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Comment by Incipient | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure a vibe coded internal or external application WILL break a company. The thought process is however, out of 10 companies:

- 2 won't use AI at all and simply be left behind and stagnate (or go bust)

- 2 will partly use AI, and maybe keep up, maybe not

- 1 will go nuts vibe an entire app and explode (see Tea app or whatever)

- 4 will have an inefficient app, suffer reputational damage, lose some money, or similar, but probably survive

- 1 will hit the jackpot and get a 100M ARR company with 4 people.

Stats are of course completely made up, but you get the point.

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> 1 will hit the jackpot and get a 100M ARR company with 4 people.

I will point out that at the point where you get an 100M ARR it seems worth it to hire more people regardless.

But I'm guessing that the bar to be hired will be EXTREMELY high, because IMO the best people to hire people in future heavy-AI-automation-era would be basically founder-level visionary leaders who are also subject matter experts who can consistently make good decisions, and giving them 1M+ salaries in exchange.

If you have 100M ARR you can probably afford like 30 of these employees (and the probably exorbitant recruiting fees required to find them) and have them command AI all day. So your company will be extremely small in headcount but still more than 4 people.

(oh and how will this affect wealth inequality? i prefer to not think about it)

I love this little utopian scenarios that make HN average users wet because they relentlessly avoid considering the core issues with mid to long term AI sustainability. Namely, dependence on external models, fucked up model costs subsidization, financial exposure to a downturn that could negatively affect the core product (models). Yet this is the inevitable future and if you dare raising concern you’re a luddite. Man what have we come too

Also implied in that scenario: mass unemployment and wealth concentration

I think it's more complicated than that.

Anything someone can vibe code that gains any level of mild traction can then easily duplicated by all their competitors and in a fraction of the time because the actual hard part, determining the products edges, has already been done for them.

Agreed. This is why I think that platform/network effects will be mandatory to stay afloat in a lot of the tech market pretty soon. (Or other types of unfair advantages that are truly hard to overcome)

Even with network effects, it's still a race between you building a ecosystem and your competitors catching up to you.

However, if you DO have some sort of network effect moat and your competitors DON'T (yet), then you have the only advantage that matters in the world, because remember, vibe-copying goes both ways. You can copy your competitors feature-by-feature just like they can copy you. So you'll just always keep up feature parity while everyone only uses you because you're the established player with the biggest ecosystem, and soon enough you'll turn your temporary advantage into a permanent one.

Note: legacy platforms can't really benefit from this because you probably need to rewrite your product from scratch to fit any sort of cutting-edge AI dev workflow. Whoever creates a AI-native platform and scales it first wins.

> 4 will have an inefficient app, suffer reputational damage

Have we been living in different realities? I can't remember any example of companies in the past 10 years that have suffered reputational damage related to their inefficient apps. And there have been plenty of inefficient apps...

I mean a lot do get reputational damage (e.g. a lot of people hate Jira because how slow it is, or Microsoft Teams - same story) - it's just that nothing comes of it, so "suffered" is perhaps the wrong word here. People curse them and still use them.

I don't hate Jira because it's slow. I hate it because it has obvious well known quirks and deficiencies that never get corrected.

Plus "next generation projects" that just stall and seem unfinished.

If I didn't see them slam ai into it in weeks just like everyone else I would say they have no product teams or engineers working on it.

Sorry there should have been an 'and/or' clause in there.

Reputational I was thinking leaking data, or generating wrong information for users etc

Sonos?

Sonos.

Funny. I think that is exactly what's happening with OpenAI (and also Twitter/X/Xai/SpaceXai)

> I can't remember any example of companies in the past 10 years that have suffered reputational damage related to their inefficient apps

OTOH, under what sequence of events would you?

Something gets big / popular enough for you to hear about it, despite having an inefficient app?

It seems exceedingly likely that a large number of companies with terrible apps just never grow... because they have terrible apps.

>- 2 won't use AI at all and simply be left behind and stagnate (or go bust)

Would why would they? As if their software being made faster is the differentiator?

In my career as a consumer (lol), choice was never about that. It was about the business proposition, pricing, quality of implementation, guarantees the company is gonna be there long term, them not being scumbags, and so on.

If anything software churn put me off, especially when it come at the cost of messing with my established use, or stability.

Most products you consume are probably not software. Pretty much all products you consume are created by companies that use software.

If those companies don't keep up with software, they might not have a competitive edge that their competitors who are keeping up gain.

The software-creation-speed is even less of a factor for companies that don't make software/services.

Yeah, but no needs to pay for software SaaS anymore so no-one is going to be getting a lucky 100MRR business off pure vibecoded software as anyone can just make that in house.

As the old saying goes: 90% of software projects fail.

Chances are that most projects that use vibe coding will fail, and chances are that most projects that succeed will use LLMs

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