Do you remember there was a time when Twitter clients were a UI design playground? Do you remember 3rd-party Twitter clients? (Do you remember Twitter?)
The interesting thing is that the Twitter clients all had roughly the same features. And nobody called them copycats. Tweetie invented pull-to-refresh. Twitterrific was all about color-coded tweets and a unified timeline. Tweetbot had custom everything and the drawer view. They all worked differently. As Gruber puts it, “Asking for the ‘best Twitter client’ is like asking for the ‘best shirt’.”
These days you go to Show HN and it’s all about yet another vibe-coded common app agent harness thingy #10. Similar types of apps all work similarly. They even look similar. Claude is the worst freelancer ever because it happily builds everyone the same thing. Not thinking about NDAs and stuff.
So vibe coding has made creating things cheap. But creativity is still expensive. What does that mean? It means if you make an app with a new idea, you’ll get copied in no time. It also means you’re stupid if you still bother making your app unique.
For some reason, this reminds me a lot of bubble tea. Very easy to make (buy boba, buy tea, buy cups, you’re in business), very little room for creativity (nobody wants to try your durian flavor). It’s the go-to answer in Singapore when it comes to starting a business.
And it’s a business alright. You can do well if you have deep pockets. You can pour money into marketing. Open shops in prime locations. Most people don’t have deep pockets, so most bubble tea shops don’t do very well.
This is what a market looks like when skill is irrelevant. Software used to be a craft. Now it’s a business. Something is lost, I don’t know what. I’m feeling sad, I don’t know why.