This AI boom is just a hyper-version of previous tech booms (web 1.0, VC, crypto, etc). You have an enormous number of people who just want to get in and build something, but the products they are pumping out don't serve anyone's need or solve anyone's problem.
The moat isn't money for out-marketing your idea that 750 other people are building, it's having a good idea that solves a problem that nobody else is solving well.
I worked during the digital revolution in film, I've told the story a zillion times on HN but basically, I went through the first pure digital film program in Canada, by the time I graduated 70% had dropped out, as far as I know I'm the only one who made a proper go at it, and even then when my startup was taking off, a new hot shot would show up every month and be gone the next when they got bored or frustrated when nobody thought they were special. Tools are tools.
They often WERE creative geniuses with a digital camera! Brilliant people! In fact they were the ones who came and went the fastest, what makes you useful in industry is very frequently nothing to do with genius or creativity or mastery of the tools. It's things like reliability, stability, team spirit, open mindedness etc.
Creative genius is one game, but it's far from the only, or even, main one.
yeah this is really a part of it. Both founders and investors get spooked by the rapid entries into a market but persistent not just when it’s hard but when it’s boring goes so much farther.
> the products they are pumping out don't serve anyone's need or solve anyone's problem.
This isn't true though.
Yes, there are too many products being build that don't serve anyone's needs or solve anyone's problems.
However, many of the AI products do solve problems and serve needs.
You're right though, to compare this to other booms, which also had the same problem. This is very much a "hyper" version, which is pretty incredible to be in the middle of.
I don't mean that _all_ AI built stuff is useless, just that the number of products where 'marketing budget' is the bottleneck is dwarfed by the number of tools that aren't that special in the first place.
If you have a product that:
1. Solves a real problem people would pay for
2. Is not trivially replicable by your potential customers or competitors
3. Does not have a natural discovery mechanism by potential customers
I think item #2 in your list is the real kicker here. Given that AI can write code the threshold for "trivially replicable" is going down.
Unless your thing has strong network effects or a large capex requirement (ex: GPU infra) its easily replicated and I think that's really what makes things hard.
Ok but pick any category of human endeavor and 80% of it is garbage in the beginning. There were 3000 car companies in the 1920s, and most of them sucked, and so they died. The market over time will sort out who survives and who does not.
It will take a few years for investors to figure this out, but in the meantime, everyone is spreading their bets around like peanut butter in order to be in the game.
> However, many of the AI products do solve problems and serve needs.
Every solution to a problem comes with its own costs. It is entirely possible that most solutions that are rooted in modern computing technology have actual or perceived costs that exceed the value of "solving the problem".
The problems that most people have that they really want to solve are not addressable by AI, or computers, or software.
This seems to me like the few booms I’ve seen before. Absolutely crazy valuations with very little behind them, massive hype, everyone’s unemployed uncle suddenly becoming a shallow expert. It’s probably going to end the same way too, once the upward momentum dissipates and things start to retreat to “fundamentals”, we’ll find out that there were a lot fewer solid points in the market than we were all told to expect, so the fundamentals are actually pretty far down. After 5 to 10 years of regrouping, a more mature and solid version will come about and become such a normal part of life we barely even remember what it was like without it.
We are well on our way to the popping of inflated expectations.
Currently people are taking AI hype too seriously and extrapolating its success out in such a way as to discount the value of other businesses.
Example - last week a bunch of trucking stocks crashed 10-20% because a $6M company that pivoted from Karaoke to AI demoed something.
This is just insane. Sure, if say Waymo is pivoting into commercial trucking.. maybe. But people are basically shorting minutemaid lemonade because their neighbors kids opened up a lemonade stand. Demos are easy, products are hard.
In addition to that, what they don’t mention is that:
1. Other app stores like Google Play and Steam haven’t seen this rapid rise.
2. There are thousands maybe tens of thousands of apps that are just wrappers calling OpenAI APIs or similar low effort AI apps making up a large percentage of this increase.
