[HN Gopher] The only moat left is money?
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The only moat left is money?
Author : elliotbnvl
Score : 221 points
Date : 2026-02-18 16:07 UTC (6 hours ago)
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| saubeidl wrote:
| Capitalism 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 wrote:
| Wealth 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 wrote:
| That's why we cured hunger in 2012, cured poverty in 2017,
| fixed healthcare in 2020, working as intended indeed
| saubeidl wrote:
| You might not be living in the same reality as me if you
| believe any of those claims.
| lm28469 wrote:
| That's called sarcasm
| rkomorn wrote:
| Had us in the first half. And the second half too.
| mothballed wrote:
| There 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 wrote:
| A _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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| This 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| bccdee wrote:
| > Regulation is what enables monopolies
|
| That's patently false. AT&T was a monopoly and they were
| broken up by antitrust regulation. The absolute most you
| can say is that _some_ regulations enable monopoly. I
| contend that we simply should pass the good kind of
| regulations instead.
|
| Monopoly is enabled by market forces such as economies of
| scale. Monopolization is a natural market process which
| happens on its own unless it is actively prevented.
|
| > big pharma loves high regulatory barriers because it
| keeps competitors out
|
| The FDA, for all the flaws of its current incarnation, is
| the archetype of necessary regulation. Pre-FDA, the free
| market did nothing whatsoever to prevent nauseating
| practices like the adulteration of milk with powdered
| plaster, lead, and cow brains. The history there is fun
| but quite gross.
|
| > Somalia
|
| What is notable about Somalia is not its lack of
| regulation, but the fact that it is perhaps THE least
| stable country on the planet. It is not the basis for any
| useful comparison here.
| mothballed wrote:
| >> Regulation is what enables monopolies
|
| >That's patently false. AT&T was a monopoly and they were
| broken up by antitrust regulation.
|
| This is patently false in the context of the reply you
| have made -- after the invention of the telephone more
| and more and eventually hundreds of telephone services
| popped up. Then in 1918 (circa WWI), the government
| effectively quasi- _nationalized_ AT &T by controlling it
| via a commission and the postmaster general and then AT&T
| leveraged politicians to create "universal telephone
| service" provided by AT&T and regulate competitors out of
| the market while using regulatory capture to use
| commissions to regulate rates, effectively creating a
| cartel that drove competitors out of business via
| regulation.
|
| the whole idea of a "natural market process" here is
| absolute and utter hogwash. The majority of the market
| was AT&T competitor up until the regulators stepped in
| and turned it into an _unnatural monopoly_ enforced by
| regulatory capture.
|
| >The FDA, for all the flaws of its current incarnation,
| is the archetype of necessary regulation. Pre-FDA, the
| free market did nothing whatsoever to prevent nauseating
| practices like the adulteration of milk with powdered
| plaster, lead, and cow brains. The history there is fun
| but quite gross.
|
| You're now arguing why we need regulation rather than
| whether they create monopolies or not. I see this as a
| complete red herring, although an interesting topic, that
| there are some counterpoints to.
|
| > What is notable about Somalia is not its lack of
| regulation, but the fact that it is perhaps THE least
| stable country on the planet. It is not the basis for any
| useful comparison here.
|
| What is notable is that the whole thesis is without
| regulation it turns into this monopolized hellscape and
| every inspection of that theory turns out to be false,
| and sometimes even the opposite.
| bccdee wrote:
| > the whole idea of a "natural market process" here is
| absolute and utter hogwash
|
| Might I introduce you to the concept of a "natural
| monopoly"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly
|
| Anyway, what regulation is responsible for Walmart and
| Amazon putting local retailers out of business?
|
| > the government effectively quasi-nationalized AT&T
|
| After a big merger put AT&T in charge of the majority of
| telephone lines in the US, the company used its control
| over infrastructure to drive its competitors out of
| business and increase its portfolio. The Justice
| Department tried to break up AT&T but failed; it was in
| the settlement of this case that AT&T was first federally
| regulated in 1913. Yes, AT&T's monopoly grew between 1913
| and 1982, but your causality is backwards. They regulated
| it _because it was already a monopoly._
| mothballed wrote:
| >Anyway, what regulation is responsible for Walmart and
| Amazon putting local retailers out of business?
|
| Walmart + Amazon combined are only ~16% of the retail
| business. They're not monopolies. The fact they put a
| small minority of businesses out of business does not
| mean they're a monopoly. This is likely part efficiencies
| and also part regulatory capture via the insane
| zoning/building regulations in this country and tax
| breaks that can favor large corporations.
|
| > After a big merger put AT&T in charge of the majority
| of telephone lines in the US, the company used its
| control over infrastructure to drive its competitors out
| of business and increase its portfolio. The Justice
| Department tried to break up AT&T but failed; it was in
| the settlement of this case that AT&T was first federally
| regulated in 1913. Yes, AT&T's monopoly grew between 1913
| and 1982, but your causality is backwards. They regulated
| it because it was already a monopoly.
|
| ... It was not already a monopoly. Hundreds of phone
| companies emerged and by shortly before your noted date
| of "regulation" those competitors held the majority
| market share. It became a "monopoly" after the government
| literally quasi-nationalized them (AT&T) to the point the
| fucking Postmaster General was basically in charge of it,
| they became intertwined with regulators, and then the
| drive for "universal telephone service" and regulatory
| commissions ensured the regulatory compliance pushed
| exactly into AT&Ts business model. AT&T intertwined
| lawmakers even brought in economics quacks to talk up
| _natural monopolies_ to argue for policies to _create_
| the regulations that made AT &T a monopoly. So you have
| it backwards -- the regulated it from a minority market
| holder to an unnatural monopoly and lawmakers _created_
| this monopoly under the auspices they essentially needed
| to legislate a "natural" (misnomer) monopoly into
| existence.
| bigyabai wrote:
| > There is no monopoly for any of the major industries
| like cow herding or cellular telephone service in Somalia
|
| Kinda a terrible example, as cellular telephones are
| highly regulated in Somalia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wik
| i/National_Communication_Authori...
| mothballed wrote:
| This is a crude but misguided attempt to bypass what I
| say which was "effective regulation." FGS only controls a
| minority of Somalia -- most of it is controlled by
| Somaliland, Puntland, Al-Shabaab, directly by xeer
| (customary) law, or only FGS hanging on by a thread.
|
| Even in cases where FGS is in control -- even then xeer
| law on property rights and law often supersede written
| law of FGS. For instance, on occasion Somali population
| has _straight up killed FGS soldiers /police_ and
| Somalian government has deferred to xeer courts and said
| "welp that is fine." Xeer law in particular has a very
| liberal free-market view on inter-familial
| entrepreneurism (although with a lot of intrafamilial and
| tribal dues which hinder it in practice) which is at odds
| with what outside law has tried to impose upon it.
|
| NCA has rather limited influence in somalia, and
| definitely not of the sort that could break up a monopoly
| if one existed.
| saubeidl wrote:
| Wealth is intently _relative_. Absolute growth of wealth is
| just inflation.
| bccdee wrote:
| Power 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 wrote:
| This 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 wrote:
| how to prevent others from building a copycat using ai?
| g947o wrote:
| You don't.
| Daishiman wrote:
| You 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 wrote:
| > you attend to those needs faster than competitors
|
| I wonder if this type of hustling can be called moat
| building?
| ativzzz wrote:
| The 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.
| maeln wrote:
| Knowledge ? For b2c it might be more difficult, but in b2b,
| understanding your customer and their specifics issue and
| developing something made for them is one of the big
| challenge. Being able to spit out code for free is useless if
| you don't know what and who you are making the code for.
| rvz wrote:
| Let's just say, building software alone is not enough.
| Bnjoroge wrote:
| You cant. You can only focus on building your own product and
| making it durable and just much better
| caminante wrote:
| The discussion here is going sideways, and I blame the
| underwhelming blog post.
|
| Having money is NOT an economic moat-- i.e., a durable,
| structural competitive advantage.
|
| He overlooks broader, true definition of moat attributes like
| labor supply, infrastructure, PP&E, brand, network, natural
| monopolies, switching costs, regulation. These don't go away
| with commoditized CRUD apps.
|
| And quoting someone with decades of experience implying that
| things are hard now and innovation didn't turn over
| industries in the last 25+ years is a joke.
| RGamma wrote:
| The more I think about it the more brainrot the article
| really is. As if all problems are solved and pumping out
| soulless shovelware companies is worth anything. It really
| is "just one more app" all over again.
| elbear wrote:
| by keeping the how part a secret
| RC_ITR wrote:
| It's like that FT chart claiming that the rapid rise in iOS
| apps is evidence of an AI-fueled productivity boom.
|
| I always ask people, in the past year, how many AI-coded apps
| have you 1) downloaded 2) paid for?
