An X exchange between indie founder Pieter Levels and researcher Herbie Bradley spotlights a narrow but pointed disagreement: Levels claims AI has made building software so trivial that he has swapped paid SaaS tools for quick custom versions and sees talent drifting toward hardware, while Bradley counters that only the act of writing code has become cheap and that reliable enterprise products still demand real engineering.
I don't know if it's obvious information or not but if you talk to random people in San Francisco the general thing they say is that software is commoditized cause so easy to make anything with AI fast (like how I cancelled all my SaaS subscriptions and just vibe coded a replacement for free) and that everyone smart is getting into hardware cause it's still difficult to enter, kinda related to the Midjourney Medical thing too
Bradley’s reply keeps the focus on production realities—security, scale, maintenance—that casual AI prompts have not yet erased, leaving open how many teams will still pay for those layers once basic code generation is free.
Levels ties the commoditization claim to an anecdotal shift of “smart” people toward hardware, yet no hiring data or head-count trends back the observation, so the predicted move remains an unmeasured hypothesis for now.
Many users expressed excitement about AI commoditizing software and shifting talent to hardware opportunities in the physical world, while a few dismissed feasibility for SaaS builders.
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That's not really what's commoditization is about I think
It means more that the profit margin of something goes to close to zero where it's sold at cost, as in it's not really a good business anymore where you can make lots of money
It means that it's so easy to make and there's so many competitors that there's no differentiation anymore and everyone just uses whatever and again profit goes to $0
Airlines for example are a commodity service, very tiny profits, very little differentiation, you just want to go from A to B
So the idea is that's happening to SaaS software since anyone can make large parts of them pretty easily these days, or well that's the theory, maybe it'll evolve into something new that does have an edge over AI vibecoded clones again?
Even with commoditization, there's usually a premium tier that remains, think private jets with airlines, or Michelin restaurants, but a premium tier is only a small % of the market, and it can't keep an entire industry alive!
can the average person watch a youtube video to make themselves a michelin star dish at home? yes.
but does that mean everyone will do it or want to always do it? no.
did making high quality recipes kill restaurants? no.
@levelsio But can you really vibe code a replacement for something like Figma or Salesforce? 😅
Not sure where the line is.. It's only easy to replace simple utils, not complex systems.
China is amazing in niche hardware. Extremely high quality. China is making a fortune selling niche hardware to the west.
They have the ecosystem of parts that we don’t have in the west.
A guy can start an hardware business by putting 100 parts together from different vendors.
@levelsio Is it "difficult" or just capital-intensive? Hardware challenges might be a bit more physics-based, but they're just technical challenges. But they cost so much more to even experiment with.
I wonder for how long that will still be true...
@levelsio There's lots of difficult software left to build
@xdrewmiko @levelsio This. Anything sufficiently complex that it would require a full-time employee just to create, maintain and expand it is still viable.
@levelsio I think that’s herd thinking, yeah ai will commoditise software, but hardware too, just a bit later. The only competitive advantage is working on things you enjoy, whatever that might be, and doing it better than everyone else. But that has always been the case.
@levelsio the fun thing waiting on the other side of the hardware game is supply chain and manufacturing, and im not sure software heads are ready for that one. not impossible, but not a walk in the park. extremely entrenched leaders in that space
@levelsio they do say that, but they're kind of wrong? code is commoditized, software is not otherwise every enterprise would be vibecoding their saas products
I don't know if it's obvious information or not but if you talk to random people in San Francisco the general thing they say is that software is commoditized cause so easy to make anything with AI fast (like how I cancelled all my SaaS subscriptions and just vibe coded a replacement for free) and that everyone smart is getting into hardware cause it's still difficult to enter, kinda related to the Midjourney Medical thing too
@levelsio All about moats
@levelsio Millions upon millions of consumers won't ever vibe code replacement software though.
@levelsio
@levelsio levelsio air fryer, when?
@levelsio I’m building a recycled GPU tester just to FAFO
@KennethCassel @levelsio Please do elaborate! What makes it harder?
execution is getting so much easier that it's causing all of the easy, obvious, normie ideas to get swallowed up and executed.
applies in hardware too!
genuinely exciting for the state of the world and for solving real human problems
but also a bit terrifying for me as a solo builder
@levelsio i'm curious - what would you be building if you were a vc backed founder in sf today?
@levelsio I do see a shit ton of software getting replaced entirely in the years to come. But most people still don't understand AI. They think it's just the ChatGPT chat, they have no concept of vibe coding. Hardware is definitely the better place to be though
@levelsio Isn't most hardware pretty straightforward?
Like most hardware isn't that advanced at all?
Like sure, building cutting edge robotics is a frontier field.
But most hardware isn't frontier work.
@levelsio A lot of the big winners from before were those who got control over a standard. There are fewer and fewer cases where I feel like settling on external software for anything in the first place when I can just hack together a streamlined custom solution in hours.