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If you can vibecode a product that sells, I can vibecode a free open source one just as easily, probably even easier since I can just ask the AI to copy the existing one. Software is trending towards being free and open source.
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Yeah, and then who maintains it?

Maintaining vibe coded software is going to become hours spent with Claude not your users.

That's going to be the difference. It takes nothing to rebuild the software, but listening to users, iterating, handling issues. That's boring.

The ones that win will be the ones that stay the course, not the ones that were built the quickest.

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Half of the value in open source was that it was used by lots of people and all of the nasty edge cases and bugs have been ironed out.

If LLMs were performing according to hype then yes, virtually all paid software would be gone by now and there would be a high quality FOSS equivalent of all of it.

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In the good old days that was called 'piracy'.
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Unclear if this is that. If someone makes their own FOSS Photoshop, that's not piracy, it's GIMP. Training a AI on things that one otherwise has lawful access to (and not, e.g., pirating the material which Meta is being sued over and Anthropic settled over) has been ruled lawful.

Is asking an LLM to "make an open-source Photoshop clone" more like GIMP, or more like opening someone else's photo in Photoshop and clicking the menu option for the filter to make it look like a stained glass window and claiming the stained glass window version is your own IP that doesn't need permission from the original creator?

We may need new IP laws. Or, to the horror of many software developers 20 years ago, software patents.

And "new IP laws" doesn't mean "stronger": the justification for giving creators a monopoly on their works (the right to copy, or copyright) is to encourage more. If we've got a machine to automate this, there's suddenly no reason to encourage more.

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Decompiling binaries and building something very similar is surely an act of piracy.
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If you've got 9 coders, you've at least got a business idea and some financial backing.

Get it out quickly, market it, iterate it. That hasn't changed. Just the speed of iteration before you go from product to product that sells.

Once you know what sells, then again, it takes far less time to rebuild it well if you need to.

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This does not apply in all cases.

Case in point: I am building a digital files archive organizer platform.

This is simply not the kind of product you do a quick prototype of, get it to market quickly, and iterate on based on any failures or issues.

There are an almost infinite number of ways to get the product wrong, in a technical, architectural, and business/market sense. It requires a lot of deep thinking and internal prototyping to even get at what would actually be useful and address the walled-content-silos problem tech vendors love to foist on us. it requires careful implementation to not mess up user data. It requires a ton of architectural and UX design to get a performant product that is easy to understand. I have mulled over architectural decisions for months and thrown them out totally after mounting evidence they were not right, without a single user yet (except myself)

Just quickly coding up the first ideas that come to mind in this space is almost guaranteed to be wasted effort, because I could try a 100 approaches in the market and all could be bad. Do not let the users do your work for you. Make sure you actually understand what you are building and why it is important. Then let the user's experiences tell you how to tweak it to be better.

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