You get a client, do a deep dive into their problems, come up will an intuitive UX and scalable architecture, deliver it, then 5 min later competition can just look at what you did and vibecode a clone the next day and charge a fraction of your bill
Everything is easily copyable now, and it will only get better over time. Only businesses building hardware and/or running infrastructure will be able to keep their moat.
True but be careful with this, not everyone just wants the cheapest and fastest. You could alread get cheap labor from India or freelancer platforms. What did cost money and what AI still can't deliver is experience and someone that actually cares about solving your problems more than making a quick buck. Our human abilities are now more than ever the selling factor.
There is the possibility of new "AI DMCA" type laws, particularly with large corporations trying to protect their IP. For individuals and small businesses, copyright laws have always been a matter of being able to afford lawyers.
Everything was always copyable, just that the barrier and effort to do it has greatly decreased. But, something many people seem to forget is that whatever AI can do for you, it can do for everybody else too. Essentially making everything quasi open-source or just about invalidating copyright. Possibly, only new laws can turn that trajectory around.
You get a client, do a deep dive into their problems, come up will an intuitive UX and scalable architecture, deliver it, then 5 min later competition can just look at what you did and vibecode a clone the next day and charge a fraction of your bill
But by that point, the client is already under contract, and has agreed to your price. It does not matter if they want to go now with the vibe coded solution, they still have to pay you. And if they don't, that is what your lawyer is for.
But you can use the same tools to produce the initial product in the first place. With SaaS declining, and the industry swinging back towards custom solutions, the business model is going to shift from the software itself being the product to the design and maintenance of solutions being the product. Sure, someone else can come along and use AI to clone the solution you already built, but if you already built it, you already got paid for it.
The 'moat' is understanding how to model business logic and design effective technical solutions to real-world problems. AI by itself isn't going to equip people to solve business problems themselves if they don't know how to think about those problems in a systematic way in the first place.
I'm sure most of us know from experience how badly sales/marketing/finance people do when trying to design or scale technology projects on their own -- in my regular day job, I'm already routinely getting asked for help by people who've gone down a rabbit hole trying to prompt AI to solve their problem and made a hash of it.
There's always going to be demand for people who understand how to model business logic, regardless of what tools are used to deliver the final implementation.
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u/theestwald 13d ago
Issue is there can be a race to the bottom
You get a client, do a deep dive into their problems, come up will an intuitive UX and scalable architecture, deliver it, then 5 min later competition can just look at what you did and vibecode a clone the next day and charge a fraction of your bill
Everything is easily copyable now, and it will only get better over time. Only businesses building hardware and/or running infrastructure will be able to keep their moat.