> Your company can scream to anyone that listens that all the competition is AI SLOP, but when hundreds of companies are pitching the same solution, your one voice will get lost.
If you cannot out compete "AI SLOP" on merit over time (uptime? accuracy? dataloss?), then the AI SLOP is not actually sloppy...
If your runway runs out before you can prove your merit over that timeframe, but you are convinced that the AI is slop, then you should ship the slop first and pivot onec you get $$ but before you get overwhelmed with tech depth.
Personally, I love that I can finally out compete companies with reams of developer teams. Unlike many posters here, I was limited by the time (and mental space) it takes to do the actual writing.
Bullshit. Practically an AI slop article itself. The rest of us actually building products know reality is different because we’re intimately familiar with our competitors and their limitations.
Copying and playing catch up was possible before AI.
I really wish we could downvote submissions like this. It adds nothing of meaning to the discussion of the subtleties of competitive product development.
Maybe it's just that the AI noise has been cranked to 11, but it sure feels like there's something fundamentally different from building and selling software today vs the last time I was building new products back in 2015. A decade is a long time, but it didn't feel nearly so weird even as recently as 2021 / 2022. That makes me think it's the AI slop noise, but maybe I'm incorrect.
> Where a great idea in a space once had 5-10 competitors, hundreds now appear - all competing for attention. Big companies used to move slowly, but now a ragtag team of two developers at a large firm can whip up something that looks top-of-market to the untrained eye in a matter of weeks.
Perhaps I'm out of touch, but I haven't seen this explosion of software competition. I'd LOVE to see some new competitors for MS Office, Gmail, Workday, Jira, EPIC, Salesforce, WebKit, Mint, etc etc but it doesn't seem to be happening.
You could build the most technically perfect MS Office competitor and still get zero users.
It's not about quality, it's market share, vendor lock-in, people being set in their ways and refusing to change from a known thing in general.
Jira had to get REALLY bad before we switched to Linear for example - and there are still growing pains from heavy Jira users who had very specific ways of working.
Can't say I agree with this article at all. This has not been my experience.
I don't quite know how to articulate this well, but there's something that I'd call a "complexity cliff" in the software business: if you want to compete in certain spaces, you need to build very complex software (even if the software, to the user, is easy to use). And while AI tools can assist you in the construction of this software, it cannot be "vibe coded" or copied whole-cloth - complexity, scale, and reliability requirements are far too great and your potential customer base will not tolerate you fumbling around.
You eventually reach a point where there are no blog posts or stackoverflow questions that walk you through step-by-step how to make this stuff happen. It's the kind of stuff that your company and maybe a few dozen others are trying to build - and of those few dozen, less than 10 are seeing actual success.
This article is based on vibes just like the trends it hypothesizes.
To pick just one claim:
“Big companies used to move slowly, but now a ragtag team of two developers at a large firm can whip up something that looks top-of-market to the untrained eye in a matter of weeks.”
This is just pure speculation with no consideration of success or longevity. Big companies are going faster now? Where? Which ones?
AI coding allows you to build prototypes quickly. All the reasons big companies are slow haven’t budged.
I see this as a great thing. Venture Capital has been way too focused on software for a long time. It’s time for the money in tech to start flowing to other things like hardware, biotech, etc. we’ve seen this start happening for a little while already with companies like Anduril, but hopefully it will continue accelerating because of this.
Vibe coded apps might do OK in the $5/mo product space (assuming people pay that instead of staying in the free tier) but will fall apart for anything even resembling B2B.
Buying business tools comes with the expectation of support and customization, the complexities of which become unmanageable when the lead developer is AI.
You don't hear much about WYSIWYG app builder platforms like Bubble.io anymore because once the hype subsided, it was clear that it wasn't scalable beyond extremely limited CRUD functionality.
I would add hardware products to that list. While they also have become somewhat easier and cheaper to create, the threshold is still much higher than for software and SaaS products.
I completely disagree. "Be Different" was never an actual selling point. Being "simple and effective" for the user was and still is.
While one can vibe-code simple CRUD at scale, one can not vibe-code the complex infrastructural coordination, security guardrails, and reliability externalities that maintain an effective business model at scale.
there's this things that happens where blog boys love to say Big Important Stuff (that isn't true) and in the 1% chance that it becomes true they point back on it and say "I am a goddamned genius" and if it hits the 99% no one remembers their bullshit.
Buying a vibe coded app is like buying something that looks like what you want from AliExpress. There's a small chance it might be good enough for your needs and you get a good deal. I might buy some small thing there that I don't care much about, or take a chance if I can't find anything close anywhere else. But for things I do care about I'll go through curated channels to filter out the fluff.
I guess the argument they make for why "Be Different" doesnt work any more is because people can use AI to copy it.
I actually think AI just makes products converge onto whatever the AI averages out to.
It would be interesting to see this explored further. It seems like being different might actually have an even more pronounced effect now (for good or bad).
