Item — HN Reader

> What if Lovable's mission became: Pay out $1 billion to vibe coders.

This reframes everything. Customer success means revenue success. Platform improvements mean better monetization tools. Growth means more builders making more money.

LOL.

Companies want their revenue numbers to "line go up" and if that means success for the customers, that's a nice side-effect. It is absolutely not the goal, however.

Paying for outcomes is a nice idea but you can make WAY MORE MONEY selling picks and shovels to people who you know will never strike gold. (Plus, you can have a nice little side-hustle selling them maps of where treasure might be).

LLM companies are incentives for the opposite. They don't want you to get the best outcome as quickly (or with as few tokens) as possible. They want to keep you on the slot machine. They want to maximize token use while giving just good enough results to not drive you to a competitor.

"Oh man, you're so close! If only you weren't out of tokens. Too bad you settled for the 20 dollar plan instead of the 200. One more prompt would do it, then everything would work perfectly"