We were experiencing abnormally high electrical bills and I could not figure out what was happening, so I downloaded the granular usage data (15 min increments) from Duke Energy, explained what we had in our house and when we typically used those items (washer/dryer, EVs, etc), provided a rundown of our energy usage plan, then asked Claude to build me a Streamlit dashboard that would help us understand what was going on and predict what was going to happen over the next months. The dashboard had a few simple toggles a levers. Claude was basically able to one-shot this, knew how to manage the XML from Duke Energy, etc... In about 20 minutes of prompting, I had a very comprehensive dashboard that was extremely helpful not only in diagnosing that specific issue but also in helping us understand how to further lower our electrical bills.
But ... who was phone?!
E.g, what was it? Don't leave us hanging!
This can be a product.
The comment above literally said this took them 20 minutes of prompting. That doesn't sound like much if any value add.
It's not going to be a particularly expensive product, but a product it can be.
I’m making $1000/month off of an app that was initially a single prompt.
There’s a gold rush right now. You absolutely can turn these ideas into products.
Sounds like something people say to locksmiths.
> The comment above literally said this took them 20 minutes of prompting. That doesn't sound like much if any value add.
You can say much the same about most small SaaS products of the last decade - the value-add isn't the 20 minutes of prompting, it's that someone else has already tested and validated the damn thing.
And yes, you won't sell many to engineers, because they'd rather prompt their own in-house version. But you might well sell to other folks
Homeassistant already has tons of integration into power providers and easily let's you pipe in local data if you have it. In addition - can it be a product if anyone can just type what this guy did into an LLM? What's your moat if anyone can just replicate it?
It doesn't have to be a durable.moat for it to be a product that makes the author money, just right place right time. If it's gonna cost me a bunch of time and effort and tokens, and the cost of the product is lower than the time and effort and tokens, then I'd rather pay for the product.
Right now we're in $1 Uber ride territory. That $20/month OpenAI/Anthropic plan isn't going to last forever. If it's going to cost me $100 in tokens to replicate the product, $20 is a cheap no brainer purchase m
Going from one off prototype to robust product is a huge leap.
I think these ephemeral context tailored projects are really great and useful. But these are not to be thought of as products. They work for you specifically, and people who are tech-brained enough to be able to formulate the complex requirements into a coherent prompt are not like the average user you'd have to sell a product to. It's much easier to make software to intelligent users.