I wrote a long essay following a talk I gave at AI DevCon in Brooklyn last month.
It starts out with an anecdote about hunting ChatGPT in December 2022 and goes on to explore what I think will be necessary to thrive as code becomes a commodity:
In December 2022, I hunted ChatGPT on Product Hunt.
It ranked #1 product of the day, then the week, and went on to be named Product of the Year.
Having co-founded a YC-backed conversational AI startup in 2018 (long before LLMs) I recognized in ChatGPT the missing ingredient that would have made that venture viable.
The future we d anticipated had arrived. I could revisit my old problem, or I could expand my area of potency by raising and deploying my own venture capital fund.
I chose the latter.
Three years later, on December 9th, I watched a 24-hour window on Product Hunt cross 500 launches roughly double what I observed throughout the preceding 825 days. Only 13 were featured; most were unremarkable.
The LLM has fundamentally shifted the economics of software development.
As someone with a dual vantage point being the #1 Product Hunter while investing in AI startups I watch the floodwaters rise in real-time.
What s become clear: SaaS is dying; VC is withering . Building software is not uniquely compelling. Code has become a commodity.
What most people miss about commoditization is that when a product or resource becomes abundant, it doesn t just get cheaper. It unlocks new and previously uneconomic uses.
