Ask HN: Is it still worth pursuing a software startup?
Considering there is very little moat left in software and big companies can copy your product in no time?
Instead, if you achieve success without much of a moat, you will be cloned by one of the "App Store mills". These are companies who employ multiple small teams (think 3-4 people), and each team is charged with cloning one of the most popular apps - they have really abbreviated development cycles, on the order of 6 weeks, and they just keep churning till they've drowned every app on the leaderboard in clones. And because they are astroturfing the whole space, they don't actually need most of these clones to be individually profitable.
But maybe you’re referring to practices I am not aware of.
And that’s coming from someone that despises Rocket for what they did to my workplace, the parent company, all teams I knew, and all colleagues I met from other projects.
App mills don’t respect anything at all, Rocket at least is Lawful Evil.
Is this happening for SaaS apps too. With AI assistance, most SaaS apps feel achievable in 6 weeks.
Your advantage in this case, now or 10 years ago, is that this is simply not true.
If your business is "a flashlight app", yeah, eventually they'll copy it (as it happened). However they'll take an unusual long time to do that simple thing (as it also happened).
Why? Because everything at big companies is a political game, full of internal conflicts, multiple priorities, non-collaborative teams, self-interest, promotion games, and a bunch of other things not really related to build the thing in question. It very rarely has anything to do with how fast the code can be written.
If your business is good enough and becomes something more than "a piece of software", and solves a problem, becomes a brand, has great user feedback... that's not something you can "copy in no time".
One example is Microsoft creating teams to take on Slack.
Teams, Slack and Discord all seem to be built as clunky web apps; but my experience is that Discord seems to work slightly better than Slack, which in turn works slightly better than Teams.
The change in the software landscape today is the apparent ability to develop a competitor faster thanks to LLMs. But, as the parent points out, the bottleneck was never code writing. It was waiting on the people involved to get past their egos. LLMs have done nothing to change that.
That says everything about how shitty Teams STILL is. MS still hasn’t improved it much from the steady state turd that it’s been a few years ago.
One of the more important acquired companies with a cash cow product basically refused to move to Teams because they hate it and concocted a reason that we just had to keep it.
The reason was total BS but it was crafted to appeal to the higher-ups, and it worked, because nobody was really going to fight over less than ten bucks per person per month.
The real moat isn’t just code it’s speed, focus, user trust, and the ability to actually ship. Those are things bloated orgs struggle with, with or without AI. If you’re solving a real problem and building a real brand, you’re already ahead.
b) give Linear.App a chance - its great
Remember that Mark Zuckerberg has had “AGI” for over a decade in the form of tens of thousands of human software engineers and Facebook still has barely been able to create a new successful product on their own without acquiring it from a smaller company.
Lots of talented people, and decent hardware, once the stupid politics was overcome.
But.
In all the time I worked there, we never managed to get "join my friends" feature get made. Trying to join your friends in a game was so fucking hard. You'd think being a social company, who's whole point is connecting people, this would be the first feature.
But no.
Threads is the only product they have launched in the last 5 years that anything close to successful. Even then it only launched because management ignored it, let them get an MVP out the door before swelling the size of the team from ~8(?) to >>2k The time to fun was also waaay too high. it got better towards the end, but in 2020-2023 it would take ages to log in, update, load, get kicked out, reboot and then join.
Large companies struggle to launch anything due to their staff size.
They're as inefficient as a government
Technology will grow in parallel and surpass it fairly quickly like the Android phones did. Only brand loyalty in US holds this thing still propped up long term.
One can see this from the failure of google+ (and killing off beloved apps, like reader on its altar, when I would argue if they are thinking platform, the idea is to make any app insert data into the platform, you don't want to push away users, you want to get them using the platform with them even knowing it).
Or their disjointed messaging strategy for many years (which might not even matter, they seemingly have given up on it?). It shouldn't matter what messaging app someone uses, let it use a common platform. Spend the money on figuring out how to make them use a common platform, because killing their app just pushes them away and you are not guaranteed that they will move to your new app vs something else. Moving their old app to your new platform, again, keeps them as users, increases the value of the platform (as more users are inserting dfata into it) which makes it more valuable to others to do the same. One might have different apps geared towards differ things (someone might be happy with just text messaging, another might want video and text messaging, but if you kill the first guy's app and expect him to move, he might just as quickly move to whatsapp or something else).
