Nick Bonatsakis

· Software entrepreneur, freelancer. iOS/Android/React Native.
· Building awesome apps and freelancing for awesome people.

[Jon Yongfook @yongfook]

"Building was never the hard part, distribution is"

- AI bro who has never built anything, and has 36 followers

[Nick Bonatsakis @nickbona]

This is why products are not getting better as a result of AI. The conventional wisdom is to build what we used to build, faster.

Why even bother making products at this point, and which VCs are going to invest for distribution? That's a commodity that anyone can pour money into.

I don't feel like the "AI is going to make the world better" vision is going to play out if it just turns product creation into drop shipping v2.

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

It used to be that you raised early-stage VC money mostly for product development. The way things are going, it feels this could change to raising early-stage VC money mostly for distribution… building is becoming much cheaper, distribution much more expensive

[Nick Bonatsakis @nickbona]

#5 is a nonsense take that is perpetuated all over this site. Technical barrier to shipping an app is certainly lower, but AI is not spitting out great products with zero effort. Most of what you see flooding the zone now is low-effort slop, no different than when creating websites became drastically easier.

This does make distribution much harder, but as demonstrated by the number of people on here complaining about excessive refund rates, you still need to build a solid product to be successful.

[Nick Bonatsakis @nickbona]

@drbarnard I'm hopeful, but not optimistic. Most (all?) of the software wins in the post-Jobs era have been incremental at best, and this is something that needs to be a big leap.

[Nick Bonatsakis @nickbona]

Right now, I'm actually seeing AI in non-coding contexts often slowing things down. People are starting to out-source their thinking to LLMs, generating more text content than any reasonable human can read, thus flooding the zone with cruft that ultimately slows down decision making.

[Nick Bonatsakis @nickbona]

@Dan_Jeffries1 What if self-improvement eventually yields novel techniques for modeling complex systems? That seems like one path to compressing time.

[Nick Bonatsakis @nickbona]

@GergelyOrosz That's insane. Like every school uses Google Classroom.

[Nick Bonatsakis @nickbona]

I'd love to see an estimate of how much written information is being generated by AI and never being consumed by anyone. I suspect it is massive.

[Nick Bonatsakis @nickbona]

@seanallen_dev @BitrigApp Don't listen to these idiots, you need to do what's best for you and not get left behind. We're not going backwards at this point.

[Vikram Pai @vikpai]

Running a business is just realizing how dumb you were 6 months ago every 6 months

[Nick Bonatsakis @nickbona]

What lol.

There are literally parts of this system that are still on paper, and they started digitizing that shit like 25 years ago.

[Tom Goodwin @tomfgoodwin]

How is it that someone has not invented an entire AI solution for literally every single thing to do with healthcare administration?

[Nick Bonatsakis @nickbona]

@YairDev @idanmasas You're making a bad assumption that if someone installed your app via an ad, that they're shopping around.

[Nick Bonatsakis @nickbona]

@ereniroh This is why the experiment metric that matters isn't trial starts, it's LTV.

[Nick Bonatsakis @nickbona]

@staysaasy @PeterDiamandis I would go as far as to say this is a crisis in education right now. We have a 14 year old in HS and we are relentless on making sure he doesn't cheat with AI, but it is absolutely rampant and teachers have no idea how to get ahead of it.

[Nick Bonatsakis @nickbona]

Anyone paying attention could've seen this coming.

[Business Insider @BusinessInsider]

Sam Altman said AI budgeting has recently become a "huge issue" for some companies, something that "never came up" earlier this year. https://t.co/P2zODBNmDp

[Nick Bonatsakis @nickbona]

@claytonlz That thing lives rent free in my nightmares.

[Nick Bonatsakis @nickbona]

@perrymetzger @Wisenaviii Hard disagree, would any 3 year old have taste?

[Nick Bonatsakis @nickbona]

Feels like that was 30 years ago.

I'll see your question and raise you one: does anyone remember writing ObjC code before autorelease pools were a thing on iOS? Those were truly caveman days.

[Viktor Seraleev @seraleev]

Did you ever ship an app written in Objective-C?

Dinosaur roll call 😁

12 years ago today, Apple introduced Swift

[Nick Bonatsakis @nickbona]

@perrymetzger @Wisenaviii And I'd argue taste comes via lived experience. So the real question is, can real experience be artificially acquired via training on data?

[Nick Bonatsakis @nickbona]

@MattCowlin Wait,, what's the app? DIdn't see it in comments.