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| > It's like that FT chart claiming that the rapid rise in iOS
| apps is evidence of an AI-fueled productivity boom.
|
| I mean, there is evidence for some change. Personally, I'm
| sceptical of what this will amount to, but prior to EOY 2025,
| there really wasn't _any_ evidence for an app /service boom,
| and now there's weak evidence, which is better than none.
| sarchertech wrote:
| In addition to that, what they don't mention is that:
|
| 1. Other app stores like Google Play and Steam haven't seen
| this rapid rise.
|
| 2. There are thousands maybe tens of thousands of apps that
| are just wrappers calling OpenAI APIs or similar low effort
| AI apps making up a large percentage of this increase.
|
| 3. There are billions of dollars pouring into AI startups and
| many of them launch an iOS app.
| vkou wrote:
| Has steam not seen a rapid rise in AI-asset shovelware?
|
| I'm not talking about the AAA or the AA or even the A space
| (where AI is being incorporated into dev processes with
| various degrees of both success and low effort slop), I'm
| talking about the actual bottom of the barrel.
| sarchertech wrote:
| I can't speak to the quality of all the games released,
| but in January 2025 there were 1,413 games released on
| Steam and in January of this year there were 1,448.
| Jensson wrote:
| You never needed AI to make shovelware, you have been
| able to make a shitty game over a weekend ever since RPG
| maker was made and there are still games made using that.
|
| AI just helps create some assets for games, it doesn't
| really make it easier or faster to make games but they
| might look a bit better.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Because so much technical functionality has been
| lost/paywalled/dark patterned/enshitified, I've cut the
| number of apps I use. I've realized building core personal
| functionality around the whims of corporations eventually
| just gets weaponized against me, so I might as well start
| undoing that on my own terms. Who in 2026 is really bringing
| in a new app/Saas to do much of anything like we naively did
| a decade ago? No one I know, we've been shown we will be
| treated as suckers for doing that.
| esseph wrote:
| > I always ask people, in the past year, how many AI-coded
| apps have you 1) downloaded 2) paid for?
|
| In the past 5 years, the only "new" app I've added to my
| phone has been Claude.ai.
|
| Before that I guess DoorDash. And that probably covers the
| past 7ish years of phone use.
|
| There's just too much shit in the store, a lot of it is
| scammy or has dark patterns.
|
| For me, "app stores" are largely dead.
| boplicity wrote:
| > the products they are pumping out don't serve anyone's need
| or solve anyone's problem.
|
| This isn't true though.
|
| Yes, there are too many products being build that don't serve
| anyone's needs or solve anyone's problems.
|
| However, many of the AI products _do_ solve problems and serve
| needs.
|
| You're right though, to compare this to other booms, which also
| had the same problem. This is very much a "hyper" version,
| which is pretty incredible to be in the middle of.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > However, many of the AI products do solve problems and
| serve needs.
|
| Every solution to a problem comes with its own costs. It is
| entirely possible that most solutions that are rooted in
| modern computing technology have actual or perceived costs
| that exceed the value of "solving the problem".
|
| The problems that most people have that they really want to
| solve are not addressable by AI, or computers, or software.
| showerst wrote:
| I don't mean that _all_ AI built stuff is useless, just that
| the number of products where 'marketing budget' is the
| bottleneck is dwarfed by the number of tools that aren't that
| special in the first place.
|
| If you have a product that:
|
| 1. Solves a real problem people would pay for
|
| 2. Is not trivially replicable by your potential customers or
| competitors
|
| 3. Does not have a natural discovery mechanism by potential
| customers
|
| Then you need the marketing budget.
|
| That is not most people's problem.
| tjwebbnorfolk wrote:
| Ok but pick any category of human endeavor and 80% of it is
| garbage in the beginning. There were 3000 car companies in
| the 1920s, and most of them sucked, and so they died. The
| market over time will sort out who survives and who does
| not.
|
| It will take a few years for investors to figure this out,
| but in the meantime, everyone is spreading their bets
| around like peanut butter in order to be in the game.
| arrsingh wrote:
| I think item #2 in your list is the real kicker here. Given
| that AI can write code the threshold for "trivially
| replicable" is going down.
|
| Unless your thing has strong network effects or a large
| capex requirement (ex: GPU infra) its easily replicated and
| I think that's really what makes things hard.
| sarchertech wrote:
| Most business software that was truly trivially
| replicable with AI, was already trivially replicable with
| the prototyping tools we had available.
| neom wrote:
| I worked during the digital revolution in film, I've told the
| story a zillion times on HN but basically, I went through the
| first pure digital film program in Canada, by the time I
| graduated 70% had dropped out, as far as I know I'm the only
| one who made a proper go at it, and even then when my startup
| was taking off, a new hot shot would show up every month and be
| gone the next when they got bored or frustrated when nobody
| thought they were special. Tools are tools.
| curiouscavalier wrote:
| yeah this is really a part of it. Both founders and investors
| get spooked by the rapid entries into a market but persistent
| not just when it's hard but when it's boring goes so much
| farther.
| ncphillips wrote:
| > a new hot shot would show up every month and be gone the
| next when they got bored or frustrated when nobody thought
| they were special
|
| I don't know much about film industry, and I have a ton of
| brainfog from being sick today.
|
| Could you say more? What made them a hotshot? They thought
| they were like, creative geniuses with digital film or
| something?
| neom wrote:
| They often WERE creative geniuses with a digital camera!
| Brilliant people! In fact they were the ones who came and
| went the fastest, what makes you _useful_ in industry is
| very frequently nothing to do with genius or creativity or
| mastery of the tools. It 's things like reliability,
| stability, team spirit, open mindedness etc.
|
| Creative genius is one game, but it's far from the only, or
| even, main one.
|
| Hope you feel better. <3
| Bnjoroge wrote:
| Eh, there's some truth it both. The truth is somewhere in the
| middle of the spectrum. Distribution absolutely matters, often
| times even more than the product. And vice versa
| clickety_clack wrote:
| This seems to me like the few booms I've seen before.
| Absolutely crazy valuations with very little behind them,
| massive hype, everyone's unemployed uncle suddenly becoming a
| shallow expert. It's probably going to end the same way too,
| once the upward momentum dissipates and things start to retreat
| to "fundamentals", we'll find out that there were a lot fewer
| solid points in the market than we were all told to expect, so
| the fundamentals are actually pretty far down. After 5 to 10
| years of regrouping, a more mature and solid version will come
| about and become such a normal part of life we barely even
| remember what it was like without it.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| We are well on our way to the popping of inflated
| expectations.
|
| Currently people are taking AI hype too seriously and
| extrapolating its success out in such a way as to discount
| the value of other businesses.
|
| Example - last week a bunch of trucking stocks crashed 10-20%
| because a $6M company that pivoted from Karaoke to AI demoed
| something.
|
| This is just insane. Sure, if say Waymo is pivoting into
| commercial trucking.. maybe. But people are basically
| shorting minutemaid lemonade because their neighbors kids
| opened up a lemonade stand. Demos are easy, products are
| hard.
| koolba wrote:
| > 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.
|
| An idea is not a moat. Execution is only a moat if being nimble
| is part of the ongoing offering.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Historically, during booms like this (for example the
| industrial revolution), it was, because we had patent
| protections in order to encourage ideas to be brought to
| market. I don't see how you can have an AI revolution that
| doesn't just funnel everything to the top without something
| similar.
|
| Why invent the cotton gin, find investors, and bring it to
| market if the steel company with the infinite worker machine
| can instantly compete with you?
