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AI is going to kill app subscriptions

nichehunt.app

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Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#111

Post by neya »

aavci wrote: post #104
neya wrote: post #60

> it costs almost nothing to build an app, it costs almost nothing to clone an app. I guess the author hasn't done real software development. The cost isn't just for the code. It's for the whole process - especially the architecture. Which database to use for the use case, which framework and language to use, how the database should be structured,table naming standardization, best practices, security audits and every…

What happened to clawd/molt?

https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/researchers-40000...

Actually this number was updated to 135,000 exposed instances recently

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#112

Post by notahacker »

noelsusman wrote: post #100
markbao wrote: post #92

Everyone who has built software knows that the hardest parts involve making complex, tricky decisions with tradeoffs. Let’s say you make a grocery list app. Now you have to make decisions about all the different ways to specify quantity. Units, weight, dollars, bunches… oh, and fractional vs. decimal weight, etc… The claim is that now every random person now will build their own app and have to make those hard decisi…

A grocery list app is the perfect example of the kind of thing that AI will make obsolete. Why would I pay $5/month for a list app when I can pay Claude $0.30 one time to make it for me? I in fact did just that. I used Claude to reverse engineer my grocery store's API and build a grocery list app that automatically pulls in the aisle information for each item and sorts it by how I typically walk through the store. It…

Who pays $5 per month for grocery store apps anyway? The usual revenue model is the app is free and you pay for the groceries...

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#113

Post by tasuki »

neya wrote: post #60

> it costs almost nothing to build an app, it costs almost nothing to clone an app. I guess the author hasn't done real software development. The cost isn't just for the code. It's for the whole process - especially the architecture. Which database to use for the use case, which framework and language to use, how the database should be structured,table naming standardization, best practices, security audits and every…

> This article was written by AI btw

Unless you had an AI write the article, you can't possibly know that. I'm sick of this being randomly thrown around: it's basically mentioned for every article posted. Sometimes the author chimes in to say that no, they wrote it themselves. Other times sure, the article was written by AI. I don't know, and you don't know either.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#114

Post by neya »

wiether wrote: post #98
neya wrote: post #60

> it costs almost nothing to build an app, it costs almost nothing to clone an app. I guess the author hasn't done real software development. The cost isn't just for the code. It's for the whole process - especially the architecture. Which database to use for the use case, which framework and language to use, how the database should be structured,table naming standardization, best practices, security audits and every…

> see if it falls apart after handling one request per second Most of the problems you talk about are problems if you intend your software to be used at scale. If you're building an app for yourself to track your own food habits; why does DB, framework, best practices matters? People used to do this in an Excel sheet. Now they can ask Claude to make them a nice UI similar to MFP or whatever. Data can be stored in a s…

All your points are valid and I myself use these types of apps (eg. For handling invoices) internally. But, the second your app talks to the internet, you are more likely to shoot yourself in the foot. Look what happened to Clawdbot. Everyone who used it had their instances exposed to the internet.

AI can fix bugs, sure. But every time you ask it to fix the same problem, it will come up with a new solution - usually unnecessarily complex. Will we reach a point where the AI can be its own architect? Maybe. But, I know for a fact that it's not what we have right now.

Right now, AI needs an architect to tell it how it should solve a problem. The real value of software is in the lived human experiences, not just the code. That's why we make certain decisions different than an AI would.

Ask an AI to vibe code an invoice app. It will make some really lovely looking UI - which is what unfortunately people judge an app by - but with a MongoDb backend which is totally not the right solution for the problem. That's what I mean.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#115

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

cruffle_duffle wrote: post #95
Dansvidania wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vibe code to production perhaps not, but vibe code for regular personal use doesn’t seem out of the realm of possibility already. Unless there is inherent complexity in the problem (and assuming subscriptions don’t get pricey soon) I can see nontechnical people getting into designing their own apps. It makes me think of 3d printing. A lot of people got into 3d modeling because of it. And a lot of people publish cute…

3d printing is something I think about. LLMs do their best work against text and 3d printers consume gcode. I’ve had sonnet spit out perfectly good single layer test prints. Obviously it won’t have the context window to hold much more gcode BUT… If there was a text based file format for models, it could generate those and you could hand that to the slicer. Like I’ve never looked, but are stl files text or binary? Or…

There is a text based file format for models. It's called OpenSCAD. It's also much more information compacted than a mesh model file like STL - e.g. in OpenSCAD you describe the curve, in the mesh file like STL you explicitly state all elements of it.

It's just gimped to the point that you can basically only use it for hobbyist projects, anything reasonably professional looking is using STEP compatible files and that is much more complex to try to emulate and get right. STEP is a bit different - it's more like a mesh in that it contains the final geometry, but in BRep which is pretty close to the machining grade, while OpenSCAD is more like what you're asking about - a textual recipe to generate curves that you pass into an engine that turns it into the actual geometry. It's just that OpenSCAD is so wholly insufficient to express what professional designs need it never gets used in the professional world.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#116

Post by esafak »

SoftTalker wrote: post #93
markbao wrote: post #92

Everyone who has built software knows that the hardest parts involve making complex, tricky decisions with tradeoffs. Let’s say you make a grocery list app. Now you have to make decisions about all the different ways to specify quantity. Units, weight, dollars, bunches… oh, and fractional vs. decimal weight, etc… The claim is that now every random person now will build their own app and have to make those hard decisi…

Some things are just not suited to an app. It's still easier to jot down a shopping list on a piece of paper than to use an app and a janky mobile phone keyboard. And bonus, nobody gets to sell your shopping preferences or blast you with ads as you're trying to use it!