3. There are billions of dollars pouring into AI startups and many of them launch an iOS app.
Has steam not seen a rapid rise in AI-asset shovelware?
I'm not talking about the AAA or the AA or even the A space (where AI is being incorporated into dev processes with various degrees of both success and low effort slop), I'm talking about the actual bottom of the barrel.
You never needed AI to make shovelware, you have been able to make a shitty game over a weekend ever since RPG maker was made and there are still games made using that.
AI just helps create some assets for games, it doesn't really make it easier or faster to make games but they might look a bit better.
I can’t speak to the quality of all the games released, but in January 2025 there were 1,413 games released on Steam and in January of this year there were 1,448.
> It's like that FT chart claiming that the rapid rise in iOS apps is evidence of an AI-fueled productivity boom.
I mean, there is evidence for some change. Personally, I'm sceptical of what this will amount to, but prior to EOY 2025, there really wasn't any evidence for an app/service boom, and now there's weak evidence, which is better than none.
Because so much technical functionality has been lost/paywalled/dark patterned/enshitified, I've cut the number of apps I use. I've realized building core personal functionality around the whims of corporations eventually just gets weaponized against me, so I might as well start undoing that on my own terms. Who in 2026 is really bringing in a new app/Saas to do much of anything like we naively did a decade ago? No one I know, we've been shown we will be treated as suckers for doing that.
> …it's having a good idea that solves a problem that nobody else is solving well.
Added emphasis to the most crucial part, in my opinion.
If you can manage to deliver a product that's meaningfully better than the competition, you still have an edge, so long as you're competent at marketing.
Nothing gets people searching for alternatives as consistently as frustration, and a product that was lazily built with AI (vibe coded or otherwise) is going to be full of bugs and papercuts that make using it a poor experience.
This is particularly true for software that sits in the hot path of peoples' workflows, where thoughtless design, misbehavior, and poor optimization chip away at time the user can't afford to spare.
In short: yes, competition will be plentiful but it will also be almost entirely awful, and capable SWEs can capitalize on that. It won't take much to stand out amongst the mountains of garbage that will be generated in the coming years.
> The moat isn't money for out-marketing your idea that 750 other people are building, it's having a good idea that solves a problem that nobody else is solving well.
This is a very naive take. Any good idea you have can now be cloned trivial in no time at all.
The clones just need to out spend you on marketing even though it is your idea that the LLM cloned.
Which is my point: it seems easy to clone something that seems conceptually simple, but is the result of all kinds of UI, UX, performance, etc optimizations. The reason someone might choose Obsidian over these so called clones is not just marketing, I assure you. The reason people attempt Obsidian clones is that they think creating todo-list management tools, etc is all it takes to implement a PKM, and that that is easy. It is not.
Right now there are kinds of tools I wished existed, that I would pay for, but AI does not automatically provide the insight, good taste, technical excellence, and grit needed to create these products. I could do them, with AI assisting, but do not have the time. It is not a simple matter of saying: Claude, create or clone X, Y, Z.
There are so many of them, aren't there? There's Roam Research (might be the OG one), Logseq (FOSS Obsidian basically), Notion, Emacs' Org-Roam, Anytype, etc. Neovim has like 5 extensions implementing the same idea (such as Neorg), Bram's Vim probably has its own plugins in Vim9script.
> Just on HN alone, throughout 2023 - 2025 we were seing like one new TODO app show up on HN weekly!
This response shows you missed my point entirely. I am saying a todo app does not a PKM make! I'm not interested in a vibe-coded todo app, it is useless to me.
> Because money is the moat, and they have it!
You're sidestepping issue and contradicting yourself. I asked: if cloning is so easy, why has no one cloned the JetBrains IDEs, for example?
Remember, I'm not talking about what happens after the cloning. Are you saying no one has cloned Jetbrains because it takes a lot of money to do so? That would contradict your claim that AI makes it easy.
