Anyhow, I expect this trend of shortening product lifespan to continue even further down. Or maybe, at some point people will realised that there are no users for their products as every user can "build" their own and custom product. Leaving us with a dozen huge platforms that host and help you build those apps. Until then - it's a crazy gold rush and a lot of makers are abandoning their empty buckets.
Instead, I'm stripping back to basics, building small tools to solve specific problems, and find myself vastly preferring established software with a track record of keeping feature-bloat down and the problem-space focused.
I decided that I don't want a private life that needs GANTT charts or org mode for interesting projects. After half a dozen of time management books I realized that this is just another form of procrastinating: * reading a lot about time management * overcomplex tooling * shuffling time slots in a calendar
The solution is a simple (check) list as a reminder. Calendar only for hard deadlines. Plus "just do it" attitude. The rest will follow. Or not, if life is otherwise too busy -- which I simply accepted.
The results don't differ much from before. Except: less time wasted with software.
Nothing about this statistic supports this claim. Maybe, actually, features aren't free, and even with a glamorous HN marketing blitz, nobody wants to use the dogshit software LLMs produce. Everyone can build "features" for free, if "features" is an alias for "a pile of 100 bugs with some makeup on it to make it look like a feature if you squint at it from a distance".
We're seeing it more and more. Someone whips out an app independently, launches it, then says, "How do I find users?", "Why does nobody use my app?" With the answer always being the same - they skipped the step of actually talking to potential users before coding.
So we see what is being described - lots of throwaway projects.
However I think there will be a price to pay building software without the "trough of sorrow" phase stressing over the product and market fit and limping away with lessons learned - the way you build software and the problems you solve are basically confined to a safe space, a bubble of yourself + your AI agents and a brief moment of suspense submitting to reddit or whatever, and you risk learning nothing at all to improve your next projects and higher-volume won't help that.
In the same vein, I am trying not to feel dismayed as I venture into the SaaS landscape in a bid to decouple myself from employment and you cannot help but feel your product is doomed before it even launches given people can build their own solutions.
You just need to remember, not everyone is as technical as the people here and those individuals still require solutions to problems.
It's tiring hearing people say "oh well I'll just build it instead" yeah but is it maintainable? Does it scale? Do you know how your data is handled and saved?
One vibe-coded app is no better than other, or if it's better - not for long. So why would anyone invest in product that is going to be superseded in a few months/weeks/days?
I have no idea how correct the code is or what I'd do with this, and I have no plans to publish it for those reasons.
It will need licences, or content others could not deliver. Really something you can’t clone that fast.
I think about Netflix, Spotify, Amazon. You can clone all this platforms but will never have the rights, artists or the logistics for example.
I think distribution become more important than ever. And having something you can’t clone on day 1. I think about Amazon, Netflix, Spotify.
You can clone the platforms but not the licences, artists logistic etc…
Maybe the technical stuff is more accessible then it was beforehand but the thousands of hours of the other stuff that leads to good software is still thousands of hours.
Quality has become less work, but only by a little.
But this doesn't mean people value the craftsmanship because they never did before...
It's always been simply a popularity contest and now it's that more than ever.
The question is, why are you spending your time building things? Is it to make things that are finely crafted? Is it the road to wealth? As a tool to get other work done? Just make sure you have an answer.
It's your time after all...
Frankly AI is making people even lazier than before, which means that anyone willing to stick around and be consistent is probably the winner.
software has always been a popularity contest
That doesn't track at all.
When the movie and music industries were pumping out their biggest hits, the production cost was high. Profit may be higher now in the modern era while costs are lower, but would you honestly (seriously honestly please) call most of the remake/homage slop we've had since the late 2000s "hits"? This simply isn't survivorship bias either. Just look at what music stands the test of time on youtube and spotify or gets people at least smiling in real life. Look at the variety of genres too. Look at when we had the highest density of solid audience ratings for even run-of-the-mill or cult movies.
You can say all you want that these industries "always did this" and insist that when you look at your own list of favorites it's just because you're getting old, but that's more obviously denial as the years of this bullshit have racked up. Even the artists agree even when they're finding success at this game, and they have the same resentment. Younger people don't even care about movies and music anymore while older people desperately pay and hope for new stuff like it's another pull of the increasingly rigged slot machine. It's not even that younger people are more interested in social media. That excuse is just as clearly false when you see how hard they go on retro styles and what they also have saved on playlists.
The movie studio business model depends on putting out a whole lot of stuff and having a few big hits earn enough to cover the losses from the flops.
Now that software is basically "dollars in, software out", companies will probably put out a lot more software. Similar to movie studios, most of this software will not hit, but the few things that do hit can earn back the costs of the things that do not.
In business, some of the most reliable returns come from predicting when the wheels fall off and riding that sucker until the bitter end. The "hits" don't matter anymore to that kind of business. The area under that tail part of the curve can be much larger than the area under the earlier peaks when consumers were most enthusiastic.