> That might be true, but it doesn't have to be immediately true. It's an arbitrage problem: seeing a gap, knowing you can apply this new tool to make a new entrant, making an offering at a price that works for you, and hoping others haven't found a cheaper way or won the market first. In other words, that's all business as usual.

I'm hearing what you are saying, but the "business as usual" way almost always requires some money or some time (which is the same thing). The ones that don't (performance arts, for example) average a below-minimum-wage pay!

IOW, when the cost of production is almost zero, the market adjusts very quickly to reflect that. What happens then is that a few lottery ticket winners make bank, and everyone else does it for free (or close to it).

You're essentially hoping to be one of those lottery ticket winners.

> How does Glad sell plastic bags when there are thousands of other companies producing plastic bags, often for far, far less?

The cost of production of plastic bags is not near zero, and the requirements for producing plastic bags (i.e. cloning the existing products) include substantial capital.

You're playing in a different market, where the cost of cloning your product is zero.

There's quite a large difference between operating in a market where there is a barrier (capital, time and skill) and operating in a market where there are no capital, time or skill barriers.

The market you are in is not the same as the ones you are comparing your product to. The better comparison is artists, where even though there is a skill and time barrier, the clear majority of the producers do it as a hobby, because it doesn't pay enough for them to do it as a job.

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wcarss 2 days ago | parent [-]

All fair points, I think I agree with your take overall but we might each be focusing on situations involving different levels of capital, time, and skill: I'm imagining situations where AI use brought the barrier down substantially for some entrants, but the barriers still meaningfully exist, while it sounds to me like you're considering the essentially zero barrier case.

My Glad example was off the cuff but it still feels apt to me for the case I mean: the barrier for an existing plastic product producer who doesn't already to also produce bags is likely very low, but it's still non zero, while the barrier for a random person is quite high. I feel vibe coding made individual projects much cheaper (sometimes zero) for decent programmers, but it hasn't made my mom start producing programming projects -- the barrier still seems quite high for non technical people.

	▲	lelanthran 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I dunno about the Glad bag analogy, and now I'm not sure that the artist analogy applies either. I think a better analogy (i.e. one that we both agree one) is Excel preadsheets. There are very few "Excel consultants" available that companies hire. You can't make money be providing solutions in Excel because anyone who needs something that can be done in Excel can just do it themselves. It's like if your mum needed to sum income and expenditures for a little side-business: she won't be hiring an excel consultant to do write the formulas into the 4 - 6 cells that contain calculations, she'll simply do it herself. I think vibe coding is going to be the same way in a few years (much faster than spreadsheets took off, btw, which occurred over a period of a decade) - someone who needs a little project management applications isn't going to buy one, they can get one in an hour "for free"[1]. Just about anything you can vibe-code, an office worker with minimal training (the average person in 2026, for example) can vibe-code. The skill barrier to vibe-coding little apps like this is less than the skill barrier for creating Excel workbooks, and yet almost every office worker does it. -------------------------------------------------------------- [1] In much the same way that someone considers creating a new spreadsheet to be free when they already have Excel installed, people are going to regard the output of LLMs "free" because they are already paying the monthly fee for it.