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What are tarpit ideas in the AI era?

3 points by maxim_bg ↗ HN
For those unfamiliar with the term, tarpit ideas are ideas that always attract lots of founders but never really work. They usually sound amazing on paper. Some examples from before AI include restaurant recommendation apps or apps that help you split bills.

My current vision of AI tarpit ideas: - AI chatbots that combine multiple models - Code review agents - Old tarpit ideas now powered by AI - Ad generators

Do you have any other ideas to add? Or do you think it's too early to define tarpit ideas for the AI era?

4 comments

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animuchan
I think there's like the meta-bad AI usage idea, in which all other tarpit ideas take root.

"Let's outsource critical decision making to a language model."

Small scale of this can be seen when attempting to single-shot a whole SaaS by the means of a severely underspecified prompt. This is the first-order blind reliance situation: our SaaS sure is implemented in some way.

Really fiery tarpits put the LLM higher in the stack: let the language model decide what the feature should be. Our SaaS sure does something in some way.

Having a human in the loop at all times doesn't scale. Not having a human scales, but doesn't work.

PaulHoule
I think “cases where AI lets you escape an old tarpit” are interesting even if they are likely to remain tarpits.
maxim_bg
another one probably "ai cold outbound"
Shakun_
how ai chatbots that combine multiple models is a tarpit idea?