Comment by majormajor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by majormajor | Hacker News Reader

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> Everyone will be able to ride their own version of whatever app. They will increasingly all be good enough, so why does anyone care about your "first"? Who cares about a first when cloning is cheap?

Everyone is probably already able to make their own version of whatever app from 1995.

Even before AI coding tools, the number of people who could write a 1995-functionality app (let alone a 1985-functionality) one was massively higher in 2020 than 1995.

So "what's next" probably isn't "everyone just clones what already exists" - instead, it's probably going to be determined by what's hard to clone that someone clever spots and then sells. What's the "I could write Facebook in a weekend" of the future, where the ability to clone isn't sufficient? I think there's likely something beyond "network effects" that we haven't found yet.

One probably-wrong guess I've had would be software that itself configures itself so well around the user that the user could only trivially clone it for themselves, not for anyone else. The "agentic" version of "I could write the 20% of Excel that's useful easily, with a better interface!" -> "oh, not everyone uses the same 20%".

You may be right. For my part I don't agree. I think the scale will be so much greater than the jump from 1995 to 2020. The moat will be data, or anything derived from hardware/the physical world. That is the tie back into "the ability to clone is not sufficient". You can clone Amazon app but how will you ship a package? Especially as their dominance in that area rests on their monopoly power?

Eventually they will fall too. It will just take longer. I think really the reason I disagree is simply that AI will get good enough where necessarily no human will have an edge. The super advanced ones will be on the whole time ambiently and likely adversarially self prompting. Your great idea already exists somewhere out in latent space. They will either get their first or just copy you. You will not care about anyone's edge. When you care about something you will necessarily engage with it manually. I mean this in the definitional sense. How did we know Alice cares about task x? Because she did it manually. She doesn't really care about the weather, so she just asked the computer in enough ways to make her own version of that. In the same way you wouldn't think Alice cared about Bob if she delegated correspondence to him to someone else. You know she likes him because with all her needs met and all her knowledge of the weather, she still chooses to spend time with him. For everything else compute/intelligence as utility will have you covered.

> What's the "I could write Facebook in a weekend" of the future, where the ability to clone isn't sufficient? I think there's likely something beyond "network effects" that we haven't found yet.

The every other part of the business is what's hard. Oh, and doubly so if access to markets will be controlled by a few giant incumbent gatekeepers. We're heading straight into a new gilded age.

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