> When creation was hard, skill was the differentiator: you had to actually be good to make something worth showing. Now the barrier is near zero, so you need reach. Reach costs money or it costs years. Probably both.

Creation has progressively been getting easier since the invention of the computer, it is not a new phenomena. This naturally pushes the boundary on what needs to be delivered in order to find paying customers. In other words, creation still is "hard" if you want to succeed.

> I launched something last week. 14 people signed up — no ads, just a couple of posts. 14 real people who didn't have to. That number is tiny and it felt like something. Then I sat down to think about what it would take to grow it and I couldn't look at that math for very long.

This applies to 90+% of founders that have ever launched something. The hard part comes from continuing to push forward when you experience this (which you will over and over). It sounds like the author expects that what was hard suddenly should be easy.

This AI boom is just a hyper-version of previous tech booms (web 1.0, VC, crypto, etc). You have an enormous number of people who just want to get in and build something, but the products they are pumping out don't serve anyone's need or solve anyone's problem.

The moat isn't money for out-marketing your idea that 750 other people are building, it's having a good idea that solves a problem that nobody else is solving well.

I really like this article, particularly the part about the gravitational threshold. My overall thoughts about launching products is that there will just be more products with smaller audiences, similar to how streaming broke down linear cable. As a software entrepreneur, this means going wider not deeper. Use your human skills to build relationships with people who have that gravitational pull. If you don’t have those relationships, go create them IRL. For context, I’ve founded and sold a social network to AOL, helped raise over $100m, and had 2 other acquisitions.

I appreciate the conversation the post initiates.

Nevertheless, by counter-example -- OpenClaw's creator was just recruited by people with more capital than countries.

If they could "re-produce" it with their capital, they would've preferred that.

Whatever he has, is still a moat. What that is, is debatable.

Is it brand? Is it his creativity? Is it trust/autheticity? A vision? Ownership of a repo or leadership of that community?

All those are perceived moats (or risks) by these folks that tried to scoop him up.

I disagree. I think creativity is still a valid moat. You still need to build good products. Its like a restaurant anyone with some money can open a restaurant but you need to has the creativity to make a good one.

In Republic I, Socrates distinguishes the art of medicine from the art of wage-earning. One is about the work; the other is about getting paid. Historically, the craft was the primary goal, and the money was an extrinsic side effect.

Today, the money-making side has staged a hostile takeover.

The attention conundrum is just a symptom of a deeper financialization. Multi-billion dollar companies have turned profit into a data-driven science – analytically turning the screws on every script, product, and interaction to optimize for extraction. This is the destruction of the art of making things.

The real issue is that you cannot compete with an entity that has no respect for the art. When a platform replaces the integrity of the work with the logic of a metric, the independent creator is no longer an underdog – they are functionally excluded. You can be the best at any art, but in a system that prioritizes sheer extraction over excellence, your craft effectively ceases to exist.

I think the patients, desire and will to do real customer-development is (or could be a moat). The desire to "create" something is very different than the desire to solve a real problem for a market that you understand. Other than this, distribution can be a moat; usually if you have abdicated the aforementioned but often no matter how much customer-development you do distribution can be a barrier to entry for competitors, hence a moat.

The way to tell if a business has a moat that I once learned was, "If someone gave you a billion dollars, could you go compete with that business and have a reasonable chance of winning." The numbers are bigger now, but I think the principle remains the same: money cannot be a moat.

Doing hard things has always been, and always will be, hard.

Building a static HTML page was “hard” in the 90’s. It took actual skills.

Any piece that gets easier automatically opens up more hard avenues to tackle.

no one is willing to pay you for easy.

I think this was already true but it is becoming a lot more obvious now and the effects of this problem are going to affect a lot more people as we see mass white collar worker unemployment. Some people think with lower costs to make software more software is possible. But you can try to get started building a product only to see an improved AI agent build out your idea cheaply, or a bigger company use capital to copy you and enter the same market, and so on. Also, individuals who are richer can take more risks - the loss of money is not existential for them.

