In LLM era, can software startup survive?

Posted by sjia 11 hours ago

Nowadays, vibe coding is everywhere. Turning an idea into software is just matter of tokens. I was joking the other day. Creating a tax return softwar is much faster than purchasing Turbotax at Costco.

Large companies still have compute resources and customer bases. For startup, users are expecting open source and free software. Posts of subscription or one-time purchase software on Reddit will get tons of downvotes instantly.

Comments

Comment by bestony 28 minutes ago

The essence of business is not that anyone who can write code is guaranteed to make money. In the past, software companies made money because they possessed the ability to help enterprises complete digital/automation and solve problems. Writing code is just one way to solve problems. The vast majority of software I see today only solves the problems of its creators; they don't care or pay attention to how others' problems are solved.

Of course, you might say: "Nowadays, LLMs are so cheap that everyone can write software." But the fact is, while everyone can write software, not everyone can write a complete software. And the assumption that "everyone can write software" is currently also incorrect. Not everyone can write software.

Comment by jaapz 18 minutes ago

It does however lower the barrier of entry and increases what a smaller team of developers can achieve with the same amount of resources. There's still been a major paradigm shift in our industry.

So it probably (I mean honestly I believe anything can happen at this point) doesn't mean every business will just start writing all of their own software (cheaper doesn't mean free), the bar for building your own stuff has lowered so there will for sure be more software written for internal use instead of using some off the shelf program.

And there will be more competition among software companies because everyone can now build much more with much less resources.

Comment by avallach 4 hours ago

I wonder if the flood of vibecoding startups may end up helping long established enterprises and OSS through eroding consumer trust towards new software, and highlighting the value of the industrial software development process. Bills of materials, 4-eyes code reviews, release gates, QA testers, planning involving domain experts, external audits etc. Any time I see a new large piece of software nowadays that seems to have popped out of nowhere and has generic sounding docs and testimonials with em dashes I tend to wonder if it was generated with a one shot prompt and may include vulnerabilities, malicious code, or business domain hallucinations.

It's a bit like with books: 10+ years ago I could have trusted a book from a new author I never heard about just because the large effort of getting published was hinting that the author is likely qualified. Now, hell no.

When the barrier to publish drops to zero, the barrier to gain trust skyrockets.

Comment by falloutx 34 minutes ago

How are you so sure that big corporations will also keep doing code reviews, QA testing, planning. At the current moment, they are laying off a large portion of their workforce, forcing devs to take more and more ownership and even expecting devs to assume the QA testing role. I dont think any software is trustable anymore.

Comment by david_shi 3 hours ago

The real question is whether these security practices can truly survive the onslaught of 24/7 attack swarms, or if we're going to have to rebuild the entire cloud from the ground up.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

Comment by 0xGich 2 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by Northernator11 8 minutes ago

I think it comes down to a change in how companies promote and charge for the service.

Comment by PreciousH 57 minutes ago

A premise here that doesn't stick, "users are expecting open source and free software" this is definitely dependent on the type of software, and reddit isn't even the best way to demonstrate this reddit frowns at everything anyways. There are definitely still a lot of new startups making revenue it's just harder these days.

Comment by genldd 11 hours ago

The code was never the hard part. Understanding the market, developing product market fit, and evolving is the hard part.

Large companies aren't going to chase every opportunity.

Comment by falloutx 32 minutes ago

> The code was never the hard part.

Yes for the people who never coded, that was not the hardest part. We always had more ideamen than programmers, they could never execute anything. If code was never the hard part, vibecoding wouldn't be so popular.

Comment by questionableans 5 hours ago

Choosing the right problem to solve was always very important. The code wasn’t always the hard part, but arguably it really was the hard part more often earlier on.

For example, a personal computer operating system that runs all your existing programs at full speed but doesn’t crash all the time and the ability to run a virtual machine on an x86 PC both took as long as they did to get to market primarily due to the technical difficulty, not because it was hard to find people ready to pay for them. Those kinds of hard coding problems are less plentiful, or at least less obvious today.

Comment by aurareturn 2 hours ago

  The code was never the hard part.

It definitely was. It was at least 50% of the hard part.

I remember there was a debate in my company on execution vs idea. Execution being writing code, the process that comes with it, and the idea being the understanding, market fit. Both sides had good arguments.

Hiring a software team to build an idea was extremely expensive and risky before ChatGPT. That's why most businesses in the world did not have a software engineering team.

Comment by waterTanuki 3 hours ago

I see this phrase thrown around alot and it lacks any substantive evidence. If coding was the easy part why were junior level SWEs getting paid six-figure salaries?

People who say coding wasn't the hard part have never had to refactor a legacy system without LLM assistance and it shows.

Comment by Ekaros 3 hours ago

I think the pay in certain markets was mostly because companies had more money than sense. And then that spread... In most markets pay is not really that special compared to any other field with some education needed. And neither really is the work.

Comment by abrookewood 3 hours ago

Yeah it was ... it just wasn't the ONLY hard part.