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Not really. It's money/resources. I had some really useful apps
| I built for myself. I looked at releasing them, but there were
| companies whose business model was waiting for people like me
| to release apps that solve a problem, and then just instantly
| jump on creating a solution and outcompeting the independent
| app.
|
| It's trivial for competitors with bigger pockets to outcompete
| you on your idea, and there are companies whose business model
| is just that. And with AI customers are trying to do it
| themselves as well. The only startup I wouldn't be nervous
| about as a small team without large financial backing would be
| ones where we start out partnered to multiple companies in the
| targeted industry so that we can leverage that connection.
|
| Historically this is why we have copyright/patent laws. To make
| it make sense for people to try to bring their ideas to the
| world. But with everything changing we are back to everyone
| just sitting on their concepts/solutions unless they have big
| money behind them.
| PlatoIsADisease wrote:
| Buddy, my wife vibe coded an app that solves her PTO tracking
| problem in 1 shot.
|
| Her payroll company was going to charge her an extra $200 a
| month.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > 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.
|
| This is a very naive take. Any good idea you have can now be
| cloned trivial in no time at all.
|
| The clones just need to out spend you on marketing even though
| it is your idea that the LLM cloned.
| prmph wrote:
| So where are the AI clones of MS Office, JetBrains IDEs,
| Whatsapp, Obsidian, etc. so far?
| lelanthran wrote:
| Obsidian has plenty of clones. The others have money as a
| moat, which is exactly my point.
| prmph wrote:
| Which clones? And why not the others?
|
| Which is my point: it seems easy to clone something that
| seems conceptually simple, but is the result of all kinds
| of UI, UX, performance, etc optimizations. The reason
| someone might choose Obsidian over these so called clones
| is not just marketing, I assure you. The reason people
| attempt Obsidian clones is that they think creating todo-
| list management tools, etc is all it takes to implement a
| PKM, and that that is easy. It is not.
|
| Right now there are kinds of tools I wished existed, that
| I would pay for, but AI does not automatically provide
| the insight, good taste, technical excellence, and grit
| needed to create these products. I could do them, with AI
| assisting, but do not have the time. It is not a simple
| matter of saying: Claude, create or clone X, Y, Z.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > Which clones?
|
| Are you seriously contending that apps that have
| Obsidians functionality don't exist?
|
| Just on HN alone, throughout 2023 - 2025 we were seing
| like one new TODO app show up on HN _weekly!_
|
| > And why not the others?
|
| Because _money_ is the moat, and _they have it!_
|
| That was my entire point - _money is the moat_.
| prmph wrote:
| You are not making sense.
|
| > Just on HN alone, throughout 2023 - 2025 we were seing
| like one new TODO app show up on HN weekly!
|
| This response shows you missed my point entirely. I am
| saying a todo app does not a PKM make! I'm not interested
| in a vibe-coded todo app, it is useless to me.
|
| > Because money is the moat, and they have it!
|
| You're sidestepping issue and contradicting yourself. I
| asked: if cloning is so easy, why has no one cloned the
| JetBrains IDEs, for example?
|
| Remember, I'm not talking about what happens after the
| cloning. Are you saying no one has cloned Jetbrains
| because it takes a lot of money to do so? That would
| contradict your claim that AI makes it easy.
| casey2 wrote:
| No, the moat is having a seemingly good "scalable" idea that
| solves a problem a few people have and most people think they
| have. Then getting bought out.
|
| The zip2s and OpenClaws of the world
| joe_the_user wrote:
| Well, if someone could create a drop-in replacement for Oracle-
| DB, Adobe Creative or AutoCad in a month of vibe-coding, I
| think they could prosper without having their own good idea. I
| would like to see something like this.
|
| But if you're just talking the fairly simple apps that a single
| very talented programmer could pump out before this, sure,
| yeah.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| > ...it's having a good idea that solves a problem that nobody
| else is solving _well_.
|
| Added emphasis to the most crucial part, in my opinion.
|
| If you can manage to deliver a product that's meaningfully
| better than the competition, you still have an edge, so long as
| you're competent at marketing.
|
| Nothing gets people searching for alternatives as consistently
| as frustration, and a product that was lazily built with AI
| (vibe coded or otherwise) is going to be full of bugs and
| papercuts that make using it a poor experience.
|
| This is particularly true for software that sits in the hot
| path of peoples' workflows, where thoughtless design,
| misbehavior, and poor optimization chip away at time the user
| can't afford to spare.
|
| In short: yes, competition will be plentiful but it will also
| be almost entirely awful, and capable SWEs can capitalize on
| that. It won't take much to stand out amongst the mountains of
| garbage that will be generated in the coming years.
| ge96 wrote:
| I 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.
| clay_the_ripper wrote:
| Doing 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 wrote:
| Ahhh 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 wrote:
| The followup thought / concern that occurs: what if the
| number of hard things is going down?
| Barbing wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| We 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 wrote:
| I 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.
| ahnick wrote:
| Wrongheaded strategies that net you bad results, often
| result in lessons and ideas that can be further pursued on
| their own merits.
| danny_codes wrote:
| The entire pitch of LLM companies is that that's not true. The
| LLM does the hard work, and you pay the LLM company for the
| tokens. So the gate is just, can you afford enough tokens.
|
| Not saying that's what will happen in reality, but that is the
| marketing pitch
| moregrist wrote:
| I was there in the 90s. I built a few bad static HTML pages. It
| wasn't hard. There are lots of stories of non-CS / non-
| technical people making stuff from the dotcom era.
|
| Making a dynamic page was harder. Integrating with a payment
| system was almost magical; there's a reason PayPal became big.
|
| But what was _truly_ hard, and continues to be hard, is
| building a page, either static or dynamic, that people actually
| want to visit.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Building static pages that worked in both Netscape and IE 4,
| and could function well with constrained dial up speeds, may
| not have been "hard", but it did come with a number of
| challenges.
| tquinn35 wrote:
| I 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.
