ncls. @nclspov - Twitter Profile

17 days ago

@matherslabs @shadcn You don't start up there. If I build a product and put it out there, it takes some time to attract people. But someone else can just copy it with AI and if they have a bigger reach, there's nothing I can do. That's what this post is about.

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shadcn

@shadcn

18 days ago

Alright. I want you to read this. Earlier today, I released a new component. What you see is the finished result. What you don’t see are the days of planning, research, testing, designing, simplifying, throwing ideas away, and trying again before I felt it was ready. Within hours, it had been copied and ported to another framework by pointing an agent at my code. Of course, it’s open source. They were allowed to do it. And I’ve been around long enough, with multiple successful products, that I don’t care. But what if this was someone’s first product? What if they spent months building it, launched on Friday, and by Monday it had been cloned by agents, repackaged, and made free? What happens when your second product is copied? Your fifth? Your tenth? What happens when every new idea immediately becomes the next prompt? What happens when your roadmap, your changelog, and your launch announcements become someone else input prompts? What happens when models become good enough to copy bigger ideas? What happens when “just execute better” stops being the answer? What happens when “just build bigger” or “think wider” stops being enough? What happens when both ideas and execution become cheap? What happens when the creator pays the full cost of creativity but everyone else pays nothing to reproduce it? What happens to creativity when AI makes copying effectively free? What happens to the will to create when AI makes copying effectively free? Look, copying is not new. Copying at this speed, cost, and scale is. People will tell you to think bigger. But nobody starts "bigger". Every one of us here started by making something small. You keep going because, somewhere along the way, the work is rewarded. Maybe people use it. Maybe they pay for it. Maybe they simply recognize the thought, effort, and care that went into it. Copying once demanded effort. You had to study the work and understand it to copy it. That effort created appreciation for the person who made it. Not anymore. Creativity begins with small steps. If we make those first steps feel pointless, we don’t just lose small products. We lose the people who might have gone on to build the big ones. We are uniquely positioned here. We get to use and experience this life-changing technology before almost everyone else. How we use it will set the default everywhere else. That default will spread to writing, design, music, research, and every other field where someone still has to take the first creative risk. We can use AI to build great things. Or we can use it to strip every new idea for parts. We decide.

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