Anecdotally, I've found I'm far less interested in adopting new products and rethinking my workflows amidst a sea of half-baked and short-lived products / services.
Instead, I'm stripping back to basics, building small tools to solve specific problems, and find myself vastly preferring established software with a track record of keeping feature-bloat down and the problem-space focused.
> Distribution and marketing have become much more important than before - within the context that everyone can build "features" for free.
Nothing about this statistic supports this claim. Maybe, actually, features aren't free, and even with a glamorous HN marketing blitz, nobody wants to use the dogshit software LLMs produce. Everyone can build "features" for free, if "features" is an alias for "a pile of 100 bugs with some makeup on it to make it look like a feature if you squint at it from a distance".
Testing products, getting a feel for them, thinking about them, talking and exploring, I mean this is still there and it's long been the actual time-consuming part of making great software; where the soft skills intersect with the hard.
Maybe the technical stuff is more accessible then it was beforehand but the thousands of hours of the other stuff that leads to good software is still thousands of hours.
Quality has become less work, but only by a little.
But this doesn't mean people value the craftsmanship because they never did before...
It's always been simply a popularity contest and now it's that more than ever.
Software used to solve problems for users. Now AI is solving most problems for users, but not all (although ever increasing). I think software needs to evolve to solve the category of problems that AI is not (yet) good at. For example very hard (extreme long horizon) problems in digital space which are still expensive to solve. Some domains overlapping with real-world and restricted/regulated industries are also not yet disrupted by AI to the level regular SaaS is. To get ahead one needs to start in those domains now, as it will get much harder once AI will start eating them.
Death of the sunk-cost fallacy, you launch a thing and nobody gives a shit especially you yourself.
However I think there will be a price to pay building software without the "trough of sorrow" phase stressing over the product and market fit and limping away with lessons learned - the way you build software and the problems you solve are basically confined to a safe space, a bubble of yourself + your AI agents and a brief moment of suspense submitting to reddit or whatever, and you risk learning nothing at all to improve your next projects and higher-volume won't help that.
Not SaaS, but I had an idea for using a CPU emulator to run a compiled binary under Java, with libc implemented in Java so standard file IO works. I punted on the idea because it seemed pretty difficult and maybe take six months. I recently gave Claude a Java RISC V emulator and a partial bridge between Java and libc, and in under an hour, it could run bash and sqlite from Debian.
I have no idea how correct the code is or what I'd do with this, and I have no plans to publish it for those reasons.
One vibe-coded app is no better than other, or if it's better - not for long. So why would anyone invest in product that is going to be superseded in a few months/weeks/days?
This is the median lifespan. If the number of total products is increasing, that doesn’t suggest that fewer products are succeeding. You could even have more products succeeding, if the number of failures is growing even faster
> a hit and fad driven industry similar to movies, music and video games
That doesn't track at all.
When the movie and music industries were pumping out their biggest hits, the production cost was high. Profit may be higher now in the modern era while costs are lower, but would you honestly (seriously honestly please) call most of the remake/homage slop we've had since the late 2000s "hits"? This simply isn't survivorship bias either. Just look at what music stands the test of time on youtube and spotify or gets people at least smiling in real life. Look at the variety of genres too. Look at when we had the highest density of solid audience ratings for even run-of-the-mill or cult movies.
You can say all you want that these industries "always did this" and insist that when you look at your own list of favorites it's just because you're getting old, but that's more obviously denial as the years of this bullshit have racked up. Even the artists agree even when they're finding success at this game, and they have the same resentment. Younger people don't even care about movies and music anymore while older people desperately pay and hope for new stuff like it's another pull of the increasingly rigged slot machine. It's not even that younger people are more interested in social media. That excuse is just as clearly false when you see how hard they go on retro styles and what they also have saved on playlists.
Anecdotally, I've found I'm far less interested in adopting new products and rethinking my workflows amidst a sea of half-baked and short-lived products / services.
Instead, I'm stripping back to basics, building small tools to solve specific problems, and find myself vastly preferring established software with a track record of keeping feature-bloat down and the problem-space focused.
> Distribution and marketing have become much more important than before - within the context that everyone can build "features" for free.
