alt Hacker NewsAnother nail in the coffin for apps that depend on AI APIs because the AI companies themselves are working on products using their own APIs (unless you can make the UX significantly better). UX now seems like the prime motivator when building apps.
Replies
reeredfdfdf • last Thursday at 6:59 AM
Yep, building a wrapper for LLM API is never going to build a sustainable business, there's absolutely zero moat. You need more, preferably physical world elements / something else that increases the switching costs.
LLMs themselves are the coffin for most apps, because by its very nature, AI subsumes products.
UX is not going to be a prime motivator, because the product itself is the very thing that stands between user and the thing they want. UX-wise, for most software, it's better for users to have all these products to be reduced to tool calls for AI agents, accessible via a single interface.
The very concept of product itself is limiting users to interactions allowed by the product vendor[0] - meanwhile, used as tools for AI agents allows them to be combined in ways user need[1].
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[0] - Something that, thanks to move to the web and switching data exchange model from "saving files" to "sharing documents", became the way for SaaS businesses to make money by taking user data hostage - a raison d'être for many products. AI integration threatens that.
[1] - And vendors would very much like users to not be able to. There's going to be some interesting fights here, as general-purpose AI tools are an existential threat to most of the software industry itself.