The only moat left is money?

I think there's still value in building quality products, but AI makes it easy to build something that appears good but doesn't actually work that well. It's very difficult to communicate the thought and intentionality that went into a well-designed product in a way that stands out amongst the noise.

If you thought things were hard now just wait for the industrial-scale fully automatic fast-follow bots that will nearly-universally nuke the human-created original product to oblivion in a few years...

> When someone suggested the answer was marketing: > jUsT dO mOrE mArKeTiNg!!!!!

This is a good point. If there's a problem reaching people because the information channel is saturated, the solution is to increase the information? And then everyone reaches the same conclusion and increases.

This destroys the channel. It's not a zero sum game. If everyone markets, nobody will make the sale because the customer will nope out and see nothing.

Building was already not the main obstacle before AI. Distribution was, and remains so - more than ever.

I saw Peter Steinberger whose creativity is huge and made a difference. Yeah you can say he's already rich.

But I also saw many people like him including the author of Flask. Also the author of XcodeBuildMcp, tailwindcss

The definition of a moat is what cannot be bought.

There should be more tax on capital because they are using it against us.

> When creation was hard, skill was the differentiator I don't think people use things because they are hard to make

While building has becomes way cheaper (and probably is going to become even cheaper in the future), is building something exceptional really that much cheaper now?

AI has certainly made it so much simpler to just pump "something" out (slop), but did it actually make building something that went through hundreds and thousands of iterations significantly cheaper?

I also like to think AI is really raising the bar for everybody. In the past, you could easily get away launching a product with a crappy landing page and a couple of bugs here and there, is that still the case? Don't people just expect a perfect landing page at this point (when's the last time anybody specifically talked/ thought about responsiveness?) paired with a flawless onboarding etc.?

I hope this is true, I'm trying to make a multi-agent orchestration thing that looks at grain futures, satellite imagery, news, etc... to trade crypto. I'll probably lose but yeah.

Maybe the guy doing their 9-5 can run many agents to make them money while they work their day job.

Is that a thing, you get hired at some company then you use an agent to work for you, deep fake video calls, cursor code... that would be crazy. Get another job and split your time between agents for minor corrections.

"The value of human thinking is going down."

No! I fundamentally reject this.

The value of unoriginal thinking has gone down. Thinking which is quotidian and pedestrian has become even more worthless than it already was.

The value of true, original human thinking has gone up even higher than it ever has been.

Do we think no new companies will ever succeed now? Of course not. Who, then, will succeed? It will be innovators and original thinkers and those with excellent taste.

Why did stripe make big inroads in developer spaces even if they are in an ultra competitive low margin market? They had excellent taste in developer ergonomics. They won big not because they coded well or fast (though I know pc thinks their speed is a big factor, I think he is mostly incorrect on that) but because they had an actual sense of originality and propriety to their approach! And it resonated.

So many other products are similar. You can massively disrupt a space simply by having an original angle on it that nobody else has had. Look at video games! Perhaps the best example of this is how utterly horribly AAA games have been doing, while indie hits produce instantly timeless entries.

And soon this will be the ONLY thing that still differentiates. Artistic propriety, originality, and taste.

(And, of course, the ever-elusive ability to actually execute that I also don't think LLMs will help with.)

Everyone now have access to a tool that makes them nearly as powerful as only the most creative builders were before.

But these new builders have a tool, they don’t suddenly have a newfound creativity.

I think with time we will stop seeing what we consider AI slop, simply because we know it’s not worth sharing. Instead great creative people will share very impressive things that simply wasn’t possible to build before.

It was always about money. People never cared about new things or innovation. It was always funneled through gatekeepers. The "moat" was a talking point to VC's who are used to 90% of their ventures failing and yet was taken seriously. We seem to forget all the racist jokes about how China will just make a cheaper copy, where were talks about a "moat" then?

I think this was already true but it is becoming a lot more obvious now and the effects of this problem are going to affect a lot more people as we see mass white collar worker unemployment. Some people think with lower costs to make software more software is possible. But you can try to get started building a product only to see an improved AI agent build out your idea cheaply, or a bigger company use capital to copy you and enter the same market, and so on. Also, individuals who are richer can take more risks - the loss of money is not existential for them.

The only real fix is incredibly heavy taxation of income and wealth for the ultra rich individuals and ultra large companies. That is what will break through the money moat and create fair competition.

Saturation of channels due to slop content - doesn't mean that created stuff is not scarce

there's more problems then ever before that need empathetic humans to solve - are you up for the challenge - or you're doing a quick cash grab

due to people using machine gun approaches - spray & pray - we haven't forgotten how scalable human touch is -- yeah at first - you've to do things the manual way - reach out have a conversation - but slowly word spreads around without you spending money on ads | content etc

Have people naturally started sounding like an LLM when they write and talk? To me this article reads not fully human.

It still take me months to build sophisticated things with hard problems at their core.

There’s not the slightest chance an LLM or less than capable developer is whipping this stuff out in a day.

Difficulty is the only true moat. [Astronaut: always has been]

Current examples: esoteric calculations that are not public knowledge; historical data that you collected and someone else didn't; valuable proprietary data; having good taste; having insider knowledge of a niche industry; making physical things; attracting an audience.

Some things that were recently difficult are now easy, but general perception has not caught up. That means there's arbitrage—you can charge the old prices for creating a web app, but execute it in a day. But this arbitrage will not last forever; we will see downward price pressure on anything that is newly easy. So my advice is: take advantage now.

Welp guess I’m done then.

Kind of nice to know I don’t have to blame myself anymore.

