Large companies still have compute resources and customer bases. For startup, users are expecting open source and free software. Posts of subscription or one-time purchase software on Reddit will get tons of downvotes instantly.
It's a bit like with books: 10+ years ago I could have trusted a book from a new author I never heard about just because the large effort of getting published was hinting that the author is likely qualified. Now, hell no.
When the barrier to publish drops to zero, the barrier to gain trust skyrockets.
I expect a much greater emphasis on contractual performance and liability now that the customer has even less reason to trust that a vendor is doing the right thing.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
Large companies aren't going to chase every opportunity.
For example, a personal computer operating system that runs all your existing programs at full speed but doesn’t crash all the time and the ability to run a virtual machine on an x86 PC both took as long as they did to get to market primarily due to the technical difficulty, not because it was hard to find people ready to pay for them. Those kinds of hard coding problems are less plentiful, or at least less obvious today.
People who say coding wasn't the hard part have never had to refactor a legacy system without LLM assistance and it shows.
The code was never the hard part.
I remember there was a debate in my company on execution vs idea. Execution being writing code, the process that comes with it, and the idea being the understanding, market fit. Both sides had good arguments.
Hiring a software team to build an idea was extremely expensive and risky before ChatGPT. That's why most businesses in the world did not have a software engineering team.
Yes for the people who never coded, that was not the hardest part. We always had more ideamen than programmers, they could never execute anything. If code was never the hard part, vibecoding wouldn't be so popular.
The tech is not there yet. It may not be ready for many years.
An LLM is just a really fancy nail gun to replace hammers. Much faster nailing, but you need to hold it right to not shoot yourself in the foot.
Of course, you might say: "Nowadays, LLMs are so cheap that everyone can write software." But the fact is, while everyone can write software, not everyone can write a complete software. And the assumption that "everyone can write software" is currently also incorrect. Not everyone can write software.
So it probably (I mean honestly I believe anything can happen at this point) doesn't mean every business will just start writing all of their own software (cheaper doesn't mean free), the bar for building your own stuff has lowered so there will for sure be more software written for internal use instead of using some off the shelf program.
And there will be more competition among software companies because everyone can now build much more with much less resources.
Everyone just picks the best, because they can. The best often have hidden advantages like tons of funding, so it's actually subsidised.
A bunch of Consultants or agile trainers will come and change how thier teams work.
The goal is to work in a better way but critically an industry standard way so your employees are more fungible.
The product is valuable because everyone else is using it, a moat like social network network effect…
I do still think there is mileage in this post AI, particularly as it changes howbuisness works, people will want to buy that change packaged. But maybe the frontier labs and thier forming walled gardens are the natural home of that package.
And tax return software is a perfect example of where "vibe coding" will go horribly wrong: a superficial tax return is trivial; handling tax rules for every different situation is vastly more complex. (1) You need to codify all the tax rules; (2) You need to do it reliably (which means really understanding how to work with LLMs: harnesses, gates, verification, reviews, etc.); (3) You need a corpus of real-world examples (taken from where?); (4) You need user feedback.
This would be an intensive multi-month project. And that's before even looking at marketing and sales.
Can a competitor race with you? Sure, but only if they're also determined to put in the work.
It takes time, it takes me away from my actual job within my business, and frankly, the bread from the bakery is pretty good.
Customers will pay for something that's of benefit to them. That hasn't changed.
Making consistent and reliable software is even harder.
True that your products will get cloned, but so what? If people start cloning you, that is only a proof that you are on the right track. Keep on cooking guys