AI Prototypes Aren't Products: Why Nobody Has Built a Real YouTube or Instagram Competitor
What is a product?
The ease of generating impressive prototypes with AI has flooded the internet with demos that look like products. But a real product requires real users, a real market, and solving real problems. Despite the hype, no one has built a true competitor to major platforms like YouTube or Instagram using AI alone. The author argues that most AI-generated creations are just toys, not products, and that true innovation remains hard.
If nobody is using the thing you built, you don't have a product, you have a toy.
- bko
I agree with the point generally but:
> I haven't seen any real competitor of YouTube, or Figma, or Google, or Instagram created solely with AI.
Is a ridiculous set of products to expect competitors for. First all but 1 rely heavily on network effects. YouTube is a low cost provider. Think about it, they provide unlimited high quality video storage for free. They process 500 hours of content every minute. Google and Instagram have a huge network all users benefit from. AI can't help you bootstrap this network.
The only one that's fair is Figma, and considering Figma is down 30% from IPO price (much lower from ending day close), it's fair to say there are competitors to Figma, including the LLMs themselves.
That begs the question: what is product? Is "an app for designers to change style and communicate with developers" the product? Or is the product "to make websites look pretty and well organized"? The former, Figma is great. But if the product is the latter, LLMs are a real threat. No one would bother building a "better Figma" today, why would they? They would just solve the problem Figma purports to solve
- JSR_FDED
It’s a great question, but I don’t think the article answers it.
Not in any academic sense, but in a real-world sense a software product is something that as a user you can rely on to solve a problem. Rely is doing the heavy lifting in that sentence.
You can rely on a vendor’s product if (a) they’re going to be around for a long time, otherwise the investment into adopting it isn’t worth it; (b) the vendor is committed to solving your problem in an ongoing way - meaning they understand enough of the domain (ideally more than you do) that they’re going to be a partner even as your own needs evolve; (c) they deliver the product in a dependable way - high uptime and security.
So it comes down to “can you depend on this software over time?”
- sujee
The issue is most of these demo are created by developers. Most of the developers don't have interests or skills in product and design. So they use AI to write code, not build product.
Another mistake everyone making is not building better and bigger products. What is used to take a month to develop is now possible in few days but most don't put the same effort as before to make bigger and better products. They just do they same as what they used to do before but quickly. This is a mistake. AI uplifted everything so products built with AI should go to next level.
I'm an indie mac app developer. My first product took me 6 months to develop without much AI. I just released my second app ( https://www.vinaa.ai/ ) but took the same time to develop as I wanted it to be the best AI chat app. So I spent a month building my own markdown renderer in TextKit as existing library are not fast enough. I wouldn't done this if I don't use AI.
- mft_
This just reads like someone's cross at the AI hype and wanted to take a shot, but missed.
The underlying point --that network effects exist and determine the success of a product-- has always been the case, long before AI made it possible to vibe code a rough Instagram clone in a weekend.
Anyway, if you want a successful new product, the path to success (obviously) isn't likely to be copying an existing behemoth, but offering something new, unique and valuable. That's always been the (exceptionally difficult) challenge, and AI doesn't help with this. But I think we can be confident that in the future, as humans do create new, unique, and valuable products, some of them will probably be vibe coded.
- visarga
I think a product should answer a specific need, it cannot be fully defined internally, it is an expression of some need in the environment which makes it a legitimate product. A product with no viability soon ceases to be a product. Generating code is not the same with answering a need, it is orthogonal. Good products have market fit, not necessarily are themselves well written apps.
The vibe-coded demos everyone's tired of are code with no environmental need pulling on them.