What's the point you are trying to make here? That it is not possible to trivially clone good ideas?
Let's start with my actual claim - "It is now trivially possible for someone to clone your good idea".
I want to clarify your position: Do you think that the bar for cloning someone else's good idea is now:
1. Harder to do with AI,
2. Easier to do with AI,
3. Exactly the same level of difficulty it always was.
Because if you are arguing that #2 is an incorrect answer, there's no real point in continuing the argument, is there? I'm taking #2 as a given, and you appear to be arguing that it is a baseless assumption.
My point is that "easier" is not the same as "trivial".
Yes, for a skilled and determined hacker, judicious use of AI can enable them do more. That is a far cry from "AI makes cloning complex flagship apps trivial".
Furthermore, the value of software is not primarily in the arrangement of bits. It is about the technical, domain, and contextual knowledge you gain as you develop the software, the understanding you gain about your customers, etc. AI cannot give you that on a whim.
> That is a far cry from "AI makes cloning complex flagship apps trivial".
That is not what I claimed, though.
I said "Cloning your good idea", and context in this thread and this story is not, nor was it ever, about producing Windows 11 or a similarly large and non-trivial product.
It was, IIRC, about small teams (the actual story is about a solo founder) executing a good idea, and then seeing someone with a $20 CC account cloning that product in a week.
The discussion here is going sideways, and I blame the underwhelming blog post.
Having money is NOT an economic moat-- i.e., a durable, structural competitive advantage.
He overlooks broader, true definition of moat attributes like labor supply, infrastructure, PP&E, brand, network, natural monopolies, switching costs, regulation. These don't go away with commoditized CRUD apps.
And quoting someone with decades of experience implying that things are hard now and innovation didn't turn over industries in the last 25+ years is a joke.
The more I think about it the more brainrot the article really is. As if all problems are solved and pumping out soulless shovelware companies is worth anything. It really is "just one more app" all over again.
Knowledge ? For b2c it might be more difficult, but in b2b, understanding your customer and their specifics issue and developing something made for them is one of the big challenge. Being able to spit out code for free is useless if you don't know what and who you are making the code for.
You work on niches that have very specific requirements that you can only derive from having a good relationship with customers and so you attend to those needs faster than competitors who are out of the loop.
> The moat isn't money for out-marketing your idea that 750 other people are building, it's having a good idea that solves a problem that nobody else is solving well.
An idea is not a moat. Execution is only a moat if being nimble is part of the ongoing offering.
Historically, during booms like this (for example the industrial revolution), it was, because we had patent protections in order to encourage ideas to be brought to market. I don't see how you can have an AI revolution that doesn't just funnel everything to the top without something similar.
Why invent the cotton gin, find investors, and bring it to market if the steel company with the infinite worker machine can instantly compete with you?
Well, if someone could create a drop-in replacement for Oracle-DB, Adobe Creative or AutoCad in a month of vibe-coding, I think they could prosper without having their own good idea. I would like to see something like this.
But if you're just talking the fairly simple apps that a single very talented programmer could pump out before this, sure, yeah.
Not really. It's money/resources. I had some really useful apps I built for myself. I looked at releasing them, but there were companies whose business model was waiting for people like me to release apps that solve a problem, and then just instantly jump on creating a solution and outcompeting the independent app.
It's trivial for competitors with bigger pockets to outcompete you on your idea, and there are companies whose business model is just that. And with AI customers are trying to do it themselves as well. The only startup I wouldn't be nervous about as a small team without large financial backing would be ones where we start out partnered to multiple companies in the targeted industry so that we can leverage that connection.
Historically this is why we have copyright/patent laws. To make it make sense for people to try to bring their ideas to the world. But with everything changing we are back to everyone just sitting on their concepts/solutions unless they have big money behind them.