This makes me think that companies like Open AI, Anthropic etc are simply new types of body shoppers. body shoppers don’t have their own products they just supply talent to help other companies make products and services.
A lot of his later ventures have been trying to break into markets that are already crowded by more established players, and that's just a lot harder to execute on.
Simple apps are a thing of the past. If an LLM can generate an app in a few sittings, it isn't a saleable product. However, people will still pay for a fully engineered application that solves a complex problem that AI cannot easily replicate.
Regarding copies, there is always room for more than one solution to the same need. Your challenge is to figure out how to stand out. A fundamental business hurdle, that has existed since the beginning.
Here's an idea that always bear's fruit. We humans love to do things as easy as possible. Write something that saves energy, time and is simple then people will pay for it.
And most of the time that problem is “the founders don’t have as much money as they want”.
> Apps are simply tools to solve human problems. Because humans will always have challenges to address, software will remain a vital tool.
You make it sound like it’s something noble, but let’s not pretend most software companies these days don’t have “make me rich” as the top goal. Effectively everything VC backed (yes, including by Y Combinator) falls in that category. That’s why pivots are a thing. Most founders these days don’t give a shit about what they’re building or customers, they only care about the payoff.
One that you apparently agree with, given the rest of your comment.
> you need to pivot until you actually create a solution to a problem that people will pay for.
In other words: You don’t care about the problem, you care about the profit from selling a solution.
If a startup is “created to solve a problem” and then pivots to solve a different problem because the first one wasn’t profitable, that means profit was the priority, not solving the problem.
There is a chasm of difference between “I care about this problem and want to solve it, but I also need to think how to make it sustainable” and “I don’t really care what I’m tackling, as long as I make bank”.
Both exist. The second one is ever more the norm.
Are you really going to claim you never encountered a startup that is obviously shitting on customers and degrading the experience to make a buck? Do you honestly believe all startups are created to solve a problem (the original claim I responded to) and none are created with the intent of being the next “unicorn” to make the founders rich? If that is the case, search the term “enshittification”. Surely you’ll have encountered it by now. Pick whatever example helps you understand the point.
I don’t know why you’re picking on startups. Big companies are where you see enshittification the most, and it’s because economies of scale require them to cut costs. Startups can often use VC fuel to offer delightful and unprofitably superior solutions to problems. That goes away after startups graduate to being real companies.
Read the thread. I’m not “picking on startups”, the conversation is about startups. Yes, Big companies do it too, that’s just not what this particular conversation is about.
I have read the thread, thank you, and you certainly have been talking about startups and founders as if these issues are unique to them. It’s not just ‘yeah yeah big companies too’… if you actually care about and study enshittification at all, it is, by and large, entirely coming from big companies, and it isn’t new to software, it has always been happening. The only thing new is a cute term for it that got popular recently. Old business terms that mean the same thing include: loss leader, hook product, bait and switch, and plain old “promotion”. Regardless of what the topic here is, it doesn’t make sense to harp on startups over quality going down. For that to happen, it had to be higher at some point, and that point is: startups. VC funding might lead to some quality decline, but all companies trim and get worse as they grow, and always have. Startup is the phase when companies provide the highest level of product or service.
Using profit to pay for those things is what we call gambling.
So can you source any of your claims of “most”? I just looked it up, and the majority of software startups are self-funded or angel/seed-funded, not VC funded. Founders that don’t care about product or customers enough tend to fail. Founders that only care about the payoff don’t tend to self-fund their startup.
That said, everyone and all companies have financial incentives. There’s nothing unique or new about software startup founders there. The entire economy runs on profit motive. And I’ve seen a lot more people who don’t care about customers or product working in large companies making a nice easy salary working 9 to 5 (or less)!
My personal sampling of founders vs company workers is that founders are, by far, the ones who care more deeply about building something new and delighting customers and growing a sustainable business, care enough to start working nights and weekends, go years with crappy pay or no pay, to do every job in the company from engineering to design to marketing to support to filing taxes. Some people certainly are at least partially motivated to accept these sacrifices for the chance at a payoff, but lots of founders would prefer a lifestyle company where they get to keep building and don’t have the insane pressures and politics of a unicorn company.
Pivots are a thing because good product ideas often are not good business ideas. Startups that fail to pivot are the ones that die, and if your startup dies you don’t get to care about what you’re building or about customers at all. If you want companies to care about product and customers and not profit, then you should embrace sustainable economics, and that means making things people will pay for, and when they’re not paying, making something else.
