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by ____mr____ 21 days ago
The meaningful difference is that you will not experience EOS if (when) anthropic/openai/etc fails to become profitable and is no longer subsidized by capital funding.

While "vibe-coded" apps do help lots of people who didnt have the time/money/skills to create their projects, you should be aware that currently the compute is being subsidized so that users become reliant/used to the service.

1 comments

I believe vibe coding in general is a bad business strategy whether you use FOSS models or not because it means your product probably doesn't have any "secret sauce" (leaving code maintainability problems aside). By that I mean a carefully researched innovation that gives the edge to your product. Nevertheless, using FOSS models is clearly better for the reason you mentioned. I believe serious businesses will transition into using AI on-premise in a very restrictive manner (eg: AI only for tests and reviews policy, etc.). We'll once the dust is settled.
Internal business tools are not innovative products. The potential edge comes from things like being better aligned with the business process or eliminating tasks from the process.
You can inject "secret sauce" through your domain knowledge or life experience.

You could vibe code the "tedium" out of your app with little to no care about it using AI while paying close attention to the critical aspects of your product. Of course, the fact that all of your AI code usage is being monitored by the company that provides you the model/harness is also still means they can just steal your product whenever they want

Stricter use would remove the primary benefit while not really giving much upside so I don't think companies will move in this direction

> Of course, the fact that all of your AI code usage is being monitored by the company that provides you the model/harness is also still means they can just steal your product whenever they want

Also anything which isn’t kept private can quickly be cloned. I think it’s going to be hard for a SaaS to stay profitable unless there’s a real-world tie-in to keep someone from pointing a bit at your app and cloning the observable behavior with just enough changes to claim they didn’t.

The question is if your "secret sauce" will stay secret as you use Anthropic's products, considering they've been launching specialised models like Claude Legal and Design. What happened to Figma with Claude Design should be a warning sign.
You're making the mistake of assuming that just because LLMs make things easy, all of the value is in the LLM and not in the prompting and glue work.