No, the moat is having a seemingly good "scalable" idea that solves a problem a few people have and most people think they have. Then getting bought out.
Eh, there's some truth it both. The truth is somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. Distribution absolutely matters, often times even more than the product. And vice versa
I'd argue that QoL in middle America is not great compared to similarly priced places in the EU.
Americans have worse health outcomes (including lifespan), travel far less and have less time off, and retire later. That said, you do get much more space, nicer housing stock, (arguably) better access to education, and generally more 'stuff', so it's a tradeoff.
I live a few months out of each year in Europe. Usually max out my 90 day stay with ABnB.
It's a hard life in Europe. My friend owns 11 bars that are packed 24/7 on a Mediterranean shoreline. He is what anyone would call successful. But he lives in a little apartment and drives a beat up old Mercedes, not because he's modest but because that's what "rich" looks like in Europe. If you ask him, he'll tell you that taxes ensure that you can never be rich in Europe.
My friend in middle America owns one bar, multiple houses, multiple cars, kids in private school. And what's mind blowing is that no one in America would consider him "rich." That's just middle class America.
I'd love to visit wherever you're going to point to as a counter example. Let me know where I'm headed this summer.
Btw I checked about health outcomes. It's actually only true if you look at America as an average. Middle America has much better health outcomes. Look at Utah for example. Again, point was that middle America isn't like the coasts.
It's true that non-coastal Utah, Colorado, and Minnesota have good life expectancy for the US but they lag behind California, New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Hawaii.
Utah is 1.7 years behind the EU average. Even Hawaii with the highest life expectancy in the US is behind all but the former Eastern Block EU countries.
Median income is not much lower in Utah than in California. Utah's low healthcare spending per capita is likely a reflection of Utah having the lowest median age of any state. Most healthcare costs are spent on elderly people.
I should add though that life expectancy is affected at least as much by social policy as by healthcare spending. Much of the difference is a result of cars/guns/drugs killing more people earlier in life in the US than in Europe.
While Utah has a lower homicide rate than California (2.2 vs 5.1 per 100k) like many rural states it has a much higher suicide rate (21.5 vs 10.1 per 100k). Accident mortality (mostly overdoses and car accidents) are similar (49.7 vs 51.1 per 100k).
Minus the commute you had to do most of that anyway though, right? We get my four year old ready and walk her to school (city free pre-k a few blocks away, plus paid aftercare).
It takes about an hour to get breakfasted, dressed, and ready which we would be doing anyway. Counting the walk both ways it's about 30 minutes of extra time for 8 hours of childcare.
Unless your commute is just huge I can't see that math being true.
You got 8 hours out of it, we get maybe three - because of how it works out.
Add in infants and toddlers, and the fact that many places seem to do childcare for a very particular age range, and it can get hectic.
Workable, of course, anything is, but hectic. It can be understandable why people look at it from the outside and say "wow, that's a lot of kids, too many for me."
It's also enormously stressful and expensive. We're stopping at one where in past times a family like ours might've had 2-3. There are a variety of reasons, but cost in money, time, and housing are big factors. I'm very well off compared to most Americans, so I can see why if you're even marginally on the fence it has tipped into a no.
"Make it work" is a great thing to say on the internet, but not very good advice to people who are one broken down car or health issue away from not making rent, which is a LOT of young Americans.
Each new episode of this I've said to myself "wow, that problem is much harder than I expected". Then he solves it in an elegant way, and I realize the problem is even harder than that!
I'm into a number of the hobbies he's good at, and it's incredible how much skill he has at design AND fine working AND manual machining AND cad/cam AND on and on... I'm really glad he started a youtube channel.
If you'd have asked me a few years ago if anything could be an existential threat to github's dominance in the tech community I'd have quickly said no.
If they don't get their ops house in order, this will go down as an all-time own goal in our industry.
I'm pretty sure they don't GAF about GH uptime as long as they can keep training models on it (0.5 /s), but Azure is revenue friction so might be a real problem.