Your personal sample doesn’t jibe with the literally thousands of even YC companies
There are even fewer that are “successful” - ie where everyone involved wouldn’t be better off just working as a LOB CRUD developer.
The goal of the founders don’t matter even if they do “care” about the customer. The customer is at the whim of the strategies of the investors of the company and if an acquired, the customer will probably get an email about “our amazing journey” when the company is shut down
You’re not debating me, you’re contradicting @latexr.
> infinitesimal
You invented a narrow niche to knock down there, but as I said, I actually looked it up and the majority of startup companies that form are seed or self funded, not VC funded. I was responding to @latexr’s claims that “most” founders don’t care about product at all, which I believe is just false. You’re arguing with me about something else, and I don’t know what your point is yet. Mine is that caring about customers and caring about money aren’t exclusive things, a successful business must do both.
Every company “cares about their customers” to the point where that’s how they make their money.
Google it. There are pages and pages of sources. Here’s one: https://gregslist.com/
> Every company “cares about their customers” to the point where that’s how they make their money.
And if they don’t make money, they fail and lose the opportunity to care about customers. It’s a boring tautology to say that companies care about money. The point is that @latexr is wrong about assuming that caring about money means they don’t care about product or customers.
The tautology is that all companies care about money. Companies care about money by definition. Many companies and many people in companies also care about customers and product quality. However, there is an absolute limit to how much money a company can leave on the table, regardless of what the customer wants, and serving the customer’s best interest becomes a ‘bad decision’ and threatens the ability for the company to do anything for the customer the moment it’s unprofitable, as soon as costs exceed income. This effectively means that at some level, companies must prioritize profit over service, otherwise service will cease to exist. The balance must lean in favor of the company on average over time.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Uy2aWoeRZopMIaXXxY2E...
A lot of people still think moats are about features. They’re not anymore. Features are cheap now. Execution and distribution are the real bottlenecks.
Big companies can copy your product, but they usually won’t copy: – your speed early on – your willingness to serve a tiny, unsexy niche – your ability to change direction without internal politics
In practice, most startups don’t die because a big company copied them. They die because they never found real users who cared enough to pay.
The moat today often looks like: – deep understanding of a specific workflow or pain point – trust with a narrow audience – compounding advantages (data, habits, integrations, community)
If your plan is “build something cool and hope it sticks”, it’s probably not worth it. If your plan is “solve a painful problem for a very specific group, then expand”, it still is.
Curious how people here think about moats post-AI. Are we underestimating distribution, or overestimating defensibility?
If the startup is just “software for the sake of software” then I think that’s a different thing entirely. And to be fair, sometimes software for the sake of it is more like art or fun. And it’s true, sometimes something wonderful comes out of that. Sometimes. :)
[1]: Obviously “pay” can mean _very_ different things in different contexts.
I spent the past 6 months rebuilding a medium-size company’s CRM.
They were on Salesforce for a decade, and now they’ll own their data based on the work of a single engineer.
For Salesforce, the moat is increasingly the inertia that comes from big-company contracts and the perceived safety of buying Salesforce.
Society is experiencing the first wave of the true Cambrian explosion of software and there’s never been a better time to be an indie maker. Never. This is like the iOS App Store moment, but multiplied by 100 and expected to last 10x longer.
I feel like most "solutions" that are really just "platforms" and require extensive customization and integration will suffer due to this. It's easy to just roll your own these days.
What moat are you referring to? AFAICT, moats are bigger now than ever before, but the moats I see are centered around things like consumer habits and B2B contracts and hub/platform experiences. People tend to like the software they know & have, or the contractors they know already, even when they complain about it. The need to overcome static friction is a moat, one that makes it harder for startups to get in, but easier to stay once you’re in.
Big companies are slow. It seems like it would be easy for them to copy products, but they rarely do, and even when they try they take forever. Worry about yourself first, whether you can deliver, whether your product is superior, whether you can get customers, whether your business is sustainable, etc.. Worry about other startups second. They can copy faster than big companies. Do you have an edge over other startups? Don’t worry about the big companies. If they aren’t already solving the problem you want to solve, they won’t start until after you’re successful.
Note acquisitions are a thing! Big companies that want to copy your product are aware that the fastest way to do that is to acquire a working solution and a pile of new customers. You should be thinking about big companies more as opportunity than competition.
