my feelings, perhaps wrong - but all this bs about fascists, white males, i've heard it recently is kind of there... "fascist white male, slapping his name and his logo on her work" sounds lot of like "bunch of dhh's dotfiles called distro"
That is an understatement! And not only that, "simple" is relative. The common saying that gets push back is "Do the simplest thing possible." People always seem to ignore the "possible" part of that phrase. Forgive me for being a little cute here, but a complex solution is simpler than a really complex solution.
Depends on what you mean by "simple". In my head, specifically with software, simple is defined as "does less", which is definitely somewhat easier to make, than a complex program that "does more".
The output is quite astonishing and makes me wonder if Figma and pure software companies could be in trouble with GPT-6 Astra vibecoding full working clones of products in minutes.
If it's truly trivial to build a clone then people will just build their own apps to use themselves. In a couple of years regardless of how good your network it won't be possible to launch a successful SaaS app is unless it has a real moat. Distribution and network won't help, because you'll be competing with people prompting for a bespoke app that runs locally for free.
Yes people can make their own apps and run them locally. Yes there is competition. But all of this is assuming that the ai is not generating slop. For now atleast that is the case for many products. The products that are well established won’t get eliminated because they have adoption.
The products that are well established won’t get eliminated because they have adoption.
An existing customer base can be a moat if there's an effect from scale, like a game where you need there to be people on a server to make it fun, sure. In the case of an app like Figma though having more customers than someone else is irrelevant to the product.
If someone can make a passable clone that does the part they need they have no reason to stay on the product, so they won't. Even the most popular SaaS products are facing a very real threat from AI unless they're either something that benefits from more users, something in a regulated industry that people can't just run even if they can copy it, or something that has a secret sauce that can be kept a secret.
reply