> a new hot shot would show up every month and be gone the next when they got bored or frustrated when nobody thought they were special

I don't know much about film industry, and I have a ton of brainfog from being sick today.

Could you say more? What made them a hotshot? They thought they were like, creative geniuses with digital film or something?

yeah this is really a part of it. Both founders and investors get spooked by the rapid entries into a market but persistent not just when it’s hard but when it’s boring goes so much farther.

I don't mean that _all_ AI built stuff is useless, just that the number of products where 'marketing budget' is the bottleneck is dwarfed by the number of tools that aren't that special in the first place.

If you have a product that:

1. Solves a real problem people would pay for

2. Is not trivially replicable by your potential customers or competitors

3. Does not have a natural discovery mechanism by potential customers

Then you need the marketing budget.

That is not most people's problem.

> However, many of the AI products do solve problems and serve needs.

Every solution to a problem comes with its own costs. It is entirely possible that most solutions that are rooted in modern computing technology have actual or perceived costs that exceed the value of "solving the problem".

The problems that most people have that they really want to solve are not addressable by AI, or computers, or software.

The discussion here is going sideways, and I blame the underwhelming blog post.

Having money is NOT an economic moat-- i.e., a durable, structural competitive advantage.

He overlooks broader, true definition of moat attributes like labor supply, infrastructure, PP&E, brand, network, natural monopolies, switching costs, regulation. These don't go away with commoditized CRUD apps.

And quoting someone with decades of experience implying that things are hard now and innovation didn't turn over industries in the last 25+ years is a joke.

Knowledge ? For b2c it might be more difficult, but in b2b, understanding your customer and their specifics issue and developing something made for them is one of the big challenge. Being able to spit out code for free is useless if you don't know what and who you are making the code for.

The same way you prevented this previously. Copying successful products is nothing new, AI just makes it easier.

Marketing, lawyers, good customer support, creating relationships with customers.

You cant. You can only focus on building your own product and making it durable and just much better

by keeping the how part a secret

Let's just say, building software alone is not enough.

You work on niches that have very specific requirements that you can only derive from having a good relationship with customers and so you attend to those needs faster than competitors who are out of the loop.

You don't.

Historically, during booms like this (for example the industrial revolution), it was, because we had patent protections in order to encourage ideas to be brought to market. I don't see how you can have an AI revolution that doesn't just funnel everything to the top without something similar.

Why invent the cotton gin, find investors, and bring it to market if the steel company with the infinite worker machine can instantly compete with you?

We are well on our way to the popping of inflated expectations.

Currently people are taking AI hype too seriously and extrapolating its success out in such a way as to discount the value of other businesses.

Example - last week a bunch of trucking stocks crashed 10-20% because a $6M company that pivoted from Karaoke to AI demoed something.

This is just insane. Sure, if say Waymo is pivoting into commercial trucking.. maybe. But people are basically shorting minutemaid lemonade because their neighbors kids opened up a lemonade stand. Demos are easy, products are hard.

In addition to that, what they don’t mention is that:

1. Other app stores like Google Play and Steam haven’t seen this rapid rise.

2. There are thousands maybe tens of thousands of apps that are just wrappers calling OpenAI APIs or similar low effort AI apps making up a large percentage of this increase.

3. There are billions of dollars pouring into AI startups and many of them launch an iOS app.

> It's like that FT chart claiming that the rapid rise in iOS apps is evidence of an AI-fueled productivity boom.

I mean, there is evidence for some change. Personally, I'm sceptical of what this will amount to, but prior to EOY 2025, there really wasn't any evidence for an app/service boom, and now there's weak evidence, which is better than none.

> I always ask people, in the past year, how many AI-coded apps have you 1) downloaded 2) paid for?

In the past 5 years, the only "new" app I've added to my phone has been Claude.ai.

Before that I guess DoorDash. And that probably covers the past 7ish years of phone use.

There's just too much shit in the store, a lot of it is scammy or has dark patterns.

Because so much technical functionality has been lost/paywalled/dark patterned/enshitified, I've cut the number of apps I use. I've realized building core personal functionality around the whims of corporations eventually just gets weaponized against me, so I might as well start undoing that on my own terms. Who in 2026 is really bringing in a new app/Saas to do much of anything like we naively did a decade ago? No one I know, we've been shown we will be treated as suckers for doing that.