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| The only moat that can beat the money moat, in fact
|
| Money (better thought of as credit, since we are talking about
| fiat here) is an attractor so much as it can stand for or
| purchase productive energy. If that fails (central bank
| failure, currency failure, government failure), creativity
| takes its place
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| I think, in time, it will be shown to be the real, persistent
| differentiator. And far more valuable.
|
| But it's also not a moat in the same way. It's accessible to
| everyone, but you have to actually disregard the parts of
| yourself that want to drive hard in some direction just for
| money or power or external validation.
|
| From the look of things right now, it may take some pain before
| that really gets to shine.
| HPsquared wrote:
| What's to stop someone copying your creations? Creativity is
| the reason a moat is needed.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| You don't need a ton of creativity for a good restaurant if you
| have good staff, and upkeep. I'll take a boring well maintained
| and staffed restaurant over an overpriced "creative" restaurant
| where the waiters are terrible and the chef is even worse.
| pixl97 wrote:
| And you'll still probably get beat by a restaurant in a
| better location or one with better marketing
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I can't remember the last time I ate anywhere because of an
| ad. I eat out a lot too, used to uber eats nearly every
| single day. I wont reorder at places that mess up my order,
| but consistent quality I reward. Chick Fil A gives me the
| best service out of any fast-food restaurant, so they earn
| my repeat business.
| boplicity wrote:
| People almost never admit it when they respond to an ad.
| Even when they very clearly do.
|
| Don't underestimate the effectiveness of advertising, or
| its ability to influence you.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I distinctively remember when ads have worked on me to
| buy something. Sometimes I blacklist a brand if an ad is
| deceptive and makes me click on something, but I don't
| watch TV much if at all, and the streaming services I do
| use I pay to have ads removed.
| Jensson wrote:
| You don't even see ads for local restaurants, you just go
| there because its close or a friend recommended it. How
| could you get influenced by something that doesn't exist?
| Their marketing is just the storefront, people go there
| since they are interested in this new place.
| boplicity wrote:
| Google Ads, especially Google Maps, has tons of paid ads
| for local restaurants. So does Uber Eats and similar ilk.
|
| I particularly despise these ads in Maps because the ad
| often obscures the search result I'm looking for -- and I
| end up accidentally clicking on an advertisement for some
| other restaurant than the one I was looking up.
| trashb wrote:
| This assumes the market is not oversaturated. It does not
| work if there are only a couple of people trying to find a
| place to eat in a street with 30 similar well maintained and
| staffed restaurants.
|
| Correct me if I'm wrong but, you may be thinking of
| restaurants where their defining factor is "having a very
| creative atmosphere", which will not suit all customers.
| However it is a differentiating factor which will serve a big
| audience that is under served in a location filled with
| "boring well maintained and staffed restaurant".
|
| In my view the creativity comes in in finding solutions to a
| problem, in a oversaturated market the problem may be "how do
| I persuade customers to come to my restaurant instead of my
| competitor?". And following that question may be (in the
| restaurant example) "what can I offer that is under served in
| the current market?" The solution to that may be "a biker
| cafe" or "an overpriced "creative" restaurant where the
| waiters are terrible and the chef is even worse" (perhaps
| even rude on purpose).
|
| Additionally I assume you want the restaurant to grow. If you
| want the restaurant to just survive the bar is lower and you
| may be able to do that by doing the same everyone else is
| doing as long as you meet the minimum.
| Jensson wrote:
| But the argument is that now you have AI for chef, staff and
| upkeep so its only the recipe writer left. I don't agree with
| that argument but that is the dream these corporations are
| selling.
| AstroBen wrote:
| Your creativity will be copied within days
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| Some peoples' yes, others no.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| The claude.ai web UI has a bug right now. If you inline some
| code by typing an opening backtick then the closing backtick
| swallows your space, puts the next letter you type after the
| code, then everything else back inside the code span.
|
| One day we might be able to write software without bugs. That
| day is clearly not here yet.
|
| (Firefox in Linux if anyone wants to repro. Can't file a bug as
| it's a closed, proprietary piece of software.)
| sowbug wrote:
| Creativity is a kind of labor. Like all labor, it never earns
| pay more than once.
| esseph wrote:
| Then what are acting and music royalties?
| sowbug wrote:
| They'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.")
| esseph wrote:
| Stock photography?
|
| Font/Typography sales?
|
| What about Pluralsight/Udemy courses?
|
| Substack/Patreon membership?
|
| Buying printable art from etsy?
| trashb wrote:
| I think creativity is still a valid moat. And I think
| creativity will become a very important moat!
|
| I am a firm believer of "limitation breeds creativity" and
| being able to make what you want with immediate result will
| lead to less diverse solutions. In a world of in-diverse
| products you need more creativity to stand out as it will
| become harder to conceive of something "outside of the box".
|
| Similarly to how anyone can basically create any image they
| desire in Photoshop (with some limited training). Leading to a
| lot of images of a similar style instead of a lot of different
| styles (ai slop anyone?). This is because between the idea and
| the result the roadblocks are reduced, the process is smooth
| (tools aim for 1:1 conversion). In the creative process these
| roadblocks are usually where you will find interesting new
| directions or ideas. And very often the original idea was not
| that interesting to begin with (and perhaps not as original as
| we would like to believe).
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| That's my hope, too, since I've had the unfortunate luck of
| practically being forced to fulfill my lifelong dream and
| create a software company as a solo dev in 2025. Great
| timing...
|
| However, I've gotten doubts about the value of creativity and
| having a vision. Plenty of people have great creativity and a
| fantastic vision, and we can see already how AI allows people
| to churn out interesting and useful projects at much faster
| pace than just a few years ago. The problem is that it seems
| more and more impossible to actually make a living of that.
|
| Anybody with the money to have access to enough AI will be able
| to create a clone of software X. We might not be there quite
| yet but it's just a matter of time. That seems to be a death
| sentence for any small software business.
| sebstefan wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| Here is the Show HN Graph. I think it is obvious when AI
| starts. https://petegoldsmith.com/2026/01/26/2026-01-26-show-
| hn-tren...
| ossa-ma wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Depends. Are you still measuring value in dollars?
| elliotbnvl wrote:
| I got mouths to feed, so... yeah.
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| Indeed. But the line of discussion was about the value of
| human thought.
| ativzzz wrote:
| If 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 wrote:
| Noted.
|
| 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.
| trashb wrote:
| If anyone can create what they want won't coming up with good
| ideas be the value, therefore the creativity will become more
| important?
|
| I don't know what you wrote and I agree that it is very sad
| that the skill of writing is very undervalued at this moment.
| But I think that trend is not new and in reality not created
| by AI (just accelerated). But I think value of writing was
| never in the writing itself but the knowledge and ideas
| behind the writing. Because mechanics of writing sped up
| (handwritten, typewriter, word processor). But the process of
| writing a novel did not speed up significantly as the
| bottleneck is the ideas and iteration on those ideas not the
| delivery of the output. Similar to how programming is more
| then typing code.
|
| So I think the real crisis right now is that people equate
| typing speed with programming speed (or writing speed) and
| due to advances in the former undervalue the later.
|
| Sadly the reality is that it won't pay for the bills anymore.
|
| Perhaps in a while people will realize how important the
| quality of ideas (and the iteration to arrive at them) is.
| danny_codes wrote:
| why? We have no real evidence to support this claim.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > Wrong. Creativity, innovation, intuition, taste - all forms
| of thought solely inherent to humans, all going up.
|
| How do you define value?
|
| I mean, if the demand remains the same and the supply goes
| stratospheric, the value has to go down.
|
| After all, purchasers don't very well care that your product
| has creativity, etc and that that other identical product was
| just an AI cloning your product.
| AstroBen wrote:
| People 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?
| sowbug wrote:
| It isn't the moat. But it gives you a head start to build it.
| prmph wrote:
| So where are the AI clones of MS Office, JetBrains IDEs,
| Whatsapp, Obsidian, Sublime Text, Claude Code, etc. so far?
| atomicnumber3 wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| This 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 wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| You 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Doom and gloom nonsense.
| norbert515 wrote:
| While 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| So 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.
| thoughtfulchris wrote:
| > 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-a...
| dzink wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| There 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 wrote:
| Welp guess I'm done then.
|
| Kind of nice to know I don't have to blame myself anymore.
| AJRF wrote:
| > When creation was hard, skill was the differentiator I don't
| think people use things because they are hard to make
| dudewhocodes wrote:
| Have people naturally started sounding like an LLM when they
| write and talk? To me this article reads not fully human.
| boxedemp wrote:
| There'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 wrote:
| looks 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 wrote:
| So where are the AI clones of MS Office, JetBrains IDEs,
| Whatsapp, Obsidian, Sublime Text, Claude Code, etc. so far?
