You cannot prompt Claude better than your customer can. There is no realistic moat there. You will not survive.
I actually think you still can. We're still in the "centaur chess" phase where a knowledgeable human sometimes needs to know the right things to ask for.
Will you be able to in 6 months? 2 years? I don't know, but it's not looking great.
I don't think the person you are replying to meant everyone won't survive as of literally today.
We're still in a somewhat calm period where something fundamental changed in the world but it changed so fast most people have barely reacted to it as of yet so things feel relatively normal, but with a growing sense that they aren't.
In the beginning of 2025 if anyone suggested "You cannot prompt Claude better than your customer can. There is no realistic moat there. You will not survive" most people on HN would have laughed at it, even the people who were considered AI-pilled for the time.
Today that sort of claim may spark some debate and some people are clinging to denial, but nobody who actually uses this stuff is laughing it off anymore. Even the staunchest deniers recognize there is enough to be concerned about there that it isn't a joke anymore.
All those one-shot games and product demos are clones of existing things, and while they're very impressive, they aren't exactly new ideas, you know?
Of course all this might change and the labs might figure out the secret to creativity, but as things stand today, humans can keep "moving up" the value stack to just make more complex things.
For now you still can outprompt your customer.
Can you outprompt a developer with your skill level who lives somewhere with a lower cost of living and doesn't need to charge as much?
Steve Jobs built an empire around the idea that the customer is generally terrible at specifying a particular solution.
When iteration had a real costs, you couldn't afford too many mistakes.
Product design is mostly saying no to ideas. And occasionally yes, but only to a very select cohesive set.
Most people are terrible at that - though I think it's learnable to some extend. And at least current-day agents will generally just do whatever dumb shit the human says it wants.
A well designed, well built physical product has a far higher barrier to entry
Even if your customers won't do it, there are endless people who are willing to compete with you if they see you making any money
That is simply and obviously not true. Technical expertise is still highly relevant when prompting, reviewing, understanding consequences, and approving.
Many people would choose not to be a plumber for various reasons. A shocking number of people seem to deem manual work as beneath them. Many others just prefer to do other work.
I have no problem doing plumbing or building. I've installed floors, ceiling fixtures, drywall, whatever. But I am best at software and would prefer to do that for my career.
I fully acknowledge this is a mess right now, but vibe-fixing or vibe-rebuiliding-from-scratch is only going to get better.
More realistically, I think other companies will vibe code and sell these solutions, but the cheapness of building will drive down costs so much that it'll be effectively the same result.
The main reason Claude is "cheap" because it has to compete with OpenAI, Deepseek, GLM, Qwen, Muse (who is also massively subsidised their model to get training data), etc. If they increased prices 10x, people would instantly jump ship to the next competitor. There's no moat for Anthropic either, short of constantly training new models in a red queen's race.
> That's why Claude is so cheap for what it does.
That's probably the competition, and
> You cannot prompt Claude better than your customer can.
You may currently have enough technical knowledge about computers and services to collaborate with a customer better than either of you working alone.
Thinking back to a previous discussion, a veterinary clinic likely does know better than you what they need in their CRM, but they may wildly overestimate the hardware required to do that and just accept the first thing Claude comes up with that's scaled for a city hospital with 4000 beds occupied at any given time, when they're actually just one person in a village with 100 pets.
Or the other way around, which is even worse.
Right now, experienced engineers can help with this kind of problem. I don't know how long this will remain true, but right now it seems to be. I think.
But yeah the majority of startups don't have well thought out reasoning either. In the end, there's no substitute for hard work. AI can reduce the iteration time maybe.
It is.
But after you expend the human-in-the-loop effort to build the right software with the right features using your impeccable judgement, what is going to stop your would-be customer from telling an LLM to analyze your solution and reproduce it feature-for-feature for a few dollars in tokens instead of paying you?
Also most of the software that's really successful has some sort of lock in or network effect. The code is not the only valuable service being provided. To wit, there exist open source off the shelf solutions for hosting your own ridesharing, chat services, social networks, internet search, etc. Why isn't anyone pointing agents at those projects to spruce them up and run them? The network is what's valuable.
I mean we already live in a world where extremely valuable software exists right in the open for free. The actual artifact of code is in abundant supply and does not have a very high price. AI can't bring the price down lower than free.
How often does a new Uber/Twitter/Google type of service come around with such a clear moat? How much of a sustainable tech economy is it when you have to be that level of unicorn just to not get LLM-washed away?
I suspect we'll increasingly see vibe coding targeting assembly language. If humans aren't going to read or write the code then using higher level languages becomes kind of pointless, except for being able to use the toolchains.