The only real fix is incredibly heavy taxation of income and wealth for the ultra rich individuals and ultra large companies. That is what will break through the money moat and create fair competition.

There is an old word for it: saturation.

And let's be honest that's not a new thing. It's been already a long time since you had a revolutionary idea in the shower only to google it(or use an LLM nowadays) and discover that there are already eight different apps that do what you were thinking.

This is certainly one conclusion that could be drawn.

Another conclusion could be that as building software gets easier (like it did for ex in the 90s and again in the 2010s), opportunities are created for new entrants to displace Bad Old Software.

Those expensive Enterprise apps that everybody hates? Are absolutely begging to be replaced by something better for half the money.

We still live in a world where most individuals own more compute power than most universities did in the '80s, yet the only sign of automation is useless push notifications.

Data behind one pane of glass can't easily be moved to data behind a second pane of glass. Simple stuff like "move my Instacart shopping cart to Costco.com same-day" is a manual affair. This is a subset of the general problem that more apps has resulted in more data silos that are generally isolated, without APIs, without automation.

There are zillions of problems out there for which people will pay money, but money chases the same 4-5 problems at a time. Just work on one of the other ones.

I think the other moat is access to non-public data. If you can train, measure, or make decisions based on specific data that the vibecoder trying to clone you can't get, you can keep ahead.

If someone has a problem they need solved:

* Attention span won't stop them recognizing a solution

* Numerous solutions won't stop them adopting one

* That the developer put little effort into building that solution won't put them off.

The real answer is of course that there's a lot of stuff that being built that doesn't solve people's problems people have, either because it targets a problem that doesn't really exist or because it fails to solve the problem it does target.

> The value of human thinking is going down.

Wrong. Creativity, innovation, intuition, taste - all forms of thought solely inherent to humans, all going up.

For the comment from "Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning", the article author editorializes

"One of the great benefits of AI tools, is they allow anyone to build stuff... even if they have no ideas or knowledge.

One of the great drawbacks of AI tools, is they allow anyone to build stuff... even if they have no ideas or knowledge."

into

"One of the great benefits of AI tools is they allow anyone to build stuff, even if they have no ideas or knowledge. One of the great drawbacks is they allow anyone to build stuff."

which removes the rhetorical effectiveness of the comment (and also breaks the promise of a quotation). I recommend that OP represents the source exactly.

____

I now see that this article contains multiple GPT-isms

Utilizing connections with influencers seems to be the most effective way to break through the noise now. Ironically, that's how it used to be before marketing and product development became so accessible.

Money is not a moat since you can buy money (debt) or sell equity for money.

>The thing I launched last week is called Kith — a paid, invite-only social network

Social networks already is an existing competitive space and making it both paid and invite only obviously will hurt its adoption. I wouldn't have been surprised if this failed to get users even if it was free and even if this was preLLM. A brand new social network doesn't truly solve users problems.

The well is drying. You have less money available for hustling and less small players with money. With layoffs happening everywhere you have more people with ambition and time on their hands, but less of them can afford big expenses or major risks.

The hype machine currently pushing for agents is selling agents ability to do automated marketing. However the bigger companies know better than to create giant security holes and the small players are either not technically skilled, or will balk at the huge per-use fees for the good models, or will be drowned out because of low quality cheap model output.

"the value of a human eyeball" / attention is and always will be the limited resource. But I wish the way the economy worked wasn't that attention is sold for money, which makes money the moat, and sets a floor on how low-priced things can get for customers too. Is this really the best the economy can do? Or is it possible to have a fair LLM-based search engine that matches customer need description with stated product descriptions from providers (while weighing customer reviews, etc)?

This post was an Ad also for his paid social network, it did reach me because the message resonates with me as a builder but I don't want to sign up to a social network

So the attention was there but not the conversion.

The definition of a moat is what cannot be bought.

