AI raises everyone's app quality but customers now vibecode their own clones to skip paying

Incredible interaction here between @mattwelter and @pedrotech showing exactly what's going on

No judgement on both btw, just interesting to observe:

Matt complains how he improved his product 10x but revenue is down by 1/3rd. Shouldn't it go up if you make the product better? The thing is every competitor also made their product 10x better using AI. So AI raised the baseline quality of everyone's apps (easier to make great apps) and increased competition (easier to enter the market)

But then one of his customers @pedrotech_ replies how he loved the app so much he decided to vibecode his own version for himself "so he didn't have to pay"

This exactly shows:

• everyone thinks they're improving their app but everyone is improving the same amount with AI (but not many realizing), it's like a race but everyone gets nitro now without realizing everyone else has nitro too
• barrier to entry is gone, anyone can just clone an app and enter as a competitor
• personal software is here, as he just cloned an existing app to not have to pay for it anymore
• he then only pays for API tokens for LLM or image models to the model hosters and model owners

So you went from a business chain of

• customer > app > ai model provider

To

• customer > ai model provider

The app layer is possibly getting removed!

Originally posted on X · 💬 86 replies — add yours