OpenAI’s Windsurf deal is off, and Windsurf’s CEO is going to Google

No one ever shares their great and shipped products. AI built slop is for generating hype not revenue or users.

It does exude a strong scent of astroturfing.

That's not always the case.

AI is often used to pump out sites and apps that scam users, SEO spam, etc. So there is definitely a revenue stream that makes scammers and grifters excited for AI. These tools have increased the scope and reach of their scams, and provide a huge boost to their productivity.

That's partly why I'm curious about OP's work. Nobody who's using these tools while following best software engineering practices would claim that they're making them that much more productive. Reviewing the generated code and fixing issues counteracts whatever time is saved by generating code. But if they're vibe coding and don't even look at the code...

Not the OP but this is smth I've vibecoded using cursor: https://bestphoto.ai/ MRR ~$150. It basically started as a clone of my other site: https://aieasypic.com (MRR 2.5k, 5-8k/mo rev) since I was having trouble keeping code context in mind and claude was pretty bad at doing full features with the tech stack I used for that site(Django BE, NextJS FE) making adding new features a pain, so I completely switched to a stack that claude is very good at NextJS fullstack(trpc BE) and now it can basically one-shot a feature request.

Just putting this here because a lot of times AI coding seems to be dismissed as smth that can't do actual work ie generate revenue, while its more like making money as a solo dev is already pretty rare and if you're working in a corp. instead you're not going to just post your company name when asked for examples on what you're using AI for.

The other day someone was gloating they'd created a 30k LoC code base in a few weeks with a similar setup.

I'd consider that a liability, not an asset, but they were pretty happy with it.

Man, who sucked the joy out of your life. Just try the damn thing. I have the staunchest anti-hypsters in my org and even they are using these tools heavily now.

I build most of not all of my stuff for work, and I ain't sharing that.

It's no panacea, but is there something to be had there? Abso-fucking-lutley. All of this would have been complete scifi at the beginning of this decade.

Those are exactly the kind of AI slop products I would expect to be vibe coded. You've created yet another wrapper around LLM APIs where the business model is charging a premium over existing services. Your revenue depends on the ignorance of customers to not realize they can get the same or better service for cheaper from companies that actually do the hard work. I bet SEO hacking is really important to you.

It's irrefutable that AI tools can be used to create software that generates revenue. What's more difficult is using them to create something that brings actual value into the world.

Sure man, any product you don't like is just "another wrapper". I guess every website is just a wrapper over postgres or wordpress too. I run my own serverless GPU containers on runpod with a combination of comfy and my own fastapi servers using diffusers, not that it'd even matter if I just used some third party APIs. It originally even started as smth that was hacked together using 4x 4070ti supers in my basement that I then moved to runpod. Indiehacking is mostly marketing, nobody cares if you built some technically beautiful thing.

Also its easy to criticize from the sidelines but, do you have products that you made by yourself that are used by hundreds of thousands of people? I have 5 such sites, 2 of which I named above

100%!