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bkoyesterday at 10:24 AM2 repliesview on HN

I agree with the point generally but:

> I haven't seen any real competitor of YouTube, or Figma, or Google, or Instagram created solely with AI.

Is a ridiculous set of products to expect competitors for. First all but 1 rely heavily on network effects. YouTube is a low cost provider. Think about it, they provide unlimited high quality video storage for free. They process 500 hours of content every minute. Google and Instagram have a huge network all users benefit from. AI can't help you bootstrap this network.

The only one that's fair is Figma, and considering Figma is down 30% from IPO price (much lower from ending day close), it's fair to say there are competitors to Figma, including the LLMs themselves.

That begs the question: what is product? Is "an app for designers to change style and communicate with developers" the product? Or is the product "to make websites look pretty and well organized"? The former, Figma is great. But if the product is the latter, LLMs are a real threat. No one would bother building a "better Figma" today, why would they? They would just solve the problem Figma purports to solve


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rogixyesterday at 7:09 PM

Yeah, I agree that YouTube, Instagram, and so on are a high bar. Not even the people who created these companies twenty years ago would be able to replicate the success of these products. My goal with this article was to highlight the hidden complexities behind any meaningful product. For example, how will I store the user info and settings? What if the user regrets buying my product? What if it is too complex? Who are the target users? And so on. Many questions that no single prompt can satisfactorily give us answers to without putting real thought into the thing, and none of this is shown in the demos we see around. Anyway, I loved all the insights I got here. Thanks for taking your time to write a reply.

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jeremyjhyesterday at 10:44 AM

That list is a pretty high bar but you can make it as low as you like and it’s still crickets.

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