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arcticbull • today at 9:40 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

There's probably an open source version of whatever you're trying to use, which you can unzip and deploy. Yet people don't do it most of the time, because they don't want to have to deal with it themselves and they value consistent experiences across industry. Gimp has been around for just short of 30 years and yet Photoshop continues to grow revenue every year. "Claude make me a Photoshop" ~= a very slow and expensive "brew install gimp" + "hey Claude just move some stuff around to make my gimp look different than everyone else for no reason."

Most people just don't want to deal with it. They want to focus on what they bring to the table and outsource the rest to people who specialize in, own, maintain and support that thing.


Replies

teamonkey • today at 10:26 PM

I don’t think that’s the same thing at all.

I’m not saying that people will just clone <large, established and popular software developed by large numbers of people, pre-AI>.

I’m asking why anyone would ever invest in a solo software startup, where the scale is necessarily small and achievable at low cost, and AI makes it feasible for many people or corporations to clone any idea of that scale within the time it takes to establish a foot in the market, if it looks remotely valuable.