd00 8mo agoi was just about to say, what they're describing is an imessage group chat with your friends.
- vadepaysa 8mo agoOne thing I’ve noticed doing Show HNs recently: People are flooded by new projects and assume (rightly) that most are low-signal, so they don’t engage. Because there’s low engagement, new projects get even less visibility. That reinforces the belief that nothing interesting can be built anymore. I ship earlier now (often free and open source) to learn faster, but it doesn’t change the attention dynamics much. The bottleneck isn’t building. it’s distribution and who already has an audience. Now dont get me started on getting an audience. thats a whole different pain.
- arionhardison 8mo agoI commented this earlier and it was instantly downvoted for some reason, but I totally agree with both points; I also think they are intrinsically connected in many ways because using customer-development to understand and build an initial audience often helps identify distribution channels. Here are a few examples I have found 1) I made a product to help people manage their diets; crowded space so it was hard to find users, following Steve Blank's customer-development process I found that the product should have been made for Dietitians not for end users. This may have been obvious to most but it was but to me at the time. 2) I made a product for Medicare/Medicaid but it was hard to get my foot in the door to even be considered for any of the Gov. contracts, so following the same model again I found that if I used politicians that had made promises during their campaign that my product could help them to fulfill then I could use them as distribution channels. One thing I disagree with or don't understand is > ship earlier now (often free and open source) to learn faster, but it doesn’t change the attention dynamics much. I have found the opposite, it seems like the bar is much higher now and not even the boost in productivity that I have gotten from using AI has allowed me to ship secure/high quality products as fast as I would like to; perhaps I am just too insecure about my work but its all new I guess.
- colinnordin 8mo agoEveryone now have access to a tool that makes them nearly as powerful as only the most creative builders were before. But these new builders have a tool, they don’t suddenly have a newfound creativity. I think with time we will stop seeing what we consider AI slop, simply because we know it’s not worth sharing. Instead great creative people will share very impressive things that simply wasn’t possible to build before.
- scoofy 8mo agoSo, I really felt like more people should be reading Nassim Taleb's Incerto series of books. A lot of the issues that fall out of AI he dealt with in his books like ten years ago. He gives one the best pieces of advice I've ever heard: if you are going to do something for a living, make sure it is NOT scalable. If you do something that isn't really scalable, like being a welder or a tailor, then you only have to compete against the tailors in your neighborhood, and you can easily find a neighborhood that doesn't have a tailor. If you're building a scalable product, you'll always be competing against the best, most well funded, smartest people in the room. Everyone here has grown up in the birth of the internet -- a once in ever event -- where building something scalable was just there for the taking. That's never going to exist again basically.
- femiagbabiaka 8mo agoautomation makes every job scalable, no?
- pier25 8mo agocan you automate a tailor?
- Epa095 8mo agoIsn't tailors by and large already outcompeted by cheap new clothes?
- dolebirchwood 8mo agoA big point of seeing a tailor is getting yourself fitted for custom clothing that is specifically made just for you. As someone who's bought $200 off-the-rack suits and $2,000 tailor-made suits, there's a world of difference between the two, especially when you have an atypical body type. (Granted, to the main point, I still think a tailor could be automated in some distant future, but we'll need robots to perform physical interactions, not just software.)
- gorjusborg 8mo agoThese types of takes are getting really tiring. The game isn't over, just the metagame. I'm not saying I have the next metagame figured out, but AI doesn't magically solve all the worlds problems by existing. It likely even creates a new classes of problems. In such an environment there's going to be opportunity. Are the software shops and devs who were winning at churning out SaaS products going to be the best suited to this new environment? Maybe not, but adaptation wins over non-adaptation, something that has always been the case.