| cyrusradfar wrote:
| I 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.
| plagiarist wrote:
| It 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 wrote:
| He 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 wrote:
| Luck 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".
| r_lee wrote:
| like another guy said, it's rhe marketing thing. the open claw
| thing became a hit sensation in the news etc. and now OpenAI
| can claim it as theirs. they have infinite money anyways, so
| might as well buy stuff like that I guess.
| supermdguy wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Difficulty 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| sounds 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 wrote:
| >> 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...
|
| 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=6EW
| qTym2cQU&list=RD6EWqTym2c...
| wan23 wrote:
| It's absolutely wild to see how unevenly distributed the
| future we're living in is.
| elektronika wrote:
| Is it any surprise when wealth inequality has been
| increasing in the USA for the past 50 years? Globally the
| picture is even more bleak.
| tensor wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Only for developers. Outside of software creation is still
| hard. Global markets giving access to excellent manufacturing
| sure does help, but software is a bubble.
| Jensson wrote:
| Creating marketing material has certainly gotten easier as
| well, it used to require a lot of work to create these spam
| pamphlets and company documents but today its trivial. Of
| course those are worthless to society so didn't help GDP but
| it filled our society with advertisements and spam and filled
| companies with worthless documents since now nobody thinks
| before making one.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Something I've noticed a lot with Twitch streamers and
| YouTubers is that many of them want the outcome and are
| prepared to do the work, but want some sort of guarantee of
| success. It's very difficult to really sell to people that you
| will work very hard for a while and there's absolutely no
| promise that you'll ever have more than 14 subscribers. That's
| simply the core risk of entrepreneurship.
| djaro wrote:
| Also, as someone who's main source of income is a YouTube
| channel: there is a type of threshold effect, where your
| videos are not good enough to watch until one day they
| suddenly are.
|
| This means that until you reach that threshold, it feels like
| you're not making progress, cause every video just gets the
| same result (no views). Even if below the surface, you're
| slowly inching closer to that moment where your videos will
| actually be watched.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| I have the impression it's more of a "bait and switch" thing.
| People get into streaming thinking they can just play games
| and make money, but then they realize nobody is going to
| watch someone play game X, they all want to watch game Y,
| because game Y is popular right now among the people who have
| the most time to play games and watch streams (kids). So they
| enter the industry thinking they can just do whatever they
| want, and quickly realize they have to do infinite things
| they don't want to actually reach the level of popularity
| they need.
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| You've basically chosen to ignore the whole AI argument as if
| it was just another tool and we had business as usual. Given
| how pervasive and fast developing it is, there should be an
| argument why it can be dismissed so easily.
| phil21 wrote:
| It's just another way of saying "Ideas are worthless, execution
| is what matters" which has always been largely true.
|
| Yes, you need the idea first of course. But that's truly the
| easy part. 99% of "ideas" rely on great execution to be worth
| even looking at - much less paying for - for anyone else.
| miyoji wrote:
| That isn't what it's saying and I don't think the idea that
| "execution is what matters" is even true, other than to point
| out that ideas aren't valuable by themselves.
|
| This is about marketing, about getting people to know and
| care that the thing you built exists. You can execute
| perfectly (in terms of making a great product) and not get a
| single eyeball.
| heathrow83829 wrote:
| i would argue that reach has already been the biggest limiting
| factor for the last 10 even 20 years.
| alfalfasprout wrote:
| The thing is, the barrier _isn 't_ near zero. The time to reach
| an MVP has just decreased. But you still very much need
| expertise, strategy, etc. to deliver something worthwhile. The
| bar has just increased.
| ericmcer wrote:
| Seriously you can ship in a week things that FAANGs would have
| paid billions for 10 years ago.
|
| LLMs are just glue between pieces of your code you still need
| to be able to plug them into a coherent architecture to do
| something impressive.
| sarchertech wrote:
| To the extent that's true it has much, much more to do with
| AWS, open source libraries, and collective knowledge, than it
| does LLMs.
|
| But I honestly can't think of anything you could do in a week
| that a company in 2015 would have paid billions for unless
| it's something like tweaking an LLM. But in that case it's
| the original model, not the 1 week or work you put in.
| zabzonk wrote:
| > things that FAANGs would have paid billions for 10 years
| ago
|
| such as?
| lich_king wrote:
| I can only assume the grandparent means Google+
| ericmcer wrote:
| I mean literally anything that leverages modern APIs.
|
| WYSIWG Site Builders, text Chat bots, audio Transcription,
| voice synthesis.
|
| Yeah building from scratch would take longer, but you can
| slap a UI, a DB/schema around modern APIs and output
| something that would be science fiction 10 years ago.
| zabzonk wrote:
| You think people would pay billions for a site builder???
| Or that it would have been SF 10 years ago? I take it you
| were not around much 10 years ago.
| tdrz wrote:
| OK, say you build a Whatsapp clone in a week. How many
| Whatsapp users will switch to your app?
| altmanaltman wrote:
| Apple Pay (launched around 12 years ago, and likely costing
| billions) is exactly the counter-example here. The 'code' was
| the easy part. The moat was the decade of hardware R&D and
| the leverage to force banks to adopt a new standard. An LLM
| might write the API wrapper in seconds, but it can't
| hallucinate a relationship with Visa and Mastercard. You
| literally cannot create a new Apple Pay in a week or even
| years, no matter how much you vibe code.
|
| I'm sometimes baffled by what people think can pass as a
| product in a real sense.
| Rapzid wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| I like the idea of you 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.
| georgemcbay wrote:
| > 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.
|
| I'm old (52) and a bit AI hysterical despite being well aware
| of the reasons I supposedly shouldn't be (variations of
| Jevon's Paradox, the fact that we've had similar disruptions
| before, etc).
|
| I can't help but think that both the speed and massive
| breadth of the AI disruption across so many industries all at
| once makes this a very different risk than anything we've
| experienced before, in my lifetime or before it.
|
| It also doesn't help that at least here in the US this is all
| occurring when our government is both openly corrupt and
| particularly dysfunctional at solving any of the real-world
| problems facing its own citizens.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| The world is crashing down for a huge variety of reasons,
| none of which are LLMs stealing jobs or anything like that.
| rkilanh wrote:
| And 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-space...
|
| It would be hilarious if the final "IPOs" will be in SPAC form
| with the help of SPAC king Chamath.
| sd9 wrote:
| Not 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 wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| No, 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 wrote:
| In 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 wrote:
| It 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?
| dzonga wrote:
| Saturation 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 wrote:
| Yeah 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 wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| For 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 wrote:
| It 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 wrote:
| Oh good catch, fixed.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Money 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 wrote:
| This 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 wrote:
| > _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.
| runako wrote:
| > the music created today is mostly boring
|
| One thing hasn't changed: people get older and hate on music
| that the youth like.
| 2001zhaozhao wrote:
| If 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_ wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| A 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.
| shimman wrote:
| I can't think of a single software company that has a moat
| then. Good rubric to have and makes sense.
| lysace wrote:
| It'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.
| advisedwang wrote:
| If 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 wrote:
| Of 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 wrote:
| This 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.
| brandav wrote:
| Utilizing 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.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Is 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 wrote:
| The definition of a moat is what cannot be bought.
| e10jc wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Um... can we talk? :D
| SilverElfin wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| It'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 wrote:
| Coding 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 wrote:
| Not 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 wrote:
| what is an example?
| charlie0 wrote:
| Kith 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 wrote:
| It 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.
| pmontra wrote:
| > 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".
| sampo wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| It'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.
| arrsingh wrote:
| This 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| There should be more tax on capital because they are using it
| against us.
| arbuge wrote:
| Building was already not the main obstacle before AI.
| Distribution was, and remains so - more than ever.
