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Comment by CuriouslyC | Hacker News Reader

Plot twist: the bottleneck when you have a development force multiplier is __MARKETING__. If you develop at 10X the rate, you still have to grind/growth marketing. Unmarketed products might as well not exist, even if they're fantastic.

Github stars? That's 100% marketing. Shit that clears a low quality bar can rack up stars like crazy just by being well marketed.

Number of startups? That's 100% marketing. Investors put money into products that have traction, or founders that look impressive, and both of those are mostly marketing.

People actually are vibe coding stuff rather than using SaaS though, that one's for real. Your example is hyperbolic, but the Tailwind scenario is just one example of AI putting pressure on products.

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Yes definitely. The average quality of Github projects, startup code may improve but there will probably not be many more stars on them or successful startups because it's immaterial and so easy to switch, the best project to do X becomes 100x more successful than the second-best project.

You cant vibe code users or traction. If you make they will come is not a strategy for 2026. In fact, the amount of money needed for marketing will wipe out any savings from not having a Software dev.

If you make they will come has never been a valid strategy. And marketing is fucking miserable now because of the proliferation low quality software people are trying to turn into SaaS.

If you don't have a halo already, you need to be blessed or you're just going to suffer. Getting a good mention by someone like Theo or SimonW >> 1000 well written articles.

I get annoyed that no one mentions software for just the user. Part of the joy of programming is making stuff you want not just to sell or to get famous. I vibe coded so many chrome extensions I lost count. Most apply just to one site, they save me one click or something. It's fun!

Wouldn't it be easier and/or faster to create a userscript? I've "vibe coded" tens myself, but never really saw the use case for making a full extension out of any of them. Genuinly curious what you made.

I allegedly know someone who allegedly uses a pirating site for watching the NFL. The site has every kind of clickjacking and malwarey trick. The extension makes only the correct buttons work, the volume controls the volume, the full screen button controls the screen size etc.

Another one (I've open sourced, you can check it out here https://github.com/luvchurchill/mani-gpg) A site I use (manifold.markets) announced they are getting rid of DMs due to spam (they've since brought it back) so I made an extension which makes it easy to use pgp & age encryption on the site so we can do pseudo DMs. It injects "Decrypt" buttons next to exncrypted text etc etc. You can see screenshots at https://manifold.markets/post/an-extension-to-assist-with-so...

(Look at the comments for the latest look)

Besides for that, there are a few I'm sure can be scripts

Someone should really take AI to these task. Let the agents run wild. Let them astroturf every possible platform in existence. Especially like this one here HN. Insert marketing messages to every post and every thread.

There is not bad publicity. More you spam more you will be noticed. Human attention is limited. So grab as much as you can. And also this helps your product name to get into training data and thus later in LLM outputs.

Even more ideas. When you find an email address. Spam that too. Get your message out multiple times to each address.

HN has been astroturfed for a while. Ever notice low quality linkedin blogspam that hits the front page before people would even have had time to finish reading it?

It's hard to disambiguate this from people who have a "fanbase." People will upvote stuff from people like simonw sight unseen without reading. I'd like to do a study on HN where you hide the author, to see how upvote patterns change, in order to demonstrate the "halo" benefit.

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