In many cases it would cost them less to buy your company than to create it from scratch. Which is why so many small companies are acquired instead of copied. The question should be more what do you want to do and are you able to follow up on creating a startup? Writing the code is a small part of creating a successful startup
Just yesterday I was speaking with the COO of a $200M/yr revenue company in the supply chain space. He'd learned Claude Code and built a couple apps to solve internal problems but reached out to talk to us. I asked him "you've been able to build some really impressive tools, clearly you can solve your own problems, why are you talking to me?" And he said "I have a business to run. I shouldn't be coding. I need somebody who understands my business & can solve my problems without taking a lot of my time."
Is there a cheaper way for him to solve his problems? Absolutely. But he wants to put the key in the ignition and know the car will turn on every time without thinking about it. There is an endless list of problems to solve; I don't think software businesses are going anywhere anytime soon.
I even dream of build tools for business to make apps (like Air table, but better) and even if you can do anything that do, perfectly, the software they need not means they want to babysit it all the time.
Is like the person that knows how cook, amazingly, yet hire a chef for take care of it most days.
They know how their tiny bit works, and can even often misunderstand why they are even doing what they're doing.
As an indie hacker I often struggle to find new ideas. Are there any practical strategies for discovering these real pain points?
2nd best way is to meet those people and talk to them. The more of them from different backgrounds you talk to, the more ideas you can get
As a founder I spend as much time as I can with customers. They tell us what to build.
beware of any business where there is no competition - there is generally good reason nobody else is making money there.
Is it still worth pursuing a software startup ... using the same strategies/approach/mindset/tools/means/methods of yesteryears?
Answer is Yes for the first part and No for the second part.
Problems which need software solutions and/or have a software component (at this point, practically everything) still exist in plenty. AI/ML has only changed the playing field drastically. It cannot understand the intent behind the problem which is a uniquely Human Dilemma. This is where the opportunities lie; understanding different Problem/Business Domains by studying and closely interacting with possible clients and coming up with tailored solutions whether domain-specific or client-specific.
The emphasis now is on better problem understanding/specification/verification (DSLs/notations/diagrams etc.) and faster iteration to a MVP. AI/ML is a great help here but the cycle is initiated by a Human who is always in the loop and steers it on the right trajectory in the state space of possible solutions.
Tangential to the question, but this is me and one of my top three regrets in life is not having been a founding engineer. For people without generational wealth or a safety net it takes a particular combination of executive function and youthful ignorance of the opportunity cost (a steady paycheck and obvious career trajectory) to be a founder. As soon as I grew enough of the former the latter evaporated as I realized how close I'd come to financial ruin and how I didn't want to ever again.
OP, if you're even thinking about it, you should just do it before wisdom sets in and you know better. Or maybe I'm romanticizing the startup experience too much - anybody with actual expertise care to comment?
Not sure why you think a large company can copy a product in no time, they have to steer a cargo ship, you have a speed boat.
Your task in a software startup (or any startup) is to produce the moat. If you can create something with little effort in a few weeks or months then so can anyone else.
If your product does something hard or useful that you know how to do because you understand the audience or business, or includes data or knowledge that others may not know about or have, or just you can put the effort in to great service to build a large customer base it becomes harder to be copied.
Having worked in the corporate world all my working life I can safely say with confidence that big companies absolutely DO NOT move fast. Do not underestimate the power of middle-management to destroy momentum!
Solve a problem for someone and if it was a painful one, they'll pay you for it.
In other words, it's typically a good thing that larger companies are slow to adapt. That's something that startups can make use of.
The startup will take over your life. You will pour every bit of time and money you have into it. You will lose your sanity. And it’s pretty much a guarantee that you will fail.
Unless you already have a comfortable financial cushion and/or industry connections that will guarantee funding and partnerships, you have to be truly crazy to try that life. But, ultimately it’s the crazy ones that end up winning.
Sure, we'd all like to think that the goal was an idealistic "startup does things for bettering humankind".
But let's face it: A large amount of startups are literally founded as an "easier" alternative of building a "more agile" sub-organization within an established and more process driven org and then just get bought out by some of those larger orgs.
Whether or not those large orgs are then actually successful in integration and actually properly leveraging what they bought vs. just "crushing competition", is not necessarily the concern of the founders, depending on how ruthless vs. idealistic they are.
Startups have always competed with big companies based on three gaps: speed, risk tolerance, and incentives. The question is whether these advantages still hold in the age of AI.