| nickelpro wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Kind 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 wrote:
| It also strikes me as being in competition with, you know, a
| group chat.
| chasd00 wrote:
| i was just about to say, what they're describing is an
| imessage group chat with your friends.
| vadepaysa wrote:
| One 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Everyone 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 wrote:
| So, 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 wrote:
| automation makes every job scalable, no?
| pier25 wrote:
| can you automate a tailor?
| Epa095 wrote:
| Isn't tailors by and large already outcompeted by cheap new
| clothes?
| dolebirchwood wrote:
| A 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.)
| bubblewand wrote:
| Tailors are a niche thing for weirdos, now. It's not
| exactly a growth market. Most folks only wear a suit to
| weddings and funerals, and _maybe_ job interviews. They
| have basically no need for more than two suits, and many
| try to get by with just one (in black, probably). Lots
| don 't own one at all, maybe just a cheap fused-
| construction blazer or two, if even that. Outright
| bespoke clothes are a niche of a niche.
|
| Normal people wear clothes containing minimum 2% elastic
| and perhaps never, ever visit a tailor in their whole
| lives, except maybe one at a tux rental place or a
| wedding dress store, for their own wedding. If they
| repair clothes, it's sewing on the odd button at home or
| using iron-on denim patches. Past that, it's just not
| worth fixing, normal folks' clothes are so cheap.
|
| The whole market for tailors is practically an
| affectation. It's not serving much actual need any more,
| not from the perspective of the overwhelming majority of
| people who are happy with stretch-denim jeans and
| polyester sportswear jackets and such. It's basically 99%
| of the way to being an obsolete job, kept from total
| death by a few enthusiasts. Only a bit more lively than
| the market for, say, authentic regency-era footwear or
| something like that.
|
| (I am a fellow weirdo, for the record)
| apsurd wrote:
| I mean, you do you.
|
| Clothing is really _fashion_ for tons of people. Fashion
| is art. People like art.
| debatem1 wrote:
| As someone who has tried to make several businesses
| around art, people generally like art but not enough to
| pay "at scale" money for it.
| bubblewand wrote:
| Yes, I am one of the people who has a preferred tailor
| who can do more than just let trousers waists out. I also
| know where the nearest cobbler is. That's not normal,
| though.
|
| A dead industry often doesn't _entirely_ disappear, it
| just shrinks a bunch and comes to rely entirely on
| enthusiasts or very rare actual need, rather than broad
| need or appeal. Consider the draft horse breeder, or the
| carriage driver. There's a market for both professions!
| But they're itty-bitty. The day-to-day need for both is
| gone.
|
| Tailoring is hovering right in the edge of that kind of
| status, today. It's dying, killed by $10-30 shirts and
| $20-50 trousers and $50-100 jackets all from largely
| synthetic materials, and a society that no longer expects
| anyone to wear anything "fancier" outside certain events.
|
| I mean, outside _very_ unusual circles, dinner jackets
| are essentially ceremonial costume-wear, and business
| suits aren't far behind on that track. You gonna wear a
| tailored wool hacking jacket or breathable linen Norfolk
| suit on your camping trip, or a bunch of polyester and
| nylon stuff from REI? LOL. All the situational tailored
| clothing but the business suit and blazer are near-
| extinct unless you want to look like a cosplayer, and
| those are on borrowed time.
| apsurd wrote:
| Yes, your message is coming from the pov of economics and
| business, as makes sense in this thread! That's my
| mistake, I took your message more sentimentally. I've
| used tailoring probably 5 times in my life, with the only
| recurring need being to hem pants.
|
| "There is no money in tailoring" seems right. It's the
| "not all things need to make maximum $$$" that I speak
| to. You didn't pick this fight though, I did heh.
|
| My (successful) friend tells me all about how amazing it
| is to collect very expensive watches. I just need to be a
| "watch guy" and I'll come to understand. Once my eyes
| returned from rolling out of my head, I did concede a
| great point he made: there is no reason for watch makers
| to exist anymore. The fantastically amazing history and
| evolution of time-keeping and personal time-pieces is now
| purely supported by rich people that care to subsidize
| the art form. And so, maybe I really do aspire to be a
| watch guy after all... hmm.
| layer8 wrote:
| Not if you want any tailoring to be done.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| _cheap new clothes_
|
| Uh.. I don't mean to be that guy, but tailors aren't even
| operating in that market.
|
| People who use tailors aren't interested in off the rack
| items.
|
| Even when they do purchase off the rack or even
| secondhand items..
|
| they'll go have some of those items tailored.
| Epa095 wrote:
| > but tailors aren't even operating in that market.
|
| Not anymore.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| Not any time that most of us have even been alive.
|
| It's been well over half a century since tailors operated
| in the "cheap clothing" market.
|
| The clothes tailors make have, pretty much, always been
| expensive relative off the rack department store options.
|
| Probably because tailor made clothing doesn't "scale".
| UltraSane wrote:
| Rich people still get suits custom made specifically to
| their measurements and preferences. They cost about
| $20,000 USD. It would be cool to have this process
| automated and affordable to the masses.
| scoofy wrote:
| A huge part of the tailoring business are making small
| adjustments to cheap clothing to get them 90% of the way
| to bespoke.
|
| If you've never done it, I strongly recommend getting
| your jackets tailored. Even a casual jacket will fit and
| look non-trivially better for $50-$100 and an afternoon
| at your local tailor. You can even get things like
| cycling gear tailored.
| ansgri wrote:
| Absolutely. Design parametric families of patterns, 3d-scan
| the person, let customer adjust with live preview, laser
| cut, then fully automated or low-skill assembly. Probably
| not currently economical like many things involving
| physical world manipulation, but without obvious
| roadblocks.
| kardashev8 wrote:
| could you automate a BJJ coach?
| AntiDyatlov wrote:
| I mean, if AI doesn't stall out, maybe there will be BJJ
| bots in 10 years.
| handzhiev wrote:
| Who's going to pay for a BJJ coach when nearly everyone is
| out of job?
| pphysch wrote:
| Even if it does, there will probably be a prolonged economic
| period where robots are doing dangerous/messy stuff like
| welding, plumbing but there is a human master guiding them
| from a few yards away, via prompts, controllers, etc. More of
| a semi-autonomous power tool than an fully autonomous master
| that is delivered by drone on-demand. Scalability is still a
| ways off.
| layer8 wrote:
| Do you expect we'll have AGA, artificial general automation?
| lukan wrote:
| I do. But it will take some time to get there.
| jimbokun wrote:
| I don't see anything stopping that from happening in the
| very near future.
| UltraSane wrote:
| That is the ultimate goal. We are very far from it for many
| jobs.
| scoofy wrote:
| If we get AGI and fully autonomous robot assistants, we'll
| live in a post scarcity world like Star Trek, or somebody in
| control the robots will use them to enslave all of
| humanity... so... high variance outcome could go either way.
| agentifysh wrote:
| This seems overly pessimistic
|
| As scalability becomes more accessible like with coding agents
|
| The less it becomes about money but distribution
|
| While money can buy you the latter it may not compound to
| something that is sustainable
| pier25 wrote:
| > _if you are going to do something for a living, make sure it
| is NOT scalable_
|
| I guess it also means that if you build something for a niche
| audience then big companies will never be interested in it.
| rwbt wrote:
| That's not really a bad thing, IMHO. Many people successfully
| make a living creating niche products.
| InexSquirrel wrote:
| I wouldn't say it's not really a bad thing, I think it's a
| very good thing. There are many people now making
| incredibly niche products that have very good lives -
| making more than enough money for themselves doing
| interesting work engaging with customers that are
| passionate about their field.
|
| Sounds like a great life to me.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| I like doing things for big companies that they actually
| could afford easily, but their costs are so high it's a
| better deal to have me do it.
|
| One of my favorite niches :)
|
| Some clients are good enough at math to figure it out, and
| you don't actually need that many of them if they are big
| enough.
| pier25 wrote:
| how do you approach big companies to offer them these
| custom niche services?
