Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

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Actual example: my wife wanted a logo for the facepainting business she's starting with our 5yo, so she asked Gemini "I want a logo with these objects in it, drawn in these colors, with this business name." And it spits back a perfectly passable logo in 5 seconds. Done. No designer needed. No Figma needed. It cut out the entire value chain.

Is it as good as a professional could've done with Photoshop? No. But it's about 90-95% of the way there, which is good enough that neither her nor any customers would care.

A great deal of business is precisely this, tasks that need to be done but where you only care about "good enough" solutions. After all, a key principle of business is you don't outsource your competitive advantages. You pay people for the table stakes, the things that everybody needs but that they only need to be "good enough". LLMs can generate "good enough" facsimiles of a wide variety of fields.

Your wife would never have used Figma for that before LLMs anyway. What is she using to manage the accounts; the bread and butter of her business? Did she conjure up her own accounting and CRM software? If she vibe coded it what did she do to ensure there are no bugs? And in any case, she works alone, I presume? I'm talking about normal companies where people work together; the typical case.

My wife wouldn't have considered this a business before LLMs. She's mostly just doing friends' parties, and oftentimes getting paid in-kind (i.e. instead of bringing a gift, she just facepaints all the neighborhood kids).

Remember that in the mid-00s, this is what YouTube and the social web was. Folks doing little, productive economic activity, usually unpaid, which can now reach an audience through technology. And now the top career aspiration in young kids is "Be a social media influencer." That's how disruptive innovations start: with little transactions that aren't considered business at all, which then grow until they subsume the economy that everybody knows of.

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