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Nothing new to see here

feld.com

11 pointsguiambros13 comments

Even before AI, writing software isn’t even the “hardest” part. This is new enough that I wouldn’t be waving Mission Accomplished flags just because someone was able to dump out a react front end, wire up some managed services, and get paying users. Let’s see how this pans out long term when someone grapples with cost, reliability, security, growth, competition, and all the other actually hard parts. Also, using “I’ve heard this all before” and pointing to cloud, mobile, whatever as the basis of your argument is a bit awkward… yeah a lot of folks made a shit ton of money but the current tech landscape is increasingly a wasteland of broken and harmful things. I’m not sure I’m thrilled that we invented a machine to accelerate decline.

But the underlying point, I think, is that the right tool in the right hands is an extraordinary thing, especially when you bring execution closer to smart visionaries who aren’t otherwise technical. I can’t sit here in denial that LLMs have drastically changed things to that effect, whether I like it or not.

Why would you invest in a vibe app though? What's the moat that will protect your investment? That somebody "had an idea"? Conventional wisdom is that ideas are a dime a dozen

Same reason you invest in any seed stage startup: the founder has a vision, you believe they have researched the topic more than anyone else, there's a meaningful total addressable market, and they have the focus and ability to get there. More importantly, you believe they have the resilience to endure for the next 10-15 years, even if they have to pivot a dozen times until they succeed.

Software - at seed stage - was never a moat. It was just a prerequired (and scarce) resource. Classic example: Dropxbox in 2007 [1].

That's not the case anymore (or won't be, at some point soon).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

good software (and hardware) was a moat in many cases, google had the best software, others tried to copy pageRank, but google scaled better and faster and killed them. Amazon, youtube, netflix. Many such cases. OSs, Browsers, those are huge moats and moneymakers.

If it can be commoditized, why not just steal the idea and give it to a tried-and-true professional CEO

We're talking about different stages of evolution. Scale is rarely a factor during your first few years. Of course software can be moats, but much, much later.

Anyone could have used Markov Chains to implement PageRank in 1997, but no one did. And Dropbox was laughed at here on HN for being a simple python wrapper for ftp. Any "tried-and-true professional CEO" had the resources to implement something 10x better, but they didn't. It happens that CEOs are usually busy delivering quarterly results, and won't chase every shiny opportunity.

My point (and the article's) is that until recently it was nearly impossible for startup founders to go from 0 to 1 without strong technical skills. Non-technical founders were almost always DOA: too costly to get to an MVP, and no VC would fund someone who doesn't have something concrete to show. Brian Chesky (Airbnb) comes to mind as one of the few counterexamples.

That barrier is now drastically reduced. I'd go as far as to say that the new stereotypical startup founder for the next decade is someone coming from a product / design background, and not engineering / computer science.

What's your moat with any software these days?

things that make it non-replicatable. But an AI-made app is pretty much replicatable. Maybe the moat would be the network effect, but that shows up later, not at the time of investment.

reads like chatgpt talking to claude about imaginary things.

While this may be a real human reality, the way it's presented is in the golly-gee-whiz, I'm just a farm-folk engineer.

If you meant this to be convincing, it's not. It looks like copy-paste-find-replace of all these other tech blogs where they found $SHINYNEWEVIDENCE of $MODUS_OPERANDI and you should too.

I don't understand what your comment is about. You don't like his style, you disagree with the evidence, or the conclusion?

The author is Brad Feld [1], who wrote checks to thousands of startups, wrote a dozen books, and advises a bunch of founders. He's talking about his personal experience observing the shift in the typical profile of a startup entrepreneur.

I think his perspective is very valid. For the past 20 years we assumed (and confirmed through empirical evidence) that having a technical co-founder was critical for the success of a startup.

This era is getting to an end, and the next 20 will be radically different in the next 20. You'll probably still need human engineering skills to scale, but getting from 0 to 1 will depend much more on taste than how good you are in <language X>.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brad_Feld

Yeah why are all these people considering evidence in the first place? Have they no faith? $ONLINEGURUINFLUENCER said AI can only produce slop so it must be true!

What does Linux kernel Devs know about real software development anyway? [1]

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/26/greg_kroahhartman_ai_...

Andecdotes are not evidence; failing to see that within a few paragraphs is golly-gee-whiz why don't you just trust this noname person.

Brad Feld is a pretty smart guy and I agree with his take. Is there a lot of AI slop out there? Sure.

But is it possible to build real apps that work well? I can absolutely confirm. Deploying software that's used by household names.

I think people are making a lot of false dichotomy around this, just because there's AI slop doesn't mean that it never works.

The world seems to be divided between people who assume that things work well until they are proven not to, and the other kind of people, who are known as “responsible adults.”

Responsible adults say that vibe-coding a serious product is a bad idea, because you aren’t capable of recognizing or fixing certain serious problems that commonly arise.

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