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| Good question.
|
| One early approach when starting to build a reputation is
| to work as a subcontractor to a less-big company who has
| already gone through everything to be on the approved-
| vendor list of the massive corporation.
|
| Even better if the less-big company is a private company
| and the biggie is public.
|
| A private company will be able to figure out the benefit
| from your work better than most, and hopefully profit
| from it.
|
| I like it when every time I invoice a client, they are
| making money at the same time, whether they are making it
| from me is not always necessary if I am participating in
| an overall money-making process they are going through.
| Especially routinely. It's just fine to be a very small
| participant in lots of activity going on between the big-
| shots.
|
| Big companies can have so much work and be able to pay so
| well that your position can be to merely absorb the
| overflow from the primary contractor, even if you do not
| yet have a unique offering.
|
| Then it's good to build into your exclusive-but-related
| niche, which would be intended for a different division
| of the biggie and expect it to languish unless your
| already-established client can use that too.
|
| Eventually after you finally get to meet the right person
| in the target corporate division, it will be after you
| have already been doing work for that same corporation
| through the approved primary contractor.
|
| By this point you've already been doing critical work for
| that corporation exactly like they need, that you can be
| proud of and point to, and it can be a whole lot more
| likely to become an approved vendor yourself. From which
| position you can finally negotiate fees directly with the
| most well-heeled corporate source, this would be the
| first time if you were only working for other primary
| contractors until then.
|
| Ideally you will then be invoicing a different _office_
| of the same corporation that you were subcontracting
| under, there will be no conflict of interest, and you can
| continue working for the original primary contractor too.
|
| And your most promising niche finally gets to launch with
| about as much upside as it can get.
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| I'm sure someone else on Etsy will undercut your price if you
| sell more than a few.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| Probably until a copyright vulture comes along and nukes
| it.
| salawat wrote:
| Given the success of copyright cultures in fending off
| the most blatant, unambiguous case of copyright violation
| in human history, (AI), I would not put your money there.
| gzread wrote:
| That's also the advice of the founder of this website, but not
| his investment firm since it's looking for moonshots.
| https://paulgraham.com/ds.html
| ineedasername wrote:
| That seems like reasonable advice until you realize you have no
| idea what will and will not scale in a few years, and there's
| only so many tailors/plumbers/welders/etc.
|
| What it really comes down to is these options as more work gets
| automated:
|
| 1) New jobs doing different things that weren't done before
|
| 2) Same jobs but shorter hours so "full time" with a salary to
| match starts to look more like 4 days, or 5 hours/day, or
| something.
|
| 3) Lots of unemployment
|
| These can happen in a lot of different combinations, they can
| come wrapped up in different ways, and unequally for different
| segments of the workforce, but there's limited elasticity in
| most areas where additional people piling into the field would
| create more demand rather than glut the supply to the
| supplier's detriment.
| scoofy wrote:
| The _point_ of doing something non-scalable is that you can
| enter and exit the market fairly easily. You don 't _need_ to
| be a tailor your whole life. You can make a living as a
| barber, electrician, teacher, or nurse.
|
| I'm not saying it's _easy_! It 's hard as hell. It sucks when
| your job gets automated. I'm just saying that aiming for
| something non-scalable means you're not always tilting at
| windmills, and the game _can 't_ be rigged against you.
| XorNot wrote:
| All of those professions you've listed require about half a
| decade of dedicated training to be legally allowed to
| practice. For example an electrician takes like 7 years to
| become qualified, that's a full time apprenticeship, and it
| pays badly in the meantime.
|
| A fact endlessly annoying to electrical engineers who
| legally can design their houses power system but not work
| on it.
|
| (I mean I think a barber is quicker, but one of that list
| is also not like the others)
| scoofy wrote:
| I'm not trying to say 'everything is fine, nothing bad is
| happening a world of recurring technology and industrial
| revolutions.' It's not. The way things are set up is bad.
|
| My point is the author writes a column about how GPTs are
| ruining the ability for people to make scalable products,
| because when everyone can make one, nobody cares... my
| point is that that's not the result of GPTs. It's a
| result of survivorship bias skewing how we look at
| things.
|
| When your business is a flywheel than needs to be running
| to provide a benefit to each user, then getting that
| flywheel running is a huge problem. The vast majority of
| non-scalable businesses, almost by definition, provide
| each customer with a benefit regardless of whether anyone
| else uses it. That is how you create basic, word-of-
| mouth, free "earned" marketing.
| noosphr wrote:
| Switching jobs from electrician to teacher to nurse will
| take around 3 to 5 years of education or apprenticeship in
| most countries. It also requires new licenses or
| certificates if you ever move country.
| scoofy wrote:
| I'm trying to respond to this stuff in good faith. Yes, I
| agree with you. I don't see how this is relevant to the
| argument. If you are in a non-scalable industry that gets
| taken over by technology, that sucks. My point was being
| in the startup game in the first place.
|
| "Becoming a teacher" takes years.
|
| "Becoming a successful scalable business" has no known
| time frame. It either happens or it doesn't. And whether
| it does is not particularly correlated to how much time
| or effort you spend on it.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| Almost typed the same thing in different words at the
| same time :)
|
| Your above point can not be upvoted enough.
|
| You do have to wonder what some people are thinking ;)
|
| Good message from Taleb too, he may not be the most
| likeable or agreeable person in the world, but he is
| quite brilliant at synthesizing logical meaning from the
| inputs he does have.
| scoofy wrote:
| People not liking Taleb and then dismissing him because
| he can be rude has always been one of the strangest
| things that so many people do.
|
| I remember about halfway through _Skin in the Game_ ,
| after being put off by most of what I'd been reading,
| that the gestalt shift happened and it finally clicked.
| It's probably one of the best texts I've ever read on a
| specific type of conservatism. I don't _like_ that I
| agreed with it, but the guy makes a very, very convincing
| argument.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| Where would we be without Linus anyway ;)
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| >Switching jobs from electrician to teacher to nurse
|
| The point is _not_ to do that ever.
|
| Just gain _one_ of the skills _like that_ and plant it
| firmly on your resume, before trying anything more risky.
|
| Like starting a business, which might not actually cost
| as much or take as long to get a license.
|
| And with no further delay needed before any future
| pivots, when you might need quick alternatives most.
|
| Even if you only go back to teaching for a while to
| regroup.
| throwaway-11-1 wrote:
| I keep hearing about the potential of "new jobs" coming from
| ai but can anyone actually describe one? My gut says they
| will be something similar to converting middle class
| knowledge workers to do DoorDash drivers or trained artists
| becoming dog groomers. What a cool future, at least my
| parent's can watch racist ai slop videos on their iPads.
| Ntrails wrote:
| It's simply a case of looking back and deciding this
| technical revolution is identical to the ones preceding it.
| Thus jobs destroyed will be replaced with new jobs, it
| always happens that way.
|
| Of course past performance is no guarantee of future
| success...
| a_better_world wrote:
| how good was Taleb at following his own advice? Had he tested
| it? As I recall he is pretty big on "skin in the game' as his
| differentiator.
| laurex wrote:
| I'm excited for a future where the technologist is like the
| tailor in their community. Scaling software has created a host
| of 'product traps' and there is no need for that for the vast
| number of activities people do aided by technology.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| Is providing scalable products at a cheaper price scalable? If
| so, can it hurry up and scale? This is a bit of a paradox.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| Who cares? He's arguing about providing something that is not
| scalable: so whatever happens to things that are scalable
| ain't the topic.