I'm sympathetic to ops issues, and particularly sympathetic to ops issues that are caused by brain-dead corporate mandates, but you don't get to be an infrastructure company and have this uptime record.
It's extra galling that they advertise all the new buzzword laden AI pipeline features while the regular website and actions fail constantly. Academically I know that it's not the same people building those as fixing bugs and running infra, but the leadership is just clearly failing to properly steer the ship here.
That's probably partly why things have got increasingly flaky - until they finish there'll be constant background cognitive load and surface area for bugs from the fact everything (especially the data) is half-migrated
You'd think so, and we don't know about today's incident yet, but recent Github incidents have been attributed specifically to Azure, and Azure itself has had a lot of downtime recently that lasts for many hours.
Many teams work exclusively in GitHub (ticketing, boards, workflows, dev builds). People also have entire production build systems on GitHub. There's a lot more than git repo hosting.
It's especially painful for anyone who uses Github actions for CI/CD - maybe the release you just cut never actually got deployed to prod because their internal trigger didn't fire... you need to watch it like a hawk.
I'm a firm believer that almost nothing except public services needs that kind of uptime...
We've introduced ridiculous amounts of complexity to our infra to achieve this and we've contributed to the increasing costs of both services and development itself (the barrier of entry for current juniors is insane compared to what I've had to deal with in my early 20s).
All kinds of companies lose millions of dollars of revenue per day if not hour if their sites are not stable.... apple, amazon, google, Shopify, uber, etc etc.
Those companies have decided the extra complexity is worth the reliability.
Even if you're operating a tech company that doesn't need to have that kind of uptime, your developers probably need those services to be productive, and you don't want them just sitting there either.
By public services I mean only important things like healthcare, law enforcement, fire department. Definitely not stores and food delivery. You can wait an hour or even a couple of hours for that.
> Those companies have decided the extra complexity is worth the reliability.
Companies always want more money and yes it makes sense economically. I'm not disagreeing with that. I'm just saying that nobody needs this.
I grew up in a world where this wasn't a thing and no, life wasn't worse at all.
Eh, if I'm paying someone to host my git webui, and they are as shitty about it as github has been recently, I'd rather pay someone else to host it or go back to hosting it myself. It is not absolutely required, but it's a differentiating feature I'm happy to pay for
Any module that is properly tagged and contains an OSS license gets stored in Google's module cache indefinitely. As long as it was go-get-ed once before, you can pull it again without going to GitHub (or any other VCS host).
Lots of teams embraced actions to run their CI/CD, and GitHub reviews as part of their merge process. And copilot. Basically their SOC2 (or whatever) says they have to use GitHub.
Every product vendor, especially those that are even within a shouting distance from security, has a wet dream: to have their product explicitly named in corporate policies.
Does SOC2 itself require that or just yours? I'm not too familiar with SOC2 but I know ISO 27001 quite well, and there's no PR specific "requirements" to speak of. But it is something that could be included in your secure development policy.
And it's pretty common to write in the policy, because its pretty much a gimme, and lets you avoid writing a whole bunch of other equivalent quality measures in the policy.
Are you kidding? I need my code to pass CI, and get reviewed, so I can move on, otherwise the PRs just keep piling. You might as well say the lights could go out, you can do paperwork.
I think this is being downvoted unfairly. I mean, sure, as a company accepting payment for services, being down for a few hours every few months is notably bad by modern standards.
But the inward-looking point is correct: git itself is a distributed technology, and development using it is distributed and almost always latency-tolerant. To the extent that github's customers have processes that are dependent on services like bug tracking and reporting and CI to keep their teams productive, that's a bug with the customer's processes. It doesn't have to be that way and we as a community can recognize that even if the service provider kinda sucks.