Comment by sjia 10 hours ago

Large companies are working hard on laying off and buying out real persons for GPU compute budget.

Comment by grim_io 6 hours ago

And then regretting it shortly after.

The tech is not there yet. It may not be ready for many years.

Comment by falloutx 31 minutes ago

Keep dreaming, No CEO is regretting his multimillion dollar bonus.

Comment by 0xbadcafebee 6 hours ago

The tech will never be there with LLMs. They can't learn, they hallucinate, lie, cheat, steal, destroy things, break the law, etc. You can't train them out of these behaviors, it's how LLMs work.

An LLM is just a really fancy nail gun to replace hammers. Much faster nailing, but you need to hold it right to not shoot yourself in the foot.

Comment by pydevgo 5 hours ago

Distribution is the moat now :)

Comment by aucls1 50 minutes ago

If you solve a problem, a real problem, and has the right niche for it, for sure it can survive. AI just speed up the software part that will also rise the amount of features that was impossible in the past without a huge numbers of employees.

Comment by fnordpiglet 6 hours ago

I think it’s completely inverted actually. The big companies have a much smaller moat now. This is almost certainly the best time to do a startup. You can build a decent product very fast, GTM in a month or so, and pivot rapidly. But it requires a lot of skill to do it with AI tooling in a way that sustainable and the techniques and tools are very immature and shifting around rapidly. Large companies are struggling very hard to integrate these into their flows and workforce while a small company, with the right small set of people, can achieve as much or more than a large one with thousands of developers.

Comment by anandj82 1 hour ago

I had the same thought - that its end of software startups since most people can develop software on their own now using LLMs. But seeing how people use LLMs to develop the app made me realize that there is a difference in knowing how software is built vs just vibe coding it. For example - only a good s/w engineer would know to include CI/CD pipeline which will help her deploy changes faster. A person who is not familiar with s/w is not gonna do that unless they dig a little more deeply OR follows an advise from a good model. In 2 months time, the non s/w engineer is gonna drown in keeping up with all the pieces of the product without regression. So startups who provide value in short cycles would still be in demand. The cycle time of requirement -> delivery is gonna be very short.

Comment by kumarvvr 5 hours ago

To me, it seems that the modern software startup is geared up to provide highly customized solutions to customers. Software that easily bends to the customers needs, rather than customer changing their processes to make use of software.

Comment by sjia 3 hours ago

Customers are less willing to pay for software. They might try AI first on their own.

Comment by berofeev 1 hour ago

Just because I can bake bread at home doesn't mean I do.

It takes time, it takes me away from my actual job within my business, and frankly, the bread from the bakery is pretty good.

Customers will pay for something that's of benefit to them. That hasn't changed.

Comment by talmr 3 hours ago

Some products are harder to build than others imo, even if making software has gotten easier.

Making consistent and reliable software is even harder.

Comment by londons_explore 3 hours ago

I find myself building far more simpler single use tools that do exactly what I need than using commercial swiss army knives which usually overcomplicate what I need to do.

Comment by simionstefanesc 1 hour ago

This is a qwuestion that has been on top of my mind for quite some time now. My answer is it depends so munch on what are you trying to sell and to whom. As software engineers we see a potential to vibe code any product that we see, but we are alone in this, imagine the guys working as BAs or other roles at multinational corporations. Most of them have absolutely no ideea how to even vibecode a working app, that is only easy to us as engineers. So you can still atract new customers, it's just about who you target and that is mostly it.

True that your products will get cloned, but so what? If people start cloning you, that is only a proof that you are on the right track. Keep on cooking guys

Comment by efren6 11 hours ago

The environment of computation and it's interactions in the 7 day week of a modern classed society is open to debate and great thought will come from it to solve the problems of mere boredom , as well as the vital life sustaining things people need.

Comment by gregzem 10 hours ago

If you are settled with distribution channels, can productize the solution or convert the startup feom product one to a service model then you are probably safe. The development itself is cheap and has no moat.

Comment by sjia 10 hours ago

Settleing channels are hard for small businesses.

Comment by fractallyte 1 hour ago

Creating new software is far more than just a matter of tokens. LLMs are like a small programming team: you still need a project manager (you!).

And tax return software is a perfect example of where "vibe coding" will go horribly wrong: a superficial tax return is trivial; handling tax rules for every different situation is vastly more complex. (1) You need to codify all the tax rules; (2) You need to do it reliably (which means really understanding how to work with LLMs: harnesses, gates, verification, reviews, etc.); (3) You need a corpus of real-world examples (taken from where?); (4) You need user feedback.

This would be an intensive multi-month project. And that's before even looking at marketing and sales.

Can a competitor race with you? Sure, but only if they're also determined to put in the work.

Comment by mono442 3 hours ago

It's still usually cheaper to pay for software than it's to write it, maintain it and run it.

Comment by vivzkestrel 7 hours ago

- getting it promoted like nord vpn is the hard part, you do that, someone or the other ll buy something as long as it serves a utility