Tell HN: Your AI startup is a Next.js page, OpenAI_API_KEY, & Stripe invoice
7•poupdich•1h ago
Your AI startup is a Next.js page, OPENAI_API_KEY, & Stripe invoice, that's it.
Gemini, ChatGPT, etc. are unique products that add value.
Your AI startup is vaporware.
Comments
dennisy•1h ago
Spicy! Upvoted just because I would look forward to the HN debate that would happen on this topic!
My personal view here has shifts quite often, yes software is getting easier to build at an alarming rate, but designing good software is not (yet), and new novel software is not in the training set so should remain hard to build, forever (?)
To address the main comment, yes lots of apps are just wrappers, and I feel this is not sustainable, we will not need all these specialised apps since AI is such a general interface to computing.
poupdich•50s ago
Maybe a soda is mostly just sugar, but it's clearly a product in and of itself separate from sugar.
I don't see that with the AI wrappers - I can do exactly what they offer without needing them, often easier in the existing UI.
They're selling sugar in a new box, and calling it a steak dinner.
Operative-001•1h ago
Personally, I had the idea of creating a wrapper that, when given a photo of a product, extracts its ingredients and claimed benefits, then tells you whether it’s “vaporwave” based on actual research, while also linking to better products that contain the same key active ingredients at concentrations proven to be effective. But I suck at getting customers so I let it go.
foldr•1h ago
In fairness, it's not that easy to make a functioning Next.js page.
fogzen•1h ago
So what? Milk the VCs dry while you can. It's probably easier to raise $500k for your AI vaporware than it is to get a decent job.
dennisy•1h ago
My personal view here has shifts quite often, yes software is getting easier to build at an alarming rate, but designing good software is not (yet), and new novel software is not in the training set so should remain hard to build, forever (?)
To address the main comment, yes lots of apps are just wrappers, and I feel this is not sustainable, we will not need all these specialised apps since AI is such a general interface to computing.
poupdich•50s ago
I don't see that with the AI wrappers - I can do exactly what they offer without needing them, often easier in the existing UI.
They're selling sugar in a new box, and calling it a steak dinner.