Nothing about this statistic supports this claim. Maybe, actually, features aren't free, and even with a glamorous HN marketing blitz, nobody wants to use the dogshit software LLMs produce. Everyone can build "features" for free, if "features" is an alias for "a pile of 100 bugs with some makeup on it to make it look like a feature if you squint at it from a distance".
Testing products, getting a feel for them, thinking about them, talking and exploring, I mean this is still there and it's long been the actual time-consuming part of making great software; where the soft skills intersect with the hard.
Maybe the technical stuff is more accessible then it was beforehand but the thousands of hours of the other stuff that leads to good software is still thousands of hours.
Quality has become less work, but only by a little.
But this doesn't mean people value the craftsmanship because they never did before...
It's always been simply a popularity contest and now it's that more than ever.
Software used to solve problems for users. Now AI is solving most problems for users, but not all (although ever increasing). I think software needs to evolve to solve the category of problems that AI is not (yet) good at. For example very hard (extreme long horizon) problems in digital space which are still expensive to solve. Some domains overlapping with real-world and restricted/regulated industries are also not yet disrupted by AI to the level regular SaaS is. To get ahead one needs to start in those domains now, as it will get much harder once AI will start eating them.
Death of the sunk-cost fallacy, you launch a thing and nobody gives a shit especially you yourself.
However I think there will be a price to pay building software without the "trough of sorrow" phase stressing over the product and market fit and limping away with lessons learned - the way you build software and the problems you solve are basically confined to a safe space, a bubble of yourself + your AI agents and a brief moment of suspense submitting to reddit or whatever, and you risk learning nothing at all to improve your next projects and higher-volume won't help that.
Not SaaS, but I had an idea for using a CPU emulator to run a compiled binary under Java, with libc implemented in Java so standard file IO works. I punted on the idea because it seemed pretty difficult and maybe take six months. I recently gave Claude a Java RISC V emulator and a partial bridge between Java and libc, and in under an hour, it could run bash and sqlite from Debian.
I have no idea how correct the code is or what I'd do with this, and I have no plans to publish it for those reasons.
Distribution and marketing have always been more important. The hard part has always been being consistent, not having a half-baked prototype.
Frankly AI is making people even lazier than before, which means that anyone willing to stick around and be consistent is probably the winner.
Software is in its SoundCloud rap era.
This could signal a healthy fail fast competitive market. Maybe?
Fail fast, with no one succeeding is not healthy.
One vibe-coded app is no better than other, or if it's better - not for long. So why would anyone invest in product that is going to be superseded in a few months/weeks/days?
This is the median lifespan. If the number of total products is increasing, that doesn’t suggest that fewer products are succeeding. You could even have more products succeeding, if the number of failures is growing even faster
Now that barriers to entry are going down, I think software will become a hit and fad driven industry similar to movies, music and video games.
it's always been like that. how far back do we want to go? mootools versus jquery? flash? foxpro and vb?
software has always been a popularity contest
Certainly not for infrastructure.
Arguably there have been fads for infrastructure, just on a longer time scale.
> a hit and fad driven industry similar to movies, music and video games
That doesn't track at all.
When the movie and music industries were pumping out their biggest hits, the production cost was high. Profit may be higher now in the modern era while costs are lower, but would you honestly (seriously honestly please) call most of the remake/homage slop we've had since the late 2000s "hits"? This simply isn't survivorship bias either. Just look at what music stands the test of time on youtube and spotify or gets people at least smiling in real life. Look at the variety of genres too. Look at when we had the highest density of solid audience ratings for even run-of-the-mill or cult movies.
You can say all you want that these industries "always did this" and insist that when you look at your own list of favorites it's just because you're getting old, but that's more obviously denial as the years of this bullshit have racked up. Even the artists agree even when they're finding success at this game, and they have the same resentment. Younger people don't even care about movies and music anymore while older people desperately pay and hope for new stuff like it's another pull of the increasingly rigged slot machine. It's not even that younger people are more interested in social media. That excuse is just as clearly false when you see how hard they go on retro styles and what they also have saved on playlists.
this website itself is vibecoded slop, a quick look at the listings shows hallucinations.
Interesting, thanks for posting