People here saying creativity or having a good idea is the moat

You know that if anything you build gets traction, it'll be cloned by 100 people, right?

Is the purpose of space exploration to build rockets? Or is the purpose to deliver things and people into orbit and to other worlds?

Is the purpose of a computer program to use processing, network and memory? Or is it to handle and manipulate information to give results which are useful to people?

Now the moat of having memorized intentionally convoluted and complicated programming languages has been taken away. Exactly like the printing press removed the monopoly on information which was held exclusively by priests and monks.

When tools make a job easier, they open up new markets for people to do and sell things which were too costly to offer before. AI translation alone means that small businesses can open up several markets they didn't have any access to, broadening the number of potential customers immensely.

It's like.. what happens when software becomes a solved problem? Like bricks for construction. There's not 50 million typically highly paid brick design engineers in the world.

I'm no big fan of economists - but if some type of business is seen as highly desirable to be in, and has minimal barriers to entry, then the market will soon be saturated. Expecting otherwise is (at best) wishful thinking.

One thing I've noticed is that there is a very specific set of technologies that attract a very specific set of people. You may have seen these people jump from Bitcoin to altcoins to Ethereum to NFTs; and now to AI. The common thread behind all of these technologies is that they are inherently dehumanizing: as in, they are a means by which ambulatory piles of money can shed the skin they are ordinarily forced to wear and just exist.

AI seems like the odd man out of the group, until you understand the utter horror that is weaponized post-scarcity economics. "The only moat left is money" is the plan. It was always the plan. The goal of AI - or at least, the goal of AI to the cult of people who mindlessly agree with it is to replace humans with pliant digital slaves.

No, it's imagination, same as it ever was.

Software to most of this discussion is a web app with a landing page, a pricing tier, and MRR. That's it. The frame is "product," the metric is "traction," and the canvas is "things people pay $9/month for."

But software is instructions that make matter and energy do things they wouldn't otherwise do. It's the most general-purpose tool humans have ever built. So let's actually think about what's underbuilt:

The whole damn physical world is barely instrumented. Agricultural systems, water infrastructure, building envelopes, soil health, local microclimates. There are farmers making irrigation decisions on vibes. Municipal water systems with no real-time leak detection. Buildings hemorrhaging energy because nobody's modeled their thermal behavior. These aren't apps. They're control systems, and they're mostly missing.

Fabrication and manufacturing are being transformed by CNC/3D printing but the software for designing things to be manufactured is still terrible (and inaccessible!). Generative design that accounts for material properties, toolpath constraints, assembly sequences. CAM software is where word processors were in 1985.

Scientific instruments. A spectrometer is mostly software now. So is a radio telescope. So is a seismograph. Every goddamn thing can be a thermometer (accidentaly!) The gap between "data sensor exists" and "useful scientific instrument" is almost entirely software, and most of that software is written by grad students in unmaintained Python.

Preservation. Some people are doing this with datamuseum.dk. But expand it: there are entire musical traditions, oral histories, craft techniques, ecological knowledge systems that exist in living memory and nowhere else. Software for capturing, encoding, and transmitting that knowledge barely exists. Not "an app for recording grandma," but formal knowledge representation of, say, how a master boatbuilder in Kerala selects wood by sound and flex.

Prosthetics and rehabilitation. This one is big for me personally! The gap between what a modern prosthetic limb could do with good software and what it actually does is enormous. Why are my eyeballs still chunks of plastic? Same for cognitive rehabilitation tools, speech therapy systems, physical therapy feedback loops.

Governance and collective decision-making. Every organization above 20 people is making decisions with tools that are basically "email plus meetings plus a shared doc." Formal deliberation systems, preference aggregation, transparent resource allocation. These are hard computer science problems that nobody's building because they don't have obvious MRR.

Tools for thought that aren't note-taking apps with backlinks. Actual reasoning aids. Argument mapping. Assumption tracking. Decision support that makes your thinking better rather than your typing faster.

The entire domain of formal verification applied to things that matter. Bridges, medical devices, voting systems, financial settlement. We have figured out how to prove some? software correct. We almost never do it for the software where correctness actually matters.

And that's me, one person, in five minutes. Every domain expert in the world is sitting on a pile of unsolved problems that software could address, and most of them have never talked to a programmer because programmers are busy building the next task management app.

Go talk to a nurse, a farmer, a building inspector, a food bank logistics coordinator. Ask them what's broken. I promise the answer isn't "nothing" and I promise nobody on ProductHunt is solving it.

PG wrote essays about this ffs! "Make something people want." "Live in the future and build what's missing." That advice didn't stop being true because AI made the building part cheaper. If anything it's more true now, because the building is almost free, which means the noticing is almost the entire game. You are skipping the noticing and going straight to the building, then wondering why nobody cares.

The number of hard things isn't going down. This thread can't see them because it's not looking at the world. It's looking at ProductHunt.

To make things concrete, in the last week I have been working on my open source speech synthesizer, rebuilding Klatt's ideas from the 1980 paper up to modern emotion/prosody work. Did you know the whole field went nuts for neural approaches in ~2018 and there's a whole shitload of interesting papers just sitting out there that nobody has ever implemented in a real system? Did you know that a bunch of people did research into what different human emotions sound like and now I can make a depressed speech synthesizer, or, scarily, one which sounds more honest to people?

Now you have to make something actually new.

Doom and gloom nonsense.

Capitalism working as intended, shifting more and more resources to the already-rich.

A handful of people doesn't own most of the country by accident.

[dead]

So this is what the VCs were screaming about this bullshit about "abundance".

Abundance of copy cats that cannot make any money as prices are raced to zero.