- johnleblanc 8mo agoAre you not concerned about getting a copyright strike from the fashion brand? https://kith.com/ https://kith.com/
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- chao- 8mo agoYour concern is valid, but you are misguided on a few details. I will inform you as best I can in the context of US intellectual property law. I am not a lawyer, but I have spent a lot of time adjacent to this stuff, and am not aware of a "copyright strike" as a legal concept. I assume you are borrowing this terminology from various platforms who have their own internal "three strikes" policy for user-created content that violates copyright. However, those policies are entirely for-and-within those ecosystems, and do not directly correlate to any legal notion of "copyright strike". If you violate the rights of someone's work, they send you a C&D and/or sue you, regardless of the platform's use of some "strike" system. That "someone's work" is key: Copyright covers the output of creative works: writing, art, photography, code, music, video production, et cetera. Copyright law would apply if social media Kith stole an image from fashion Kith's website. It would also apply if one was sent social media Kith the source code from fashion Kith's website, and social media Kith used it (I don't know why they would, but it would violate the copy rights of fashion Kith). The violation would be about the work, not the name. You referred to the brand name, which would be covered by Trademark law. Trademark law concerns itself with more than just the name, but also the design/logo, sound of the name when spoken, etc. Within that, there is a focus on the likelihood that the public would might confused and the degree to which one brand or another might be damaged by that confusion. This leads to (somewhat common) situations where there are two marks with the same name, but in different industries, because there is no risk of brand confusion. For example "Delta" is a trademark of an airline company, and "Delta" is also a trademark of a faucet company. They have different logos and products/services in different industries (the USPTO has 40-or-so categories), thus there is little risk of brand confusion. On the other hand, if two businesses have products/services in the same category, even a different name can be a Trademark violation if it (for example) sounds similar enough. Imagine a hypothetical hard drive manufacturer named "StoreTech". If you started a hard drive manufacturing company and named it "StorTek" it's very likely that StoreTech would pursue trademark action against you, even though the name is technically different! There is A LOT more to Trademark than just this, but these are some factors to keep in mind.
- yodon 8mo agoThe OP should read up on business strategy, probably starting with Porter's Five Forces. Hint: Money is a nice thing to have but it is very definitely not a moat. If a company is making above market returns and the only thing stopping a potential competitor from competing with them (aka the company's so-called "moat") is that "it takes money", that company does NOT have a moat. It's very easy for a potential competitor to calculate that, after x-months or y-years, they will have made enough profits to pay for the cost of building the competing product. As long as that amount of time is finite, there is excess profit for a competitor to take, and the company will find it's so called "moat" wasn't a moat at all. This isn't a new thing. It's been a fact for centuries or millenia. It's one of the many things that makes success in business hard. Porter's Five Forces is one distillation of the foundational principles on which moats can be built (and yes, this is a non-trivial subject, so success in this area generally does take more effort than just reading or skimming the Wikipedia page, but if you had to distill it down to one sentence, it's probably "try to build something that has network effects").
- chasd00 8mo ago> Hint: Money is a nice thing to have but it is very definitely not a moat. in this context i think where money becomes a moat is when you consider Google can keep advancing their LLMs and tools while operating at a loss because they have the cash and revenue to do that. They'll just keep going and wait for everyone else to go bankrupt and then the whole AI market is theirs. In that way money, and the ability to out last your competitors, is the moat.
- andrewstuart 8mo agoNow you have to make something actually new.
- andrewstuart 8mo agoIt still take me months to build sophisticated things with hard problems at their core. There’s not the slightest chance an LLM or less than capable developer is whipping this stuff out in a day.
- readingnews 8mo agoI thought your blog sofware was interesting, and you have a blog on it from last year. The Git link on this page: https://elliotbonneville.com/building-a-blog-in-90-minutes/ https://elliotbonneville.com/building-a-blog-in-90-minutes/ however, is broken. Broken Git link: https://github.com/elliotbonneville/elliotbonneville.com https://github.com/elliotbonneville/elliotbonneville.com
- chatmasta 8mo agoWhy are HN mods appending a question mark to the original title which is obviously a headline of a blog post, i.e. a thesis of the author, and not an assertion of fact? You may as well suffix every headline with a question mark.