There are still some processes that require a waterfall method for development, though. One example would be if you have a designer, and also have a front-end developer that is waiting for a feature to be complete to come in and start their development. I know on HN it's common for people to be full-stack developers, or for front-end developers to be able to work with a mockup and write the code before a designer gets involved, but there are plenty of companies that don't work that way. Even if a company is working in an agile manner, there still may come a time where work stalls until some part of a system is finished by another team/team-member, especially in a monorepo. Of course they could change the organization of their project, but the time suck of doing that (like going with microservices) is probably going to waste quite a bit more time than how often GitHub is down.
> There are still some processes that require a waterfall method for development, though
Not on the 2-4 hour latency scale of a GitHub outage though. I mean, sure, if you have a process that requires the engineering talent to work completely independently on day-plus timescales and/or do all their coordination offline, then you're going to have a ton of trouble staffing[1] that team.
But if your folks can't handle talking with the designers over chat or whatnot to backfill the loss of the issue tracker for an afternoon, then that's on you.
[1] It can obviously be done! But it's isomorphic to "put together a Linux-style development culture", very non-trivial.
Being snapshot-based. Git has some issues being distributed in practice since the patch order matter which means you basically need to have some centralized authoritative server in most cases with more than 2 folks to resolve the order of patches for meaningful uses as the hash is used in so many contexts.
That's... literally what a merge collision is. The tooling for that predates git by decades. The solutions are all varying levels of non-trivial and involve tradeoffs, but none of them require 24/7 cloud service availability.
Yeah, I'm literally looking at GitLab's "Migrate from GitHub" page on their docs site right now. If there's a way to import issues and projects I could be sold.
I wish more people used git-bug. It stores issues and PRs in git (not as branches or tags but as special refs that don't pollute the output when you list branches), and have bridges from/to github and other sites
Maybe it's be reasonable to script using the glab and gh clis? I've never tried anything like that, but I regularly use the glab cli and it's pretty comprehensive.
This is Microsoft. They forced a move to Azure, and then prioritized AI workfloads higher. I'm sure the traing read workloads on GH are nontrivial.
They literally have the golden goose, the training stream of all software development, dependencies, trending tool usage.
In an age of model providers trying train their models and keep them current, the value of GitHub should easily be in the high tens of billions or more. The CEO of Microsoft should be directly involved at this point, their franchise at risk on multiple fronts now. Windows 11 is extremely bad. GitHub going to lose their foundational role in modern development shortly, and early indications are that they hitched their wagon to the wrong foundational model provider.
It’s not so much an op’s issue as an architecture and code quality issue. If you have ever dug into the GitHub enterprise self hosted product you get an idea of the mess.
I viscerally dislike github so much at this point. I don't know how how they come back from this. Major opportunity for competitor here to come around and with ai native features like context versioning
It's arguably canon, even, if you consider the cross-over specials meaningfully "canon" as works designed not to hold up to storytelling scrutiny but simply bring in TV viewers.
90% of TSMC's capacity is still in Taiwan. A substantial amount of global high end chip capacity is also in South Korea and Japan, which would likely get pulled in.
A war would not wipe out chip production, but the squeeze would be immense for many years.
I don't think even the non-3d printed commercial ones are for law enforcement purposes.
Besides being for fun, the main draw seems to be that it picks the lock _and_ gives you the bitting. So if you lose all your keys, your locksmith is now in and can easily remake keys without swapping out the lock core.
There may be cases were it's (much) cheaper to pay a locksmith to stand there for ten minutes and spend a few minutes at a key machine, rather than pick a lock in 30 seconds and spend 10 minutes installing a $100 high end lock cylinder.
What a fun project! The use of wires to get around the corner is such a clever idea, although I see that goes back to the 90s. I'm surprised the idea isn't older.
I wonder what makes it take a minimum of 0.7s per combo, it seems like it could be sped up substantially.
The moat isn't money for out-marketing your idea that 750 other people are building, it's having a good idea that solves a problem that nobody else is solving well.
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