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Comment by imiric | Hacker News Reader

Those are exactly the kind of AI slop products I would expect to be vibe coded. You've created yet another wrapper around LLM APIs where the business model is charging a premium over existing services. Your revenue depends on the ignorance of customers to not realize they can get the same or better service for cheaper from companies that actually do the hard work. I bet SEO hacking is really important to you.

It's irrefutable that AI tools can be used to create software that generates revenue. What's more difficult is using them to create something that brings actual value into the world.

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> yet another wrapper around LLM APIs

Patio11 famously built, ran for a number of years (profitably) and then sold a "wrapper for a random number generator" (bingocardcreator.com)

Value is in the eye of the beholder, and only tangentially related to the technical complexity or ingenuity.

I'm not arguing in favor of technical complexity or ingenuity.

My point is that the perceived value of a service or product is directly related to its competitive advantage, product differentiation, and so on. When the service is made from the same cookie cutter template as all the others, the only value that can be extracted from it is by duping customers who don't know better.

There are entire industries flooded with cheap and poorly made crap from companies that change brand names every week. Code generation tools have now enabled such grifters to profit from software as well.

It's people configuring WordPress with various themes from Envato at jacked-up prices in a trench coat /s

I'm only half joking.

> When the service is made from the same cookie cutter template as all the others,

You're conflating "underlying tech" and "cookie cutter template".

The fact that something uses the same LLM under the hood as some other product doesn't mean it's not differentiated.

Eh, it is more like an extended/better UI. Plenty of people are willing to pay for just that.

There are lots of people that only use LLMs in whatever UI the model companies are providing. I have colleagues that will never venture outside the ChatGPT website, even though with some effort they could make their tooling richer by using the API and building some wrapper or UI for it.

Sure man, any product you don't like is just "another wrapper". I guess every website is just a wrapper over postgres or wordpress too. I run my own serverless GPU containers on runpod with a combination of comfy and my own fastapi servers using diffusers, not that it'd even matter if I just used some third party APIs. It originally even started as smth that was hacked together using 4x 4070ti supers in my basement that I then moved to runpod. Indiehacking is mostly marketing, nobody cares if you built some technically beautiful thing.

Also its easy to criticize from the sidelines but, do you have products that you made by yourself that are used by hundreds of thousands of people? I have 5 such sites, 2 of which I named above

Hey, don't blame me for the fact that your sites are indistinguishable from hundreds of others that offer the same service. Everything I said is logical to assume, since all these sites look the same.

Good on you for learning how AI tools work, but there's no way for anyone to tell whether your backend is self-managed or not, and practically it doesn't really matter. I reckon your users would get better results from proprietary models that expose an API than self-hosted open source ones, but then your revenue would probably be lower.

> Also its easy to criticize from the sidelines but, do you have products that you made by yourself that are used by hundreds of thousands of people? I have 5 such sites, 2 of which I named above

That's a lazy defense considering anyone is free to criticize anyone else's work, especially if they're familiar with the industry. Just like food and film critics don't need to be chefs and movie producers.

But I'll give you credit for actually building and launching something that generates revenue. I admit that that is more than I have managed with my personal projects.

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