> 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.

This is a very naive take. Any good idea you have can now be cloned trivial in no time at all.

The clones just need to out spend you on marketing even though it is your idea that the LLM cloned.

▲

prmph an hour ago | parent [-]

So where are the AI clones of MS Office, JetBrains IDEs, Whatsapp, Obsidian, etc. so far?

▲

lelanthran an hour ago | parent [-]

Obsidian has plenty of clones. The others have money as a moat, which is exactly my point.

▲

prmph an hour ago | parent [-]

Which clones? And why not the others?

Which is my point: it seems easy to clone something that seems conceptually simple, but is the result of all kinds of UI, UX, performance, etc optimizations. The reason someone might choose Obsidian over these so called clones is not just marketing, I assure you. The reason people attempt Obsidian clones is that they think creating todo-list management tools, etc is all it takes to implement a PKM, and that that is easy. It is not.

Right now there are kinds of tools I wished existed, that I would pay for, but AI does not automatically provide the insight, good taste, technical excellence, and grit needed to create these products. I could do them, with AI assisting, but do not have the time. It is not a simple matter of saying: Claude, create or clone X, Y, Z.

▲

lelanthran 32 minutes ago | parent [-]

> Which clones?

Are you seriously contending that apps that have Obsidians functionality don't exist?

Just on HN alone, throughout 2023 - 2025 we were seing like one new TODO app show up on HN weekly!

> And why not the others?

Because money is the moat, and they have it!

That was my entire point - money is the moat.

	▲	prmph 8 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		You are not making sense. > Just on HN alone, throughout 2023 - 2025 we were seing like one new TODO app show up on HN weekly! This response shows you missed my point entirely. I am saying a todo app does not a PKM make! I'm not interested in a vibe-coded todo app, it is useless to me. > Because money is the moat, and they have it! You're sidestepping issue and contradicting yourself. I asked: if cloning is so easy, why has no one cloned the JetBrains IDEs, for example? Remember, I'm not talking about what happens after the cloning. Are you saying no one has cloned Jetbrains because it takes a lot of money to do so? That would contradict your claim that AI makes it easy.