The current mood seem to be that big companies will automate away many white collar jobs and just get bigger profits. My question is - what if it's the other way around ? Could said white collar workers just spin off competitors much more easily than before ? Obviously this mostly apply to software, but I'm curious what people think about it in all industries.
A large company is more than a single GitHub repo.
Doing a subset of what a market leader is doing, but worse, with no path to scale or support, isn’t going to go anywhere.
Yesterday someone vibe coded a password manager in 20 minutes and posted it here. Should anyone use it? Absolutely not. It’s a security nightmare, won’t get support, and the architecture is complete trash, requiring the use to run a local server the background that the app and browser extension talk to. Not to mention it will likely never see an update.
Successful competitors do something new. A lazy vibe coded clone doesn’t nothing new, and they don’t even do all the basics.
That's the more interesting angle here to me. Rather than building a direct competitor at 10% the cost, agent assisted tooling could make it individually profitable to target small cap, cottage industry type problems that have too much nuance for a one size product. Areas where someone already has deep business insight that provides the value proposition moreso than the labor around coding. Not competitors at 10% the cost, but filling niches that wouldn't have been profitable otherwise.
The danger is that if agents get more capable, the niche markets start to erode. If a generic solution agent can acquire domain knowledge and coordinate with customers, even these 'competitors' become risky again.
And turning our tech over to AI would undoubtedly be a disaster of security and compliance fails in a highly regulated industry — if it didn’t simply hit a complexity wall that it couldn’t spaghetti code its way through.
And that’s setting aside UX. We have in-depth conversations around twice a week to make decisions at the intersection of data needed for business logic, compliance constraints, and managing both of those while keeping UX “delightful”. I’m not convinced an LLM will ever be able to handle those with halfway decent judgement.
YMMV if your product is an issue tracker, CRM less complex than salesforce, or newsletter platform, etc.
Traditional moats have crumbled. New norms challenge established truths. What were barriers are now entry.
A phase shift across industry where entrepreneur becomes the incumbent. This time it is different. I say go for it!
Eaglo•6h ago