| laffOr wrote:
| Being a tailor is scalable, that's way there are way, way more
| cheap machine produced clothes today than in the past. Surely
| he did not miss that the textile industry was at the core of
| industrial revolution. So being a tailor is more like a post-
| scaling job - the automation has already happened and now there
| are only remnants left.
|
| But how can you be sure a job is peak-automated? A few years
| ago, I would have said musicians are post-scaling - way fewer
| musicians jobs now that you can play recorded music. But it
| looks like generative AI will hit musicians again. Can some of
| welding be automated? Probably.
| scoofy wrote:
| I mean a tailor who adjusts clothes and occasionally makes
| something bespoke.
|
| Tailors typically operate a launderette and act as middlemen
| to a local dry cleaner.
|
| I'm not talking about a fancy man making clothes for rich
| people, I'm talking about the talented old lady in you
| neighborhood who adjusts your clothing for $50 and runs a
| wash and fold.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| >Can some of welding be automated?
|
| Huge amounts have been doing it for decades.
|
| Manual work pays better than ever though.
|
| And plenty of alterations going on all the time after all
| the automation dust had settled manufacturing most
| fashions, a lot less manual work is of course being done
| but it's still everywhere. You do have to be good or you're
| not going to do half as well as you could though.
|
| The thing is, automation should be expected to slow or
| stall sooner or later, automation's not suitable for every
| little bit of welding or sewing that needs to keep going
| on. Only the most suitable, of course ;)
|
| These are just random examples, if you want to make
| absolutely sure you won't be automated away by the
| internet, build a valuable skill that doesn't depend on the
| internet at all, nor look anywhere near the places where
| automation is emerging that it wasn't doing before.
|
| If you eventually figure out how to automate _that_ skill
| it would be something.
|
| Just like the internet though, there can be extra credit
| for being first :)
|
| One of the most valuable things to be able to build single-
| handedly is something that can not be mass-produced by any
| stretch of the imagination.
|
| You might stick with that alone, or pivot to something with
| more of a financial upside, but you would always have
| something to fall back on if needed. Plus give you less
| worry about taking financial risks than you would have
| been, considering the same resources and/or capital to work
| with.
|
| And on a regular basis revisit how far you can stretch your
| imagination to see if your baseline fallback still doesn't
| look like it will ever be automated in a way that would
| effect you.
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| My mom altered clothing when I was younger - and she darned
| socks too. My M-I-L still sews the occasional seam for
| pants that are too long and were cut for my wife or
| daughters.
|
| But me? I buy a pair of $30 jeans at Costco. If they don't
| fit great, I buy a different pair of $30 jeans. I don't
| spend $50 to have them altered, or take it to a laundrette.
| If it can't be washed in our home washer/dryer, I don't buy
| it. And these days, when a sock gets a hole? I throw it
| away.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| Well, that's why there are so few people doing this full-
| time any more.
|
| But at least they're not going to disappear completely.
|
| And now there's nowhere to go but up :)
|
| They have had the internet a while too, keep in mind a
| select few have gone viral on Etsy while so many SaaS
| things don't return a fraction of their potential.
| scoofy wrote:
| This is an effective strategy if you're a fit model, or
| close to one. If you're within the standard deviation of
| the sizing chart, you'll probably do fine most of the
| time.
|
| I like golf. Most people use a standard shaft. In fact,
| that shaft length _is standard_ because _most people_ use
| it. That doesn 't mean there isn't an entire industry for
| "golf fittings" because "most" people isn't even close to
| everyone.
| laffOr wrote:
| Yes, but this is simply the remnants of the old tailor
| occupation, post automation. The talented old lady would
| have had a lot more business in clothes making in the past,
| no need for a wash & fold.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| >how can you be sure a job is peak-automated?
|
| Probably the best way is to spend a few years working for a
| company where you can get a better picture whether it seems
| that way or not.
| throwaway150 wrote:
| > if you are going to do something for a living, make sure it
| is NOT scalable.
|
| Great advice but difficult to action though.
|
| I mean 10 years back I'd have thought programming is that thing
| which is not scalable. I had every reason to believe that. It
| required skill, experience, ability to stay current, grit for
| debugging hard stuff. Much of it can be automated now.
|
| What can I pick now for a living that is not scalable today
| that some future technology would automate it just as easily.
| HoldOnAMinute wrote:
| >> you'll always be competing against the best, most well
| funded, smartest people in the room
|
| What if your goal is for them to buy you out?
| scoofy wrote:
| There are much less expensive ways of playing the lottery
| than investing a year of you life into an unprofitable
| product that must be scaled to be successful, and only then
| hoping gets bought by a direct competitor.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| Don't compete, complement and start building the relationship
| from the beginning.
|
| Plus, who wants to spend any time competing with the stongest
| contender anyway, especially to get started :)
| amelius wrote:
| > 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.
|
| You mean like opening a restaurant?
|
| Too bad delivery services like Uber Eats totally own the market
| now.
|
| Starting a hotel? Booking.com and Airbnb are there to take your
| profit margins away!
| InexSquirrel wrote:
| I think that delivery services give you bigger market, but
| not intrinsic scale. You're still limited by kitchen size,
| staff numbers, and raw hours you can put into the food.
|
| You can scale the system (say Subway, or even smaller chains
| like Burger Fuel), but also reasonably choose _not_ to scale
| and still do incredibly well (like Michelin star restaurants,
| or the myriad of hyper-famous-locally Japanese eateries, or
| Fergburger in Queenstown).
|
| Someone scaling their own restaurant on the other side of the
| world won't necessarily out compete out (and in the
| overwhelming majority of cases with have no impact at all).
| Despite fast food joints all over the place, I still see
| small cafes, individual eateries, etc performing well (I
| mean, as well as hospitality can be).
|
| Maybe it's worth expanding the definition of > make sure it
| is NOT scalable < to include 'make sure it's not
| automatable'?
| amelius wrote:
| The problem is that any market can be taken over by someone
| with deep pockets (or investors making a pile of money).
| They just make sure they are the "go-to place" for
| consumers to access the market. By marketing the hell out
| of it, by making apps, abusing power in other markets (see
| platforms), etc.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| > if you are going to do something for a living, make sure it
| is NOT scalable
|
| You need to consider both horizontal and vertical scaling.
| Being a bespoke tailor may not scale vertically, but it can
| scale horizontally. If you have too many people pick up
| tailoring, you might run out of neighborhoods without
| competitors.
| mrkpdl wrote:
| I used to look at my local dry cleaner and think that it had to
| be the most stable business going - it couldn't be replaced by
| a computer. Then Covid hit, work from home took off, and the
| dry cleaner went out of business. Computers came for the dry
| cleaner, not by cleaning clothes but by eliminating the need
| for dress codes.
| webel0 wrote:
| Welding is coming along. Ever heard of Path Robotics? That's
| high-mix, high-complexity welds. (There are a lot of other,
| less-sophisticated welding robots out there.) The biggest moat
| for a welder right now is special certifications to be able to
| do welds on submarines, etc.
| gorjusborg wrote:
| These 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 wrote:
| Are you not concerned about getting a copyright strike from the
| fashion brand?
|
| https://kith.com/
| yodon wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Now you have to make something actually new.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| It 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 wrote:
| I 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/
| however, is broken.
|
| Broken Git link:
| https://github.com/elliotbonneville/elliotbonneville.com
| chatmasta wrote:
| Why 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| soulchild37 wrote:
| This 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 wrote:
| It 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 wrote:
| Ironically, 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 wrote:
| Not 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 wrote:
| This whole thread is classic HN. Someone uses a random example to
| illustrate a point, and the rest of the post is about that.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| One 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 wrote:
| What's wrong with screenshots? Those X widgets are cancer.
| cryptonector wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| AI 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 wrote:
| > 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
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