Median product "lifespan" has fallen from ~4y down to ~1.5y

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".

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.

Software is in its SoundCloud rap era.

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.

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.

This could signal a healthy fail fast competitive market. Maybe?

However, my ability to produce a lot of really useful software for myself has gone way up. None of them are over a year yet but I use them more than the non personalized apps they replaced

I would 100% agree on that. Now REA comes in again and in a few years everybody could clone big and complex software. I think a software will need more than features in the future.

It will need licences, or content others could not deliver. Really something you can’t clone that fast.

I think about Netflix, Spotify, Amazon. You can clone all this platforms but will never have the rights, artists or the logistics for example.

I would 100% agree on that. Now REA comes in again and in the future everyone can clone complex software.

I think distribution become more important than ever. And having something you can’t clone on day 1. I think about Amazon, Netflix, Spotify.

You can clone the platforms but not the licences, artists logistic etc…

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.

The question is, why are you spending your time building things? Is it to make things that are finely crafted? Is it the road to wealth? As a tool to get other work done? Just make sure you have an answer.

It's your time after all...

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.

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.

this website itself is vibecoded slop, a quick look at the listings shows hallucinations.

[dead]

Interesting, thanks for posting