- imglorp 8mo ago> When someone suggested the answer was marketing: > jUsT dO mOrE mArKeTiNg!!!!! This is a good point. If there's a problem reaching people because the information channel is saturated, the solution is to increase the information? And then everyone reaches the same conclusion and increases. This destroys the channel. It's not a zero sum game. If everyone markets, nobody will make the sale because the customer will nope out and see nothing.
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- soulchild37 8mo agoThis article sounds like "I can't make a profitable SaaS, hence others can't too, and those who can, are using absurd amount of money or prior reputation to do so" I advice to grow up and do some proper research on what problem to solve, and how to build trust with audience before pushing your products. I dont have much money or prior reputation when starting out, I blogged weekly, then slowly launched technical ebooks, one time utility app, and finally SaaS , took me about 6 years of showing up every day to have a job-replacing income. Your other post mentioned you gave up and declared failure after 3 weeks of launching your SaaS, I think the timeframe expectation you had might be unrealistic.
- kittikitti 8mo agoIt was always about money. People never cared about new things or innovation. It was always funneled through gatekeepers. The "moat" was a talking point to VC's who are used to 90% of their ventures failing and yet was taken seriously. We seem to forget all the racist jokes about how China will just make a cheaper copy, where were talks about a "moat" then?
- CuriouslyC 8mo agoIronically, lots of people are going to get pushed back into agriculture because yields are going to fall and humans can pick marginal/mixed/non-row crops much more efficiently than robots, plus local consumption eliminates logistics costs. So yeah, techno-feudalism is going to drive us back to agrarian feudalism.
- karma_daemon 8mo agoNot sure I agree with this - if productivity is going up, then it seems like the value of thinking would _also_ go up Each thought is just worth so much more
- arathis 8mo agoThis whole thread is classic HN. Someone uses a random example to illustrate a point, and the rest of the post is about that.
- kmeisthax 8mo agoOne thing I've noticed is that there is a very specific set of technologies that attract a very specific set of people. You may have seen these people jump from Bitcoin to altcoins to Ethereum to NFTs; and now to AI. The common thread behind all of these technologies is that they are inherently dehumanizing: as in, they are a means by which ambulatory piles of money can shed the skin they are ordinarily forced to wear and just exist. AI seems like the odd man out of the group, until you understand the utter horror that is weaponized post-scarcity economics. "The only moat left is money" is the plan. It was always the plan. The goal of AI - or at least, the goal of AI to the cult of people who mindlessly agree with it is to replace humans with pliant digital slaves.
- ghssds 8mo agoWhat's wrong with screenshots? Those X widgets are cancer.
- cryptonector 8mo agoThe only real mote was and is mindshare. Build mindshare, don't screw your users, and your competition will have a hard time dethroning you. LLMs will probably force SaaS and software prices to come down, which will be a great opportunity for dethroning reigning champions. PostgreSQL, for example, has a ton of mindshare. It will be hard to dethrone it. OpenSolaris was Sun's attempt to recover from the loss of mindshare to Linux. The a company that had become dominant in databases due to mindshare acquired Sun then failed to understand the mindshare play, and it killed OpenSolaris. Explain that one to me. Even mindshare might not be such a moat now.
- beAbU 8mo agoAI coding assistants make it trivial to switch between models, and developers will switch to a different model from a different provider if the new model is perceived to be better than the current one even if that perception is completely subjective. Furthermore, the only users who will actually pay for AI are these assistant-using developers and other power users -- people who will not hesitate to switch to something better. We are already used to new model releases being neck in neck and there is no real incumbent/underdog dynamic going on here. Yes, there is strong mindshare among the normies, who only know about "ChatGPT", but as soon as they graduate into a powe user, then the above applies to them.