* Speed Gap: Still valid. Might even widen. The bottleneck at big companies was never coding. It's approvals, alignment, and politics. AI makes implementation faster for everyone. But here's the thing—when the implementation bottleneck disappears, startups ship immediately. Big companies still get stuck at the decision-making bottleneck that comes before implementation. So the speed gap doesn't shrink. It might actually widen.
* Risk Gap: Still valid. AI doesn't change this. Big companies only want to solve proven problems. If something fails, someone has to take the blame. Startups can bet on unproven problems. If they fail, they don't have much to lose anyway. This is about org structure and decision-making culture. AI isn't going to suddenly make big companies comfortable with risk.
* Incentive Gap: Still valid. Actually stronger now. Employees at big companies get salaries. Founders get equity. This hasn't changed. If anything, AI makes it better for founders. Lower implementation costs mean you can get further with less capital. Less fundraising means less dilution. The math got better for founders.
All three gaps are still intact. AI hasn't weakened the structural advantages of startups. Some of them actually got stronger.
If you aren't a first mover, your success was always dependent on other skills and great execution across multiple disciplines, and also a lot of stubbornness. The software layer has always been important, but a support role of successful enterprises. Start-ups have always been hard to pull together successfully for a lot of other reasons unrelated to code.
If you find a disruptive algorithm (like pagerank) there is little evidence that LLMs will infer your solution by looking at your app. Anything else, they are just design choices and have never been moats either, but say you have a qualitative edge, you'll make the choices that can create a recognizable brand where someone vibing a copycat may not care as much. Nothing has changed on this. Your chance of succeeding rests on your ability to reach your users and iterate in a crowded space, this is what you always had to do anyway.
There are things, however, that aren't worth working on anymore with the advent of LLMs. Some of these have been fully dismissed, for example sentiment analysis. A single API call for the cheapest (even local) LLM vendor will give you SOTA classification. There are many more examples but they are so obvious. Essentially, the "build me 1 billion dollar app" prompt will never work, so if you have a burning desire to build something, do it. Just remember, there never was and never will be a promise of unlimited fortunes whatever you do.
- The CEO of some major corporation or a big VC is a close friend or friend of your family.
- You are rich and have a lot of friends who will buy your product.
- You already finished the MVP; which you started building 12 years ago... Might as well try to complete.
- You're a criminal.
The market is insanely saturated and people already have more stuff than they need. Capitalism has been over since 2008. Now it's just feudalism. Product is irrelevant; it's all a social game of selection. You have to be selected. You just need to know someone and have a product with a semi-reasonable narrative that your CEO buddy can use as a justification to give you company money. That's it.
I disagree with the sour mindset, as I don’t feel those games were necessary for my startup, although I admit mine was bootstrapped (0$), and didn’t grow as far as the others, it still made me millionaire, has paid my employees a high-than-average salary and has the potential of adding them a few hundred thousands each.
I admit the old market (do web apps to manage records! or notes!) is saturated but the IA market is brand new and fresh open.
In the last 15 years, I met just one person who bootstrapped a tech startup 'on their own' to be worth a few millions... This guy was super smart and switched on... But I later found out his wife's parents were multi-millionaires. I'm thinking that was probably the differentiator. I met a LOT of successful tech people. They always got major help. I never actually met one who didn't have access to significant help.
In hist first speech/announcement he said: "...everything is AI now..." - from this day on, Google was dead for customer acquisition.
From now on, every search query with same terms served always an individual page at different times. The good old SEO days were dead, this user-acqui channel died.
Then they increased & enlarged the space for ads at top of page; and these days finally they introduced this AI panel - most people wont scroll anymore on Google.
Try another idea (while still running the above). Go for $1000 MMR. Still too small.
This is harder than you think and will teach you incredible skills. Next: keep going. :)
DISCLAIMER: obviously don't quit your job/starve/become homeless etc to try this.
The value cannot be just the software. E.g. some workflow tool (Salesforce). These tools will continue to exist for awhile but any customer capable of moving off of it to a startup version, can probably make their own startup version, tailored to them.
Now, if you offer something besides the software — logistics, networks, financial instruments, regulatory compliance, physical goods, compute, etc — that has value besides the software.
But the five billionth workflow automation tool has fast diminishing value in 2026.
Big companies don't copy this because:
The problem is too niche and behavioral (not "how to get returns," but "how to enforce your own discipline").
