When Every Market Has Ten Clones

Every week I think I've seen enough to not be surprised by the capabilities of AI, and every week for a while now it seems to just keep blowing my mind.

Good or bad? I think there's probably going to be more software created in the next few years than in the past 20.

I know this may raise some eyebrows, but right now I think 95% of web-based tools, SaaS applications, internal tools, pipelines, libraries and frameworks can be built from scratch within a few days, with the more complex cases taking a couple of weeks. That's with a maintainable codebase, documentation, security, testing, CI/CD, monitoring and everything else you'd expect from a production-ready application.

There are definitely exceptions. Social apps that rely on interactions between users aren't going to be replaced easily. Platforms with large libraries of content and resources are a bit trickier, but certainly not immune, as it's pretty simple to spin up parallel agents to tackle that problem with high-quality results.

But it got me thinking about the near future. What happens when every market is flooded with 10 viable clones of the same tool?

I think reputation and real recommendations are going to become an even bigger factor for customers than they are now, assuming we get some kind of mechanism that allows them to genuinely trust it.

Not just "this has 4.8 stars", but something that tells you people actually use this, it's reliable, and people trust it.

Originally posted on LinkedIn.