Taptanium Research @taptanium

Some thoughts on the breakthrough-commoditization-cycle in tech

Franz Bruckhoff @franzbruckhoff

2 days ago

@levelsio True, except for more complex software systems that go far beyond straightforward CRUD SaaS, especially those involving deep-tech problems that are far outside current LLM capabilities and out-of-distribution relative to their training data. Right now for example LLMs themselves

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My experience is similar. I built alternative tools that better fit my needs than off the shelf SaaS solutions but that comes at a higher cost. A non-technical friend quit some subscriptions and vibe coded her own alternatives and is now paying more for AI + hosting than she did for the SaaS she used. I don't subscribe to the widely circulating idea that everyone is going to create their own software from scratch as that's too inefficient. Currently tokens are heavily subsidized and costs would be roughly 9x to 10x higher if they were to fully cover the AI infrastructure buildout. At those levels things would look different and it would be obvious that there is value in maximizing usage of existing solutions vs reinventing new ones for individual users. It takes a lot of time thinking through and expressing what it is that I need. A well curated knowledge base can help infer a lot but it's still quite tedious. But sometimes it feels easier to just go do it rather than waste time trying to find an existing solution that turns out to be only 70% there, and then you can't customize or modify anything unless it was open source. So the real problem I think is discoverability of things that exist, and the inability to customize SaaS more deeply. That's where AI will have a lot of positive impact on software in the future. (via @franzbruckhoff - for some reason I can't reply on your posts using my personal account that is Premium+ and ID verified, maybe because it's too new)

Imagine living in Europe and maybe having earlier situational awareness than the great Leopold Aschenbrenner (@leopoldasch) ↓↓↓

Franz Bruckhoff @franzbruckhoff

7 days ago

My blog vanished years ago, but @internetarchive snapshotted it. Here's my original article about the impending wave of AI from April 2015, written out of a cave in Germany. Most of it came true ~10 years later. Link in the comments.

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On the suspension of Fable 5: In 1999, the US Department of Commerce applied export controls to Apple’s Power Mac G4 because it hit 1 gigaflop. An M5 MacBook Pro nowadays is over 4,000x faster! Eventually we'll all get AI thousands of times more powerful than Fable 5.

The US gov seems to be working hard to suppress its AI companies. Anthropic can't provide Fable 5 to non-US nationals anymore, draining revenues & valuation needed to sustain R&D funding. And OpenAI is being teared apart as we speak. There is a ceiling in AI, and it's the gov.

Gary Marcus @GaryMarcus

a week ago

Wow! OpenAI subpoena’d big time! “documents related to a range of its activities and impact on users, including advertising, user engagement and retention, handling of consumer data and health data, activities related to minors and seniors, deep learning models, model

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@levelsio Please make some noise: x.com/franzbruckhoff…

Franz Bruckhoff @franzbruckhoff

a week ago

Fable 5 is no longer available to non-Americans. This is why the @EU_Commission must invest €1T today to build sovereign AI tech. This comes a day after the US got their first trillionaire. Wake up #EU, the alarm is ringing! CC @levelsio @euacc @vonderleyen

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Fable 5 is no longer available to non-Americans. This is why the @EU_Commission must invest €1T today to build sovereign AI tech. This comes a day after the US got their first trillionaire. Wake up #EU, the alarm is ringing! CC @levelsio @euacc @vonderleyen

Anthropic @AnthropicAI

a week ago

The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of

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@levelsio Bottom line: Build pure software products that solve a persistent problem and capture value through recurring subscriptions rather than one-off sales.

It's true that AI is very expensive to society. But only because it is being widely misused for slop of all kind. AI is being heavily subsidized right now. Per @GaryMarcus and his sources, it might be to the tune of 10x. Someone spends $1 on tokens for slop. Someone else pays $9 in subsidies.

How's the English proficiency in Bangkok from your experience? Is it easy to get by with English in everyday life, or do you often run into language barriers? And what are the living costs (rent, food) like per month? You're on the right track with that iterative process. Statistically it takes the feedback of ~7 real users per key user type to uncover ~80% of UX issues, including the most serious ones. 20+ users give stronger quantitative conclusions overall. Depends what you're iterating on.

We're in phase α of the vibe coding gold rush. Millions of non-technicals are trying their luck at the app vending machines. The next phase is β, the great disillusionment. Millions are vibe coding into a void. Excitement, time and money in. Nothing out. Then comes phase γ, the great awakening to reality. Vibe coders realize it was never about building products. It was always about building audiences.

@nico_jeannen Very cool. Where do you get that advertiser data from?

@levelsio It's sad to see all these non-influencer vibe coders raising their hopes for nothing. It's like watching 100 ducks fight for a small hand full of breadcrumbs. And it's funny until you realize they are essentially fighting for their survival. That's not how the world should be.