Their game is scale; ours is depth of trust. We see this with our 200+ beta users: 64% ran portfolio scans more than twice, 12% immediately said they'd pay $20-30/month for rule monitoring. That's not a forecast—it's existing, paying demand for discipline.
Speed vs. bureaucracy. Our engine, which analyzes thousands of historical scenarios against user-defined constraints, was built by two people in 5 months. A large corporation would still be aligning on a roadmap in that time.
The takeaway: Code is a commodity. The real moat in 2026 is speed, focus on a real pain point, and the ability to turn users into a community that trusts your approach more than a magic pill.
Knowing how to acquire, support and cultivate a growing user base is the challenge.
The availability of a technical "moat" has always been a select property of only a few products. All real moats are network effects.
Have heard from multiple investors that they think boring software is the next wave, rather than a new UI/UX/Productivity way of doing things.
Little moat, but also little thresholds. The only way to not win 100% is not to play.
You certainly should not start a software startup to get rich, as that was never the most likely outcome. You should start one if you have an idea for software that isn't out there, which you think people would find useful, and you want to see what it's like to do a startup (enough to give it several years of your life).
I have, btw, never founded a software startup, though I have worked at some. I got paid in salary, not equity. It is now, always was, and probably always will be a longshot.
There's still a ridiculously minuscule chance that you'll end up profitable, let alone successful.
I read that software, from a business perspective, is almost always looked at as a liability rather than an asset. There just isn't very much profitable software in this world, and the software that can become profitable likely subsidizes its business with advertising. The only saving grace is that software that becomes profitable can typically scale. See Facebook, TikTok, Google.
Games sell but are risky and creatively demanding.
Software is a tough business.
It has happened over and over many times and American antitrust law is useless. The largest corporations must be broken up, taxed heavily, and regulated in new ways. Otherwise there is no fair competition or level playing field for startups.
If they have at least one tiny step/foot in the door, they are good at upselling nearly everything. And they are continuously buying up other companies and integrating them (somehow questionable very often) and then selling this as new SAP product after replacing the former logo
Whenever you have doubts about your ability to do something enough to ask for advice from random people you don’t know, and if that thing is unnecessary and will be significantly difficult, like a startup that is just some option for you to work on, the answer is probably no.
You have to feel the true desire to make something happen because you must. Anything other than that is probably a bad idea.
Big companies try to balance a lot of stakeholders, the collection of all their requirements makes them risk adverse and creates wasted effort. I’ve been on a lot of projects (pre AI coding) with rewrites and changes that have more to do with politics and org changes, lack of vision, and needless veto points.
That’s the small software company advantage still IMO
And sure, maybe someone will try to copy what you build, but that’s a good problem to have because by then you’re probably somewhat successful.
Also, disregard any "success stories", as they are 99.999% funded by a massive piles of money and immeasurable amount of connections in high and right places, that you never hear of.
Channels are becoming even more important as software has become easy to copy. But copycats always existed. When it wasn't created by AI, it was created in low wage countries.
Code is now cheap, so the advantage moved into things that cannot be copied by looking, accumulated data, hidden workflows, trust, and judgment earned by staying inside a problem too long.
Big companies copy shapes, not gravity. If your edge is visible, it is temporary. If it only appears over time, you are still early.
That's why it's so common for successful software startups to eventually get acquired. Big companies know that it's a lot more efficient for them to spend money simply buying someone who did the thing, than spending money and taking on a bunch of risk trying to do the thing themselves.
Everything is going off the rails this year. You only have to use Claude Code for 10 minutes to realize every job involving a computer is going to get flipped upside down within a year.
I an far, far less bullish than you on the timeframe. The vast amount of work is not even optimised for computers without AI. Much if not most bureaucratic process has stayed mostly the same for the best part of a hundred years.
It will change everything, but not in a single year!
(though, I have 25+ years of tech/software experience, so I didnt start from scratch)
Cope or pretend it's not happening, I don't care, this is the year.
Chunk it into single parts/components/building blocks. Then do each of these a dedicated project/workspace. In each of these workspaces, you put in only the source code relevant for this module. You are working in each project/workspace separately.
Try this
Im working productive with it every day (Claude Opus). If you provide enough context, the code usually works veeeery well on first shot.
(For sure, I do not tell it "build me a facebook", instead Im telling it precisely which single function I want to have, how it should work, what the output should be.
Its just a boon.
Not to pick on you, be mean or anything, but your github profile says no contributions in a year. Obviously there are other online git repo sites.
