Walmart, McDonalds, Nike - none really have any secrets about what they do. There is nothing stopping someone from copying them - except that businesses are big, unwieldy things.
When software becomes cheap companies compete on their support. We see this for Open Source software now.
Software is different, you need very very little to start, historically just your own skills and time. Thes latter two may see some changes with LLMs.
Having to buy a large property, fulfilling every law, etc is materially different than buying a laptop and renting a cloud instance. Almost everyone has the material capacity to do the latter, but almost no one has the privilege for the former.
There is more to it than the code and software provided in most cases I feel.
Who'd pay for brand new Photoshop with a couple new features and improvements if LLM-cloned Photoshop-from-three-months-ago is free?
The first few iterations of this cloud be massively consumer friendly for anything without serious cloud infra costs. Cheap clones all around. Like generic drugs but without the cartel-like control of manufacturing.
Business after that would be dramatically different, though. Differentiating yourself from the willing-to-do-it-for-near-zero-margin competitors to produce something new to bring in money starts to get very hard. Can you provide better customer support? That could be hard, everyone's gonna have a pretty high baseline LLM-support-agent already... and hiring real people instead could dramatically increase the price difference you're trying to justify... Similarly for marketing or outreach etc; how are you going to cut through the AI-agent-generated copycat spam that's gonna be pounding everyone when everyone and their dog has a clone of popular software and services?
Photoshop type things are probably a really good candidate for disruption like that because to a large extent every feature is independent. The noise reduction tool doesn't need API or SDK deps on the layer-opacity tool, for instance. If all your features are LLM balls of shit that doesn't necessarily reduce your ability to add new ones next to them, unlike in a more relational-database-based web app with cross-table/model dependencies, etc.
And in this "try out any new idea cheaply and throw crap against the wall and see what sticks" world "product managers" and "idea people" etc are all pretty fucked. Some of the infinite monkeys are going to periodically hit to gain temporary advantage, but good luck finding someone to pay you to be a "product visionary" in a world where any feature can be rolled out and tested in the market by a random dev in hours or days.
People pay for things they use. If bespoke software is a thing you pick up at the mall at a kiosk next to Target we gotta figure something out.
Sure we can vibecode oneoff projects that does something useful (my fav is browser extensions) but as soon as we ask others to use our code on a regular basis the technical debt clock starts running. And we all know how fast dependencies in a project breaks.
it gets me thinking: if anyone can vibe from spec, whats stopping company a (or even user a) from telling an llm agent "duplicate every aspect of this service in python and deploy it to my aws account xyz"...
in that scenario, why even have companies?