Not discrediting the post, which I think is worthwhile and generally pointing at the right thing, however:

> I launched something last week. 14 people signed up — no ads, just a couple of posts. 14 real people who didn't have to. That number is tiny and it felt like something. Then I sat down to think about what it would take to grow it and I couldn't look at that math for very long.

They launched a paid social network, with no content available without joining a waitlist.

This would not have worked 20 years ago either. Bootstrapping the content for a _free_ social network is incredibly hard. But a paid social network where the only differentiating factor is that users are humans, and there is no activity in the network? Not going to work.

I liked the part about attention being the scarce resource now. Everyone is competing for your attention. But then I see a world in which openclaw is managing emails for people and searching the internet for them and shopping in their behalf. How long until we start seeing advertising specifically targeting AI instead of humans?

If you thought things were hard now just wait for the industrial-scale fully automatic fast-follow bots that will nearly-universally nuke the human-created original product to oblivion in a few years...

I disagree. Customer relationships, taste, creativity, tenacity, execution excellence, industry relevance, reputation, non-public data, etc... are all hard earned or intrinsic capabilities that matter a lot more than feature development speed/cost.

"The value of human thinking is going down."

No! I fundamentally reject this.

The value of unoriginal thinking has gone down. Thinking which is quotidian and pedestrian has become even more worthless than it already was.

The value of true, original human thinking has gone up even higher than it ever has been.

Do we think no new companies will ever succeed now? Of course not. Who, then, will succeed? It will be innovators and original thinkers and those with excellent taste.

Why did stripe make big inroads in developer spaces even if they are in an ultra competitive low margin market? They had excellent taste in developer ergonomics. They won big not because they coded well or fast (though I know pc thinks their speed is a big factor, I think he is mostly incorrect on that) but because they had an actual sense of originality and propriety to their approach! And it resonated.

So many other products are similar. You can massively disrupt a space simply by having an original angle on it that nobody else has had. Look at video games! Perhaps the best example of this is how utterly horribly AAA games have been doing, while indie hits produce instantly timeless entries.

And soon this will be the ONLY thing that still differentiates. Artistic propriety, originality, and taste.

(And, of course, the ever-elusive ability to actually execute that I also don't think LLMs will help with.)

> The people winning mostly had a head start. Or they have money. Usually both.

It feels like that doesn't it? But, as one counter-point, OpenClaw. :)

Btw I did a deep-dive into AI moats last week and wrote a blog post about it. Relationships were most likely the strongest moat from my research - but definitely having a large amount of money in reserves helps. https://www.cjroth.com/blog/2026-02-11-moats-in-the-age-of-a...

> The value of human thinking is going down. You probably knew this. The corollary is rarely mentioned: the value of a human eyeball is going up, because there are only so many of them and there are now infinite things that want to be looked at.

Hey, so I'm thinking about getting my car washed..

This article reads as overly hyperbolic; cashing in on the AI hysteria. AI derangement.

>Every morning a few thousand people wake up and ship something. A tool, a SaaS, a newsletter, an app that does the thing the other app does but slightly differently. They post it on Hacker News. Nobody clicks.

>This is not new. What's new is the scale. An AI can wake up (or whatever it does at 3am) and ship twelve of these before breakfast.

That's fun, I'm sure if somebody actually checked that and graphed it, you would not be able to pinpoint when AI starts on the graph

I think there's still value in building quality products, but AI makes it easy to build something that appears good but doesn't actually work that well. It's very difficult to communicate the thought and intentionality that went into a well-designed product in a way that stands out amongst the noise.

looks like the real tension here is that "money" and "reach" aren't quite the same moat though. I think the post kind of conflates them. existing audience is the actual barrier - money can buy ads but it can't buy trust or distribution, not quickly anyway

the gravitational threshold thing is real ngl. I've seen the same dynamic in product launches - identical quality, completely different outcomes based on whether you're already above the line or not. that part holds up

not sure the "creativity is the moat" counterargument fully lands either. yeah taste matters, but AstroBen's point is valid - anything that gets traction gets cloned basically immediately now. so creativity gets you first mover advantage for like... a week?

maybe the actual moat is just community? people who already trust you before you ship. which is a form of reach I guess, so kind of proves the point

And the super rich now even switch to other people's money. A fund makes investments in SpaceX and Anthropic available:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/retail-investors-access-space...

