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Comment by asnyder | Hacker News Reader

That's always been the justification to skip this phase :). Tools have just changed. One-person to small-team wonders that could code and build directly made the same arguments.

My point isn't to stitch things to Figma, that's abhorrent to me as well. My point is to not get bogged down on the implementation details, in this case an actually working DB, those tables, etc, but rather less fidelity actual full flow concepts that can be generated and iterated.

Then that can be fed into a magic genie GPT that generates the front-end, back-end, and all that good jazz.

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If the effort to produce websites goes tends to zero, the value of websites will surely tend to zero. Either issues with security and maintainability will be a break on this tendency or we will get to a point where generating a custom website will be something trivial that will be done on demand.

The thing is, the cost of producing websites is already pretty low, but the value of websites mostly derives from network effects. So a rising flood of micro crud saas products will not be likely to generate much added value. And since interoperability will drive complexity, and transformer based LLMs are inherently limited at compositional tasks, any unforeseen value tapped by these extra websites will likely be offset by the maintainability and security breaks I mentioned. And because there is a delay in this signal, there is likely to be a bullwhip effect: an explosion of sites now and a burnout in a couple of years in which a lot of people will get severely turned off by the whole experience.

If you need a website that needs prototyping in 2025, you're probably doing it wrong (eg launch on insta or something). But anyway, you can vibe iterate, and not just small iterations, but wholesale different value props and approaches, so why not. it's tangible, easier to test, and you get more meaningful feedback. I do this and it's 3-4x faster than working with a designer. And to be sure, we're not making websites, but protyping features into a saas app to test with users and ourselves.

The value of Amazon.com is not the cost to produce the HTML and JavaScript you see when you visit that website. It is a component of the Amazon business, and to Amazon it is extremely valuable, and to everyone else it would be almost worthless.

If someone has the idea for the next Amazon, as well as everything else you need beyond the idea, and tools like Supabase and Lovable allow them to get it off the ground, those tools are incredibly valuable to that person.

If someone’s ideas are worthless, their websites will be worthless.

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