Care to share anything in prod? For a reply so aggressive, the proof is in the pudding.
AI is already more or less ultimately powerful with nearly endless ressources - though, no one built a big software company in the last 3 - 4 years solely with AI to replace one of the behemoths.
The fact that you own a car which could bring you everywhere does not mean that you actually will go eveywhere.
On a conference 2 month ago, one speaker claimed that AI will be so powerful that within 3 years there will be guys who replace microsoft because they have a better coding AI than today.
I do not see this happen
Didn’t we say that last year?
Time - opportunity - matters a lot, perhaps more than anything. And to face that, one needs to ask better questions (even if you're just polling).
Everything else is just details and it doesn’t matter if the idea is rehashed a million times.
if you are young there’s still hope that you can change your mindset and approach though.
if software can save time and make money than human capital then there will be demand.
Yet, Ford didn't copy Tesla, why not?
Checkout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma but overall the idea is that large corporations have totally different goals and incentive than startups. Also check https://steveblank.com and his startup owner manual trying to clarify that a startup is NOT a small company, rather it's searching for a product/market fit.
So is it worth pursuing a (software) startup?
Honestly if you want to make money, no. It's much easier to work for a large corporation (big economical benefits) or a public institution (work safety). You might not get ridiculously rich either way but you will be safer than most.
If you want to make a ridiculous amount of money though, well you might have to make sacrifices you are underestimating. I don't want to promote the grind culture but checkout Silicon Valley, the TV show, in particular when they discuss VC and promises done. Basically if you ask for a very high valuation you have to deliver on those claims and obviously they investors are going to keep you accountable on that. You might have to work more than you wanted (which might make the whole process a nightmare more than a joy) but more dangerously you might lose the very raison d'etre of the company you founded. If it's "just" about making money, you won't care, if you have a genuine mission, those compromises are going to eat you alive.
So... is it "worth it" very much depend on who you are, who you want to be and how saturated the market is.
I wouldn't worry about the big corporations, I would worry about what you can actually deliver and how not being able to do so will change you along the way.
Also, GTFO! My ideas are not just slop from sitting around day dreaming. Every one is from observations made from talking or watching people struggle... cant replace that with AI yet.
In our case, we're building a tool that has a moat from: integrations, multiple parties connecting, and others
It's very sticky once we get in, and has nothing to do with the software so much as legal, company policy and inter party communication
The way I think about it is, everyone is struggling to make AI tools work well, so if you can be in the top 50% of people trying, you're actually in the top 10% in terms of positioning for future growth.
Finding customers is the difficult part.
Making someone’s agents 20% better, cheaper or faster will be a measurable and easy sales goal.
The concern now is that other small team or solo developers can rebuild what you have very quickly. This happened in the mobile space with all the decompiled and repacked (with min changes) apps that showed up in the stores.
The moat for SaaS startups was that the code is hidden. Now that matters less because people use AI to try and reverse engineer your backend from the API or even UI screenshots.
You have to pick up the pace to keep ahead of them and make sure you don't cause problems for customers while doing it.
Building something hard cannot be replicated easily or at all. People can and always have stolen things.
I do agree that you just have to move faster but again that's the same.
How will big companies know your revenue and the number of paying customers you have?
Before you even get there, you'll have made generational wealth pretty much. They made tons of clones of Agario but none of them were as good.
The problem is finding a solid idea and marketing it to people. That's the harder part. Programming is still hard despite vibe coders churning out slop but not as hard.
When smartphones just came out I was already not making websites anymore. But every single app I made got at least 10k downloads in one week and around 1/5 got in the top 10 of a category like "social" even though I've only ever spent maybe a month max on developing any single app.
But now there are soooo many already there. Good luck getting into the top 10 social now with one weekend of coding.
Copying isn't your biggest worry.
I get it people are skeptical about the future. But I can't imagine any scenario where people would like taking responsibility of building and mantaining their own software for everything vs. paying marginal amount of money (relatively speaking) to let someone else take the headache.
Exactly. Even something as seemingly mundane as hosting your own email is a major challenge.
So you get all of the downsides of cloud hosting (company employees can still remote in), with none of the upsides (all the hardware is now geographically distributed, instead of one big building) with the privilege of paying for it instead of being "free" like facebook/google.
However, E-mail's horrible protocols and spam-blocking security monopolies mean you're stuck with one of the big cloud providers, even if you could automate/solve e-mail server complications.