alt Hacker News> Software is now very easily replicable
How?
Do you mean by AI? I haven't seen any evidence of this.
It was always possible to get code generated at large volumes for low cost (offshore/outsource market) but we didn't see this upend or replace many (if any) software companies. In my experience it had the opposite effect - companies that replaced talented internal teams ended up suffering.
LLM generated code is similar, but arguably more expensive and lower quality.
We don't see LLM generated product replacement at scale because code generation is a problem, but it's not the only problem. Low quality can kill a product, but high quality doesn't guarantee success.
There's an entire ecosystem around a successful software offering. An ecosystem that depends on adequately functioning code.
LLMs may be useful for certain tasks (...maybe... - we've always had good options for repetitive code generation) but I certainly wouldn't describe it as "very easily replicable".
Replies
Imagine saying with a straight face "we've always had code generation tools like LLMs".
>> > Software is now very easily replicable
> any evidence of this.
"Any evidence" you say? I think something has moved.
As of Autumn/Winter 2025, I can say "Here's a complete enough spec of what I want cloned. Crank on it for a few hours. Give me the clone site as I specified." And frontier agentic tooling does a hands-off YOLO job really well. (Notice: I set it up with good specs/rules to scaffold.) Cost maybe an hour of my time to set up/scaffold, and 3 hours cranking on its own, on a $20 or $60/mo sub.
I think taking the same problem to an "offshore house" (or even Fiverr or whatever) would probably easily cost 10-100x more, and quite possibly with worse (less reusable or less best-practices code quality or less functional or less clean) output overall.
So I think your OVERALL point may stand. I'm just nitpicking the specific aspect quoted above, and maybe to some degree the aspect of
> "LLM generated code is similar, but arguably more expensive and lower quality"
Which to be fair obviously depends on what code one is comparing.
I used to say "nah, it can't replicate apps that well by itself", but then I tried it (on the advice of a fellow commenter here on HN), and was surprised myself.