[peder]

I mean, this is just basic smart investing today. Software is now very easily replicable, and you wouldn't want to invest in software that has absolutely no moat.

At a minimum, this gives Bain more leverage when negotiating with these companies.

[claytongulick]

> Software is now very easily replicable

How?

Do you mean by AI? I haven't seen any evidence of this.

It was always possible to get code generated at large volumes for low cost (offshore/outsource market) but we didn't see this upend or replace many (if any) software companies. In my experience it had the opposite effect - companies that replaced talented internal teams ended up suffering.

LLM generated code is similar, but arguably more expensive and lower quality.

We don't see LLM generated product replacement at scale because code generation is a problem, but it's not the only problem. Low quality can kill a product, but high quality doesn't guarantee success.

There's an entire ecosystem around a successful software offering. An ecosystem that depends on adequately functioning code.

LLMs may be useful for certain tasks (...maybe... - we've always had good options for repetitive code generation) but I certainly wouldn't describe it as "very easily replicable".

[realityfactchex]

>> > Software is now very easily replicable

> any evidence of this.

"Any evidence" you say? I think something has moved.

As of Autumn/Winter 2025, I can say "Here's a complete enough spec of what I want cloned. Crank on it for a few hours. Give me the clone site as I specified." And frontier agentic tooling does a hands-off YOLO job really well. (Notice: I set it up with good specs/rules to scaffold.) Cost maybe an hour of my time to set up/scaffold, and 3 hours cranking on its own, on a $20 or $60/mo sub.

I think taking the same problem to an "offshore house" (or even Fiverr or whatever) would probably easily cost 10-100x more, and quite possibly with worse (less reusable or less best-practices code quality or less functional or less clean) output overall.

So I think your OVERALL point may stand. I'm just nitpicking the specific aspect quoted above, and maybe to some degree the aspect of

> "LLM generated code is similar, but arguably more expensive and lower quality"

Which to be fair obviously depends on what code one is comparing.

I used to say "nah, it can't replicate apps that well by itself", but then I tried it (on the advice of a fellow commenter here on HN), and was surprised myself.

[claytongulick]

I agree with your nitpick, I think.

If your argument is that LLMs are more effective and less costly than typical low-quality outsourced code, I generally agree with that, depending on the details.

For prototype/POC stuff, absolutely.

For long term deployable product stuff that needs to be maintained, supported with SLAs etc... eh, like everything, it depends on the people/team.

I've been leading dev teams for around 25 years, and I tend to think in terms of total cost of code.

Cognitive debt is a real thing. The cost of a developer that leaves the team, and the struggle to have someone take over their work is real.

With LLMs you have all this hidden cost, plus no "theory of mind", which makes the cognitive debt much worse.

Combine that with atrophied skills, subtle bugs, architecture facepalms, security issues, etc... and the total cost of LLM generated code is a lot higher than just a subscription price.

[budsniffer952]

Imagine saying with a straight face "we've always had code generation tools like LLMs".

[claytongulick]

Yes, we have, though that wasn't my point - I was comparing LLMs to offshore development.

But since you bring it up, those of us that have been around a while have used many code generation tools that took care of tedious work like model creation, forms, validation, class creation, CRUD, component creation, project skeletons, starter templates, visual design tools that generate code, etc... etc... basically most of the stuff that LLMs are good at. Simple things that are tedious and don't require much thought - the sorts of things that statistical pattern matchers like LLMs are good at.

The rest of it, the stuff that requires thoughtful architecture and reasoning is where LLMs fall flat and mostly end up costing time. The research supports this.

So yep, my face is indeed quite straight.