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Comment by adevalois | Hacker News Reader

The startup landscape has also changed noticeable compared to 5 or 10 years ago. A team of smart/credible people could get funding for an idea and build a product + publish, knowing there was a six month lead time for anyone to copy them and ship. These days, the barrier to ship code is zero. People can copy your business over a weekend, so there is much more urgency to establish product market fit and build a “moat”. Publishing timelines are now at odds with the pace of go-to-market and VC funding timelines.

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I think in theory this is true but in practice I don't see loads more good apps or products. There's a paradox here I think. I just don't see loads of quality competitors popping up I actually think it makes building something harder because the barrier to entry just gets higher somehow.

I think the revolution is more of a gradual thing than an overnight one. New features and more complex apps in days or weeks instead of months. I think the world will be a much different place in 10 years than it is now, but it will be a gradual change rather than the overnight switch flip some AI maximalists would have you believe.

At my company, AI has had a huge positive impact in helping us manage technical debt that we just didn't have time to deal with before. This simple thing will have a compounding efficiency and profitability effect over the next several years.

The other thing that we have found is that AI coding abilities can crank out features faster than we can provide human support to our customers using said features. We have feature PRs that have been open for months without being merged because our company does not have the human bandwidth to provide support for them. In case you can't tell, we prioritize human support and individual connection with our customers. We actually value them.

As with all human endeavours, as the tooling gets better the expectation for a launch/product/feature increases dramatically too. I probably do 3-5x the features I used to before AI, yet there's still more to do. I'm not running out of work but making incredible progress on features that save the place I work at weeks and weeks of time every month which frees people up to do more of the other things. It still takes time to build and check and test things though.

it goes to show that, despite what we want to think, developers just aren't that important. The code is maybe 10% of what it takes to make a business, even a software tech business, a success. So whether it's human generated or LLM generated, the code is just one slice of the pie that has to be complete and effective to make a product successful in the market.

Over the weekend, I analyzed public YouTube tutorials of 4 SaaS products in the same domain. Then I asked the coding agent to define an API where they converge — prior art. Today I'm working on creating dashboards that won't touch anyone's copyright or IP.

A couple of days ago, something interesting happened. The agent works in an iteration loop where each iteration is an endpoint. I let it run overnight. In the morning it was still cranking away even though it had finished all the API endpoints. It had found a changelog from one of the companies listing every single feature and bug, and decided on its own to implement every item as an iteration.

We are 2 to 3 months away from coding agents replicating solving the edge cases of most SaaS applications.

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