That's just a contrived example. Every application involves a million subjective decisions; from the architecture, algorithms, to the UI/UX.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#117

Post by eddythompson80 »

SoftTalker wrote: post #93
markbao wrote: post #92

Everyone who has built software knows that the hardest parts involve making complex, tricky decisions with tradeoffs. Let’s say you make a grocery list app. Now you have to make decisions about all the different ways to specify quantity. Units, weight, dollars, bunches… oh, and fractional vs. decimal weight, etc… The claim is that now every random person now will build their own app and have to make those hard decisi…

Some things are just not suited to an app. It's still easier to jot down a shopping list on a piece of paper than to use an app and a janky mobile phone keyboard. And bonus, nobody gets to sell your shopping preferences or blast you with ads as you're trying to use it!

I spent years trying to find the PERFECT pantry tracking, auto shopping list generating, auto "what can I make tonight with what I have", auto meal preping app. The idea seemed so simple in mind back then. Let me input everything I have, then as I pull ingredients out of the fridge I just "decrease eggs by 3, decrease butter by 1tbsp, decrease bacon by 2 slices" then over time, it will just build my shopping list for me etc. I even built a requirement list and spent a year implementing my own thing.

Given the number of apps put there, from dozens of OSS hobbyist apps to industrial resturant inventory management ones, I wan't alone in thinking this is a solved problem and someone should just have the perfect interface for it. Between auto-unit converting apps, natural language processing apps, @cooklang, a million ideas about tracking pantries and ingredients and their categories, frequency of use charts, etc..

Then one time I went on a trip with a friend to his home town where we stayed at his parents house. His 78 year old mother had a 2 notepads attached to the fridge with a pencil on a string. As she worked in the kitchen, between washing hands she would just jot down random notes, cross others, doddles some on one notepad, and the other she would just add meal plans as she went along. Then when we were going to market she just ripped the page off.

Sounds so fucking simple and easy and I felt so stupid for the amount of effort I put trying to figure out the right app, the right device to mount on my fridge, how to connect power to it. How to make it not always on to blind me at night, but also so I don't have to keep fiddling with it to unlock it. how to use it with wet fingers, how to keep translating units and "catch up" when I miss updating it for a couple of meals, how to hide ingredients I don't care about and highlight ones I do, how to rearrange the interface. It seriously gave me a pause at how dumb I was that the solution is much much simpler and I pigeon holed my thinking on a tech solution for some reason.

Can't sell people notepads though. There is no margin or lock-in in that stuff.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#118

Post by bwfan123 »

sunir wrote: post #66

After the dot.com, there was the O-pocalypse that terrified me as a recent grad. - Open source - Outsourcing - Offshoring It was driving the labour cost of an engineer to zero I felt as a young man. Then time passed, and I learnt that engineers aren't paid to code. Engineers are paid to solve problems for a business. If you recall, the dot.com bust and 9/11 crashed finances for a few years. When the money printing gu…

> Software will have its time in the sun again

Take a look at the history of the power loom which automated weaving in the 19th century. The number of handloom weavers dropped two orders of magnitude after the power loom.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#119

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

colesantiago wrote: post #89
neya wrote: post #60

> it costs almost nothing to build an app, it costs almost nothing to clone an app. I guess the author hasn't done real software development. The cost isn't just for the code. It's for the whole process - especially the architecture. Which database to use for the use case, which framework and language to use, how the database should be structured,table naming standardization, best practices, security audits and every…

I vibecoded an app for my business and didn’t need any engineers and it is currently in use for our customers. I think this is great for everyone to be a developer, the gatekeeping has now been removed and we will see a creative explosion of apps that everyone can build. The security and maintenance aspect of apps is just a claude skill away to be a solved problem.

> "The security and maintenance aspect of apps is just a claude skill away to be a solved problem."

To think that someone on Hacker News actually wrote this seriously in 2026, after a couple of decades of CVEs, security breaches, and data thefts being in the news every single week and after 50+ years of the industry experiencing how arduous software maintenance is. I doubt even Anthropic or OpenAI would be brave enough to say that.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#120

Post by wiether »

CPLX wrote: post #9

I’ve been talking about this a lot with founder/coder types in my circle of friends with a wide variety of opinions. My theory as an old guy is that the standards will just go up. There’s a current business model where you can make a basic but useful tool that solves a specific business problem and make money. That’s going to end. We’ve seen this before. A good example would be when the mobile app stores launched and…

> There’s a current business model where you can make a basic but useful tool that solves a specific business problem and make money. That’s going to end.

I don't know... Because the tool that solves a specific business problem usually requires tons of business expertise. And when company buy this tool, they mainly do it for the expertise diluted in it.

If they didn't already made their own in-house implementation, it's because they don't want to invest in maintaining the tool that requires expertise outside of their actual business.

Meanwhile, the company building the tool can invest in keeping this expertise because it's financed by the multiple companies paying for the tool.

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