I watched the App Store go from total gold rush to indie bloodbath in the 2010s. Now I’m watching the exact same movie play out with AI vibe coding in 2026. Everyone’s shipping apps in hours with AI tools. Great. But is anyone actually earning real money? Market saturation is insane. Talking to almost any indie builder in my network right now and the story is the same: talented people grinding, and yet financially struggling hard despite using the most powerful tools in history. The economic pressure + saturation equate to most just fighting for scraps. Zoom out and it gets darker. Homeownership for under-35s is at historic lows. The tools are there, the skills are there, but the path to actually winning (stable income, home, family) feels like it’s disappearing for an entire generation of creators! Am I just being paranoid? Or is this the new normal for tech builders? Drop your real experience below, especially if you’re an indie dev/AI person feeling the squeeze 👇

@GergelyOrosz Directionally yes, but I would say the problem is that ambition hasn't caught up yet with capabilities.

@GaryMarcus The wisest thing anyone can do is to stay away from IPOs until long after the lockup periods. I prefer not to be exit liquidity for investors and insiders.

We are still a couple years away from regular consumers generating apps for themselves on the fly. That's not how it is going to work. What I see in R&D right now is something that is a bit more hybrid. AI-native app architectures that allow easy customization. Regular people are going to attempt to build apps for themselves not because they won't want to spend on apps, but because they fail to discover existing solutions. Expressing your needs costs mental energy. Personal agents will give direction, but I don't see a world where everyone vibe codes everything for themselves. Well-crafted products will always beat ad-hoc vibe coded prototypes.

This is accurate. I see the foundational App Store story repeat with vibe coding, but on a different level. Back then you could be a complete dork, but if you managed to publish an app, just any dumb app imaginable, you would make >$10k with ease, and >$100k with a little bit of luck. A friend called me crazy for quitting my well paid job and building for the iPhone: "Franz, don't do that! There are twenty thousand apps already! Twenty thousand! The market is SATURATED!" I didn't listen to him. iPhone users were desperate to discover new apps. The media was desperate to cover them. Apple was desperate to feature them. The App Store itself was the holy grail of distribution. You just had to show up. That was 2009, with only roughly ~20k apps on the store. The gold nuggets lay on the surface, glittering in the sun. I had tried to build and sell software before, and never really succeeded in making a life-changing amount of money. The App Store seemed to have solved the distribution problem for developers, and that was revolutionary. In response, Steve Jobs himself said that he had never seen such great career opportunities in his life. And for a while, that was true. The App Store opened the gates for the underclass to rise to the top. It was an invitation to improve your life. To stop paying rent. To start a family and send your kids to private school. Anything you wanted. To be there was all you needed to do. Stories of near-homeless developers becoming wealthy overnight spread like wildfire. The euphoria was contagious. By the end of 2009, there were over 100,000 apps on the App Store. Roughly 5x more than at the start of the year. VC money smelled blood. Kleiner Perkins launched the $100M iFund just for apps. Apple took advantage of the hype and repeatedly hinted at gold rush success stories to lure in more developers. The developer community went supernova. A few months later, the App Store cracked the 140,000 apps barrier on a path toward infinity. Everyone seemed to be making great money fishing for success. The boat was getting heavier. Just one year later the wind blew in a different direction. The sky got cloudy and the gold nuggets no longer glittered in the sun. Developers could no longer simply show up and pick up nuggets in front of the mine's entrance. Now they had to go inside. The App Store was already saturated. Developers were complaining about discovery. Indies started to get steamrolled by VC-backed startups. VC money started to flood social media. Ads for apps became a megatrend. Before developers realized, apps were no longer the key to their freedom. Marketing was all that mattered. And it was dominated by VC-backed reckless spenders. Apple wanted developers to market their apps themselves. Hundreds of thousands of developers spending on marketing to direct people to the App Store meant enormous gains for Apple. Over a decade and millions of apps later, the App Store no longer solves your distribution problem. It amplifies it. As platforms mature, operators aim to maximize profits. High saturation forces optimization. Developers can now spend more time on their App Store metadata, store page A/B tests, keywords and various other aspects, than on building. And routinely more money on ads than they earn in return. The App Store evolved from a vessel carrying indie developers toward the promised land, to a boat that flipped in a bloody red ocean. The sharks appeared and invested billions in marketing. Indie app developers got eaten alive by VC-backed startups. If you can't spend VC money on ads, don't go app first. Those times are long gone. Don't let one-in-a-million success stories fool you into believing otherwise. Invest your energy in building an audience first, or raise. Vibe coding is 2009. The saturation is coming. The good news? You're early. The better news? You now know how this ends.