The Hacker News Tarpit(joanwestenberg.com)
joanwestenberg.com
The Hacker News Tarpit
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-hacker-news-tarpit/
2 comments
> To be clear - this is not a post about how hard it is to build software. It's a post about how easy it is to build software, and how that easiness fools people into thinking they understand what they're looking at when they see a successful product
Recommended reading to vibe coders and read that sentence very carefully.
Anyone can clone this orange site very quickly with AI, but what is the point if no-one will use it? If you have no distribution, you have no chance.
This now means code is cheap, ideas are cheaper and the competition is now a thousand times fierce. What matters now is knowing what to build to get distribution.
That is a social problem rather than a technical one and that is what you should absolutely optimize for. Second is speed of iteration. Third is the data. A plus if it is proprietary data.
Very successful companies have all three. Stripe is one of them.
Recommended reading to vibe coders and read that sentence very carefully.
Anyone can clone this orange site very quickly with AI, but what is the point if no-one will use it? If you have no distribution, you have no chance.
This now means code is cheap, ideas are cheaper and the competition is now a thousand times fierce. What matters now is knowing what to build to get distribution.
That is a social problem rather than a technical one and that is what you should absolutely optimize for. Second is speed of iteration. Third is the data. A plus if it is proprietary data.
Very successful companies have all three. Stripe is one of them.
You know the style. It's punchy.
Filled with single-sentence paragraphs!
The punctuation has some pizzazz.
There's an abrupt ending, exhorting you to face your deficiencies, work 25 hours a day to support your wife and children.
Anyway, I'm not on a witch hunt, but I think this article was written partly by an "AI" weened on LinkedIn. It makes some passable points, but nothing too earth shaking.