Original work is now an endangered species

When everything looks the same, being different becomes valuable again

Trevor I. Lasn Trevor I. Lasn
· 2 min read
Building 0xinsider.com — see who's winning across prediction markets (Polymarket, Kalshi, and more) — and what they're trading right now.

I’ve been noticing something lately. Everything online is starting to look and sound identical.

Open Twitter, LinkedIn, or any blog platform. Scroll for five minutes. You’ll see the same articles rewritten 50 different ways. Headlines like: morning routines of successful people, is coding dead in the age of AI, top programming languages to learn this year, how to stop procrastinating once and for all, ChatGPT will revolutionize everything, side hustles you can start today.

It’s all LLM-generated content. Not terrible. Just… empty. Taking existing knowledge and rephrasing it into slightly different words. No new insights. No personal experiences. No real learning.

Look at new apps launching on Product Hunt. They all look identical.

Same gradient backgrounds. Same rounded corners. Same “modern” aesthetic. Same CRUD operations wrapped in different terminology. It’s like everyone asked ChatGPT to “make a SaaS app” and shipped the first result.

“vibe-coded apps” - they have the vibe of an app, but no soul. Built in a weekend using the same Tailwind templates, the same component libraries, the same boilerplate code.

They work. They’re functional. But they’re forgettable.

It’s not that people stopped being creative. It’s that the barrier to creating content and apps dropped to zero, so the internet got flooded with the easiest possible output.

Why spend weeks researching and writing something original when you can prompt an LLM to write something “good enough” in 30 seconds?

Why spend time designing unique interfaces when you can copy a template and ship in a day?

The problem isn’t the tools. The tools are amazing. The problem is we stopped using them to amplify our unique ideas and started using them to replace having ideas altogether.


Trevor I. Lasn

Building 0xinsider.com — see who's winning across prediction markets (Polymarket, Kalshi, and more) — and what they're trading right now. Product engineer based in Tartu, Estonia, building and shipping for over a decade.


Found this article helpful? You might enjoy my free newsletter. I share dev tips and insights to help you grow your coding skills and advance your tech career.


Related Articles

Check out these related articles that might be useful for you. They cover similar topics and provide additional insights.

Tech
5 min read

Repopack (now Repomix): Pack Your Entire Repository Into A Single File

A tool that packages your code to easily share with LLM models.

Oct 21, 2024
Read article
Tech
11 min read

Google's Journey: From Search Engine to Tech Giant

Exploring the key innovations and strategies that transformed Google into a global technology leader

Oct 1, 2024
Read article
Tech
5 min read

VoidZero: Threat or Catalyst for Open Source JavaScript Tooling?

When Evan You announced VoidZero, I'll admit - I got excited. And a little nervous.

Oct 15, 2024
Read article
Tech
3 min read

Why Anthropic (Claude AI) Uses 'Member of Technical Staff' for All Engineers (Including Co-founders)

Inside Anthropic's unique approach to preventing talent poaching and maintaining organizational equality

Oct 23, 2024
Read article
Tech
5 min read

Cloudflare's AI Content Control: Savior or Threat to the Open Web?

How Cloudflare's new AI management tools could revolutionize content creation, potentially reshaping the internet landscape for both website owners and AI companies.

Sep 24, 2024
Read article
Tech
5 min read

Can OSSPledge Fix Open Source Sustainability?

The Open Source Pledge aims to address open source sustainability challenges by encouraging companies to pay $2,000 per developer per year

Nov 17, 2024
Read article
Tech
3 min read

When Will We Have Our First AI CEO?

Welcome to the future of corporate leadership. It's efficient, profitable, and utterly inhuman

Nov 4, 2024
Read article
Tech
3 min read

The Crutch Effect: How AI Tools Became A Crutch

Introducing The Crutch Effect

Sep 13, 2024
Read article
Tech
5 min read

Recursion Explained In Simple Terms

Understanding recursion through real examples - why functions call themselves and when to use them

Nov 22, 2024
Read article

This article was originally published on https://www.trevorlasn.com/blog/original-work-is-now-an-endangered-species. It was written by a human and polished using grammar tools for clarity.