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Developers and companies who put real care into their product will come out on top. A large part of that is going to be, what not to build - something AI agents will always say yes to.
To be fair, was always the case but its only going to be made more apparent as AI scales out.
Making production software is still hard. You still need to know what you're doing. Making good software still requires significant investment of time and intelligence. Using LLM tools can greatly accelerate development when used effectively, it can enable much smaller high performing teams to be much more effective. But it's not magic and if you're holding it wrong it really can be a hindrance rather than a benefit.
I've given up trusting lifetime anything from the app stores now.
Mobile OSs seem to evolve so much faster, add new layers of security, lock pro features behind app store billing APIs that require the developer's account remains in good standing.
I've been burnt by three apps cutting and running now. One where the developers got their prize jobs at Microsoft and AWS [1], another where they sold the app off to another company that gave up maintaining it [2] and finally EA (enough said) [3]
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46768909
[2]: https://www.androidpolice.com/2018/04/16/beyondpods-first-pu...
[3]: https://web.archive.org/web/20190116224256/https://answers.e...
Before AI dev was expensive so I'd spend hours planning features. I filled 5 notebooks with UI sketches and data schemas and lists of names of what to call things. Building was more or less final as I only had 5-10 hrs a week max and wanted to move on.
Now I type directly into the Claude Code chat box and it writes it in front of me. I haven't planned a thing in months. As a result the app swings wildly around based on my whims and feelings. I can rewrite the whole thing based on something I thought of in the shower. Then days later I realize it isn't right and I rebuild it again. All of the rewrites have done a number on the code and I see dead patterns everywhere from stuff long since deleted.
In a professional app I'd have others to hold me accountable so it's not exactly the same but AI has made it very easy to make a lot of bad apps quickly. If you know exactly what you want though it can feel like magic.
I just hope it's still respecting the data loading and caching algorithms I designed so carefully cause I wouldn't know if it wasn't anymore.
I think we are moving from "can you build this product?" to "do i trust you to support this product?". Software is cheap, trust is a premium. Developers and companies who put real care into their product will come out on top. A large part of that is going to be, what not to build - something AI agents will always say yes to. To be fair, was always the case but its only going to be made more apparent as AI scales out.
Is it typically bug hunting on edge cases? Feature requests? If the initial product is polished enough, what can I realistically expect to run into down the line?
Were you using exclusively free plans to build your app? I didn't find app building to take that long, even without knowing the ins and outs of kotlin and swift. I did find the process of publishing the app to be one of the hardest things. The last 10 - 20 percent of app development still requires a lot of paperwork of you aren't already a developer.
If you read the article, you'll see that the author took the same approach one would use when writing an app manually from scratch: > I started with a simple hello world application. Then added in the habit list, the ability to add a habit, edit a habit and so on. This hands-on, incremental approach works, of course. But I don't think it is the most effective way of using LLMs to write apps.
The problem lies in convincing other people to use it. So far I am the only user.
And, this is not a new experience. I have a utility to change the gamma ramp in a GPU, for windows, that still works in Windows 98, XP, 10, and 11, even Linux and X Window with Wine, and so far I am the only user.
I wrote it because I had an old CRT that was too dark and unusable with the default gamma.
So now everyone can do these one-user apps. Welcome to my world :)
Now I have 20 YOE in software too before the booon of AI.
I've used AI for building a hobbyist note app myself. It's also a mixed bag but a lot of that comes down to how I've changed. Before AI dev was expensive so I'd spend hours planning features. I filled 5 notebooks with UI sketches and data schemas and lists of names of what to call things. Building was more or less final as I only had 5-10 hrs a week max and wanted to move on. Now I type directly into the Claude Code…
Is it bad from a user or performance perspective, or just untidy and unaesthetic from a developer’s perspective? Because the developer’s perspective is becoming increasingly unimportant as LLMs become the main readers and writers of the code.