It would be hilarious if the final "IPOs" will be in SPAC form with the help of SPAC king Chamath.

I saw Peter Steinberger whose creativity is huge and made a difference. Yeah you can say he's already rich.

But I also saw many people like him including the author of Flask. Also the author of XcodeBuildMcp, tailwindcss

Is the purpose of space exploration to build rockets? Or is the purpose to deliver things and people into orbit and to other worlds?

Is the purpose of a computer program to use processing, network and memory? Or is it to handle and manipulate information to give results which are useful to people?

Now the moat of having memorized intentionally convoluted and complicated programming languages has been taken away. Exactly like the printing press removed the monopoly on information which was held exclusively by priests and monks.

When tools make a job easier, they open up new markets for people to do and sell things which were too costly to offer before. AI translation alone means that small businesses can open up several markets they didn't have any access to, broadening the number of potential customers immensely.

> When creation was hard, skill was the differentiator I don't think people use things because they are hard to make

While building has becomes way cheaper (and probably is going to become even cheaper in the future), is building something exceptional really that much cheaper now?

AI has certainly made it so much simpler to just pump "something" out (slop), but did it actually make building something that went through hundreds and thousands of iterations significantly cheaper?

I also like to think AI is really raising the bar for everybody. In the past, you could easily get away launching a product with a crappy landing page and a couple of bugs here and there, is that still the case? Don't people just expect a perfect landing page at this point (when's the last time anybody specifically talked/ thought about responsiveness?) paired with a flawless onboarding etc.?

I hope this is true, I'm trying to make a multi-agent orchestration thing that looks at grain futures, satellite imagery, news, etc... to trade crypto. I'll probably lose but yeah.

Maybe the guy doing their 9-5 can run many agents to make them money while they work their day job.

Is that a thing, you get hired at some company then you use an agent to work for you, deep fake video calls, cursor code... that would be crazy. Get another job and split your time between agents for minor corrections.

Saturation of channels due to slop content - doesn't mean that created stuff is not scarce

there's more problems then ever before that need empathetic humans to solve - are you up for the challenge - or you're doing a quick cash grab

due to people using machine gun approaches - spray & pray - we haven't forgotten how scalable human touch is -- yeah at first - you've to do things the manual way - reach out have a conversation - but slowly word spreads around without you spending money on ads | content etc

It's like.. what happens when software becomes a solved problem? Like bricks for construction. There's not 50 million typically highly paid brick design engineers in the world.

Have people naturally started sounding like an LLM when they write and talk? To me this article reads not fully human.

Difficulty is the only true moat. [Astronaut: always has been]

Current examples: esoteric calculations that are not public knowledge; historical data that you collected and someone else didn't; valuable proprietary data; having good taste; having insider knowledge of a niche industry; making physical things; attracting an audience.

Some things that were recently difficult are now easy, but general perception has not caught up. That means there's arbitrage—you can charge the old prices for creating a web app, but execute it in a day. But this arbitrage will not last forever; we will see downward price pressure on anything that is newly easy. So my advice is: take advantage now.

Welp guess I’m done then.

Kind of nice to know I don’t have to blame myself anymore.

I'm no big fan of economists - but if some type of business is seen as highly desirable to be in, and has minimal barriers to entry, then the market will soon be saturated. Expecting otherwise is (at best) wishful thinking.

People here saying creativity or having a good idea is the moat

You know that if anything you build gets traction, it'll be cloned by 100 people, right?

Doom and gloom nonsense.

No, it's imagination, same as it ever was.

