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Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

I don’t see how this follows. If anything, ai tools let you be vastly more productive as a single dev. The limiter is and has always been the idea and your ability to market it.

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> ai tools let you be vastly more productive as a single dev

Or to reframe, AI tools allow everyone to have some base-level software engineering competency and makes everyone you're competing against vastly more productive.

Generally speaking if you want to make money you need to provide a product/service within a niche. If too many people are able to compete against you, or just do whatever you're providing themselves, then you have no addressable market. It doesn't matter how productive you are.

This is why SASS valuations are crashing right now. While they might all be more productive their competition from people able to roll their own CRM and cheap alternatives from vibe-coders has increased exponentially.

Arguably any project that was previously small enough that a single dev could maintain it is now probably vibe-codeable in less than a day.

But by the same logic, people who could readily code small projects can now code large projects. It helps everyone, not just the non-programmers. There is still a large gap between what an amateur can do and what a professional can do, so the competitive advantage is still there.

It's a self-solving problem because people don't know how to market, which is 10x harder than development and which an AI cannot really help with, and that's how the real money is made.

And by the way it's SaaS, software as a service, Sass is a different tool, for CSS.

it's not base-level. it shifts the margin, at low skill base-level and your marginal level may be similar. but if you have enough experience and know the complete SLDC , having done each role during your career it, the margin is a massive wedge. if you know a niche, you now know all the adjacent niches and technolgies IF you are open minded to want to know them. that has powerful leverage.

You can compete in more ways than technology. Taste, marketing, design, creativity, distribution, economics, etc.

On one hand yes, but also a big company can now potentially copy your project for pennies and have far bigger outreach and marketing so they eat your market.

Big companies have always been able to copy your project for pennies, relatively.

Yes but even then, it required people assigned to the project, middle management and time.

Now one could even envision a near future where they have agents running 24/7 automatically scanning for new SaaS projects and cloning them, and just throwing slop into the market to see if it sticks.

Way more concerned about the one-man shops who have no real sturdy backend or support services trying to drive-by undercut important industries

than Oracle all of a sudden being able to figure out (with AI, magic, or otherwise) what users want.

This isn’t really how marketing works, and randomly throwing slop into the market is not how good brands get built.

I wouldn’t worry about it anymore than you worried about it pre-AI.

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