>The result is a Cambrian explosion of software launches.
Citation needed. There was a HN post a few weeks ago (I've lost it since) that said there isn't actually a measurable increase in App Store submissions and other such metrics to indicate that more software applications are being launched, in the last few years.
Also, in my view one of the most overlooked moats that incumbent software companies have is product quality. You can't upset Uber and Lyft primarily because you don't have the resources/skills to build an app of that quality (and your VC doesn't trust you can build one even given the resources). It's not due to business dev, marketing or "network effect" reasons; a lot of drivers tag-team both Uber and Lyft anyway, it doesn't cost them anything to onboard into a 3rd app even if it initially yields them 1 passenger a week.
32 comments
[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 44.2 ms ] threadIf you cannot out compete "AI SLOP" on merit over time (uptime? accuracy? dataloss?), then the AI SLOP is not actually sloppy...
If your runway runs out before you can prove your merit over that timeframe, but you are convinced that the AI is slop, then you should ship the slop first and pivot onec you get $$ but before you get overwhelmed with tech depth.
Personally, I love that I can finally out compete companies with reams of developer teams. Unlike many posters here, I was limited by the time (and mental space) it takes to do the actual writing.
Copying and playing catch up was possible before AI.
I really wish we could downvote submissions like this. It adds nothing of meaning to the discussion of the subtleties of competitive product development.
Maybe it's just that the AI noise has been cranked to 11, but it sure feels like there's something fundamentally different from building and selling software today vs the last time I was building new products back in 2015. A decade is a long time, but it didn't feel nearly so weird even as recently as 2021 / 2022. That makes me think it's the AI slop noise, but maybe I'm incorrect.
Perhaps I'm out of touch, but I haven't seen this explosion of software competition. I'd LOVE to see some new competitors for MS Office, Gmail, Workday, Jira, EPIC, Salesforce, WebKit, Mint, etc etc but it doesn't seem to be happening.
It's not about quality, it's market share, vendor lock-in, people being set in their ways and refusing to change from a known thing in general.
Jira had to get REALLY bad before we switched to Linear for example - and there are still growing pains from heavy Jira users who had very specific ways of working.
I don't quite know how to articulate this well, but there's something that I'd call a "complexity cliff" in the software business: if you want to compete in certain spaces, you need to build very complex software (even if the software, to the user, is easy to use). And while AI tools can assist you in the construction of this software, it cannot be "vibe coded" or copied whole-cloth - complexity, scale, and reliability requirements are far too great and your potential customer base will not tolerate you fumbling around.
You eventually reach a point where there are no blog posts or stackoverflow questions that walk you through step-by-step how to make this stuff happen. It's the kind of stuff that your company and maybe a few dozen others are trying to build - and of those few dozen, less than 10 are seeing actual success.
To pick just one claim:
“Big companies used to move slowly, but now a ragtag team of two developers at a large firm can whip up something that looks top-of-market to the untrained eye in a matter of weeks.”
This is just pure speculation with no consideration of success or longevity. Big companies are going faster now? Where? Which ones?
AI coding allows you to build prototypes quickly. All the reasons big companies are slow haven’t budged.
This software... Is it in the room with us right now?
This article feels like it is targeted at drop shippers, competing on brand or maybe derivative features, rather than ideas.
Buying business tools comes with the expectation of support and customization, the complexities of which become unmanageable when the lead developer is AI.
You don't hear much about WYSIWYG app builder platforms like Bubble.io anymore because once the hype subsided, it was clear that it wasn't scalable beyond extremely limited CRUD functionality.
I would add hardware products to that list. While they also have become somewhat easier and cheaper to create, the threshold is still much higher than for software and SaaS products.
While one can vibe-code simple CRUD at scale, one can not vibe-code the complex infrastructural coordination, security guardrails, and reliability externalities that maintain an effective business model at scale.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lehman's_laws_of_software_evol...
AI Slop only has relevance to those that imagine meaning in syntactically correct nonsense. =3
I actually think AI just makes products converge onto whatever the AI averages out to.
It would be interesting to see this explored further. It seems like being different might actually have an even more pronounced effect now (for good or bad).
The easier it is to make a software product, the harder it will be to differentiate between what’s good and what’s hastily assembled.
Citation needed. There was a HN post a few weeks ago (I've lost it since) that said there isn't actually a measurable increase in App Store submissions and other such metrics to indicate that more software applications are being launched, in the last few years.
Also, in my view one of the most overlooked moats that incumbent software companies have is product quality. You can't upset Uber and Lyft primarily because you don't have the resources/skills to build an app of that quality (and your VC doesn't trust you can build one even given the resources). It's not due to business dev, marketing or "network effect" reasons; a lot of drivers tag-team both Uber and Lyft anyway, it doesn't cost them anything to onboard into a 3rd app even if it initially yields them 1 passenger a week.