Hacker News Reader

I don't think that's true.

I don't think companies are living and dying, by how much code they can produce. Even tech companies.

They absolutely live and die by how quickly they can produce working solutions.

Well, and that's how you get enshittification everywhere. Everyone just cares about time to market, consumers are left to drown among a sea of slop, and honest businesses go down because they cannot stand a chance against slop peddlers flush with VC money.

"working solutions" is the key portion of the comment.

Pareto principle. 20% of the effort will get you the 80% happy enough with a half finished vibecoded slop.

Enshittification happens after the company was quick to deliver a working solution. They successfully captured the market, killed off the competition and now they are ready to start milking the customers who have no other choice.

AI slop can actually help with this, because it reduces the cost of replacing their enshittificated software.

The reason its hard to dethrone Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitch, etc. Is not because it's hard to recreate the software (it may or may not be) it's because of network effects, budgets, etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com