- xyzsparetimexyz 8mo ago> The corollary is rarely mentioned: the value of a human eyeball is going up, because there are only so many of them and there are now infinite things that want to be looked at. There's an easy fix for this. Agent to Agent SAAS
- jppope 8mo agoThe author of this article is missing whats really going on: Hard novel things are still hard and valuable, easy things are now super easy and really aren't valuable anymore. Lets take an easy thing... like a meal planning app or a todo list or something. Its what we would all call a weekend project, but in 2022 it would be hard to develop, get the legal stuff reviewed, do the marketing, and do all the rest of the operations in a few weeks. That stuff is basically a series of prompts now. Now lets look at a hard thing, such as decreasing the cost of titanium production (courtesy of orca: https://www.orcasciences.com/articles/there-has-to-be-a-better-way-to-make-titanium https://www.orcasciences.com/articles/there-has-to-be-a-bett...)... to be able to scale operations and bring the cost down you are going to have to do some real science and engineering... LLMs can certainly help you, but this challenge is a far cry from something that an LLM can handle. *Novel things have just become MUCH MUCH more valuable, slop is way way less valuable*
- goldenarm 8mo agoEveryone is excited (or scared) by vibe coded startups, but ask yourself, how many vibecoded apps do you use weekly ? Every single one I've tested looks great at first, but is an UX nightmare with awful performance. Even worse, my founder friends are all churning slop prototypes with Claude Code with zero product vision and are going nowhere. Is this revolution just a mirage that is FOMO-driven ?
- kledru 8mo agoliked this one, but even this one turns to AI-sh style in the end... no escape from it any more.
- el3ctron 8mo agohttp is now a trash can no by AIs activity, they only reveal to our eyes something that has been already happening for years, not perpetrated by robots, but something worst: marketing industries. But in other hand, why to pay for another social network when exist technologies like gopher, RSS feeds or gemini-protocol?
- bigbuppo 8mo agoLet me guess, there's a link to his soundcloud or something else he's pitching at the bottom?
- seertaak 8mo agoInteresting article! FYI I clicked on joinkith.com and got: "Application error: a server-side exception has occurred while loading joinkith.com (see the server logs for more information)."
- hintymad 8mo ago> The value of human thinking is going down The value of human repeating other human's know-how through hard work and thinking is going down. Unfortunately (or fortunately?), many types of programming is one human repeating other human's know-how.
- thoughtpeddler 8mo agoThis person needs to study Ronald Coase's Theory of the Firm in order to not make incorrect assertions like 'the only moat left is money'. There's many other criticisms to level at this piece, but this is the one I'll use my reply/comment on. If the author was right, then the entities with the most money, or ability to print money, a.k.a. the government, would be in charge of all economic activity. They are not. Empirically, what we observe about human economic activity is that it's not about who has the most money. Money helps, and certainly there's economic structures that are a tier below government but definitely far larger than a small business that can use money as a weapon to stay entrenched or gain other advantages in the market, etc, but it's not the only thing. Empirically it is just not. There has been, is, and will continue to be room for what other commenters have called 'creativity' broadly speaking, and that even includes creatively recruiting other people to your cause/company versus another's, etc, that 'the one with the most money' has not alone shown to be decisive.
- insane_dreamer 8mo agoIf the promise of AI doing most tasks a human can do does become true (and it appears to be on its way, though it's a matter of time), I think this will come as a serious shock to society -- particularly the US and highly developed countries. We are not, nor even trying to be, nor even thinking about trying to be, prepared. I feel like all players are rowing downstream as fast as they can, in the hopes that they will be one of the lucky few to catch the few ropes while the rest of humanity goes over the waterfall.
- cinkhangin 8mo agoI love the idea of kith.
- abhaynayar 8mo agoIt's funny because the post is so baseless and emotions-driven, however these kind of common-denominator (bike-shedded) articles (by definition) touch humans more deeply and evoke more emotional responses. But again one can't be against "shallow" stuff because in the end everything is about how it makes you feel.