Serious question: Does the ease of building cheapen the final product? Like something I've been struggling with is how can I show effort in the design of a product if I can just one-shot it with a prompt?
Design is still hard. People are very good at sniffing out shortcuts and inconsistencies and AI “smell”. The last 10% of designing a product is more like the last 400% (because you’ll probably need to throw it away or start over). It’s not spending time on design that cheapens the product
The current state of AI seems to be more about automation of well defined tasks rather than things like creativity and challenging design that bucks convention, or requires human sensibility, so I think there is still room to get satisfaction from that aspect of it (you do the design, AI does the coding).
People point out how computer chess hasn't killed human chess, but I don't see much satisfaction from doing any development work by hand that could equally well (at least as far as the resulting artifact goes) be done by one/few-shot prompting, even though part of the fun of being a developer is being able to conjure dreams into reality - the end result is part of the satisfaction, but the challenge in getting there also matters.
If you're building it to sell.. I don't see how this doesn't commodify most products if a competitor can just clone what you're selling with minimal effort
What matters is human hours invested. A tic tac toe game hand coded in 30min and a fully playable 3d platformer created in 30min both have the same value in my eyes.
You can make cheap things with AI, but you can also make things that are rich and have depth. That deepness though comes from days of thinking, reflecting, and iterating on the problem. It doesn’t come from a fire and forget prompt.
Two days ago I had someone on socials send me a message saying they had cloned my platform, and that they were going to undercut me. It gave me a good laugh. A prompt isn’t a product, it’s the first step of one. I’ve poured thousands of hours into the part of the product that makes it real - the administration, the financials, the infrastructure, the marketing, the iteration and refinement. One thing a lot of people are now facing the realities of is that there is far, far more to a product than just code. AI can’t one shot a business - that still takes blood sweat and tears.
When you are vibecoding or vibe engineering, you're moving so quickly that it's difficult to evaluate what you're actually building and why. This often significantly reduce the quality and usefulness of the result.
It seems very difficult to mitigate, even if you were aware of the phenomenon. I think that the speed alone plays a large role. I'm not sure how one can build quality products without careful reflection and thoughtful iteration throughout the process.
This is why SAAS is here to stay. Yes, I can one shot it, but then I've got to maintain it, and I want to get on and play with the next shiny thing!
Doing things for me, awesome, that works. Doing things that have an expectation from a third party, not so fun.
If you build something, sit with your users, listen, build community etc. I don't think that cheapens the final product.
It feels like a very very well done exhaustive PoC.
Like executing an Idea is a 1000 times more fun than just thinking it and rethinking it a few month later again and then typing a few things down, again, and then thinking about it again and then thinking "i should do some sabatical to work on that stuff" Just to talk to friends who did sabaticals and never done anything with their time and realizing that you wouldn't just do that just because you took some sabatical.
You're discovering that effort doesn't matter, only results.
I bought an old house and started renovating it. Countless hours of back breaking work to get things up to a modern standard of living. Yet bringing people over to see the finished result felt so hollow. There's no "gosh this must have been so hard, great work!". To them it is just a house, like any other. The incredible amount of effort on my part to get it to that point meant absolutely nothing. No one cares how much work you put into something. It ultimately only matters what something is or isn't, and competence is the expected baseline.
I want to renovate a house myself too and we would ask your ears off and you could show us every single detail of your renovation story and challanges.