Software to most of this discussion is a web app with a landing page, a pricing tier, and MRR. That's it. The frame is "product," the metric is "traction," and the canvas is "things people pay $9/month for."

But software is instructions that make matter and energy do things they wouldn't otherwise do. It's the most general-purpose tool humans have ever built. So let's actually think about what's underbuilt:

The whole damn physical world is barely instrumented. Agricultural systems, water infrastructure, building envelopes, soil health, local microclimates. There are farmers making irrigation decisions on vibes. Municipal water systems with no real-time leak detection. Buildings hemorrhaging energy because nobody's modeled their thermal behavior. These aren't apps. They're control systems, and they're mostly missing.

Fabrication and manufacturing are being transformed by CNC/3D printing but the software for designing things to be manufactured is still terrible (and inaccessible!). Generative design that accounts for material properties, toolpath constraints, assembly sequences. CAM software is where word processors were in 1985.

Scientific instruments. A spectrometer is mostly software now. So is a radio telescope. So is a seismograph. Every goddamn thing can be a thermometer (accidentaly!) The gap between "data sensor exists" and "useful scientific instrument" is almost entirely software, and most of that software is written by grad students in unmaintained Python.

Preservation. Some people are doing this with datamuseum.dk. But expand it: there are entire musical traditions, oral histories, craft techniques, ecological knowledge systems that exist in living memory and nowhere else. Software for capturing, encoding, and transmitting that knowledge barely exists. Not "an app for recording grandma," but formal knowledge representation of, say, how a master boatbuilder in Kerala selects wood by sound and flex.

Prosthetics and rehabilitation. This one is big for me personally! The gap between what a modern prosthetic limb could do with good software and what it actually does is enormous. Why are my eyeballs still chunks of plastic? Same for cognitive rehabilitation tools, speech therapy systems, physical therapy feedback loops.

Governance and collective decision-making. Every organization above 20 people is making decisions with tools that are basically "email plus meetings plus a shared doc." Formal deliberation systems, preference aggregation, transparent resource allocation. These are hard computer science problems that nobody's building because they don't have obvious MRR.

Tools for thought that aren't note-taking apps with backlinks. Actual reasoning aids. Argument mapping. Assumption tracking. Decision support that makes your thinking better rather than your typing faster.

The entire domain of formal verification applied to things that matter. Bridges, medical devices, voting systems, financial settlement. We have figured out how to prove some? software correct. We almost never do it for the software where correctness actually matters.

And that's me, one person, in five minutes. Every domain expert in the world is sitting on a pile of unsolved problems that software could address, and most of them have never talked to a programmer because programmers are busy building the next task management app.

Go talk to a nurse, a farmer, a building inspector, a food bank logistics coordinator. Ask them what's broken. I promise the answer isn't "nothing" and I promise nobody on ProductHunt is solving it.

PG wrote essays about this ffs! "Make something people want." "Live in the future and build what's missing." That advice didn't stop being true because AI made the building part cheaper. If anything it's more true now, because the building is almost free, which means the noticing is almost the entire game. You are skipping the noticing and going straight to the building, then wondering why nobody cares.

The number of hard things isn't going down. This thread can't see them because it's not looking at the world. It's looking at ProductHunt.

To make things concrete, in the last week I have been working on my open source speech synthesizer, rebuilding Klatt's ideas from the 1980 paper up to modern emotion/prosody work. Did you know the whole field went nuts for neural approaches in ~2018 and there's a whole shitload of interesting papers just sitting out there that nobody has ever implemented in a real system? Did you know that a bunch of people did research into what different human emotions sound like and now I can make a depressed speech synthesizer, or, scarily, one which sounds more honest to people?

So this is what the VCs were screaming about this bullshit about "abundance".

Abundance of copy cats that cannot make any money as prices are raced to zero.

Capitalism working as intended, shifting more and more resources to the already-rich.

A handful of people doesn't own most of the country by accident.