So where are all the AI apps?

    > So, let’s ask again, why? Why is this jump concentrated in software about AI?...Money and hype

The AI field right now is drowning in hype and jumping from one fad to another.

Don't get me wrong: there are real productivity gains to be had, but the reality is that building small one-offs and personal tools is not the same thing as building, operationalizing, and maintaining a large system used by paying customers and performing critical business transactions.

A lot of devs are surrendering their critical thinking facilities to coding agents now. This is part of why the hype has to exist: to convince devs, teams, and leaders that they are "falling behind". Hand over more of your attention (and $$$) to the model providers, create the dependency, shut off your critical thinking, and the loop manifests itself.

The providers are no different from doctors pushing OxyContin in this sense; make teams dependent on the product. The more they use the product, the more they build a dependency. Junior and mid-career devs have their growth curves fully stunted and become entirely reliant on the LLM to even perform basic functions. Leaders believe the hype and lay off teams and replace them with agents, mistaking speed for velocity. The more slop a team codes with AI, the more they become reliant on AI to maintain the codebase because now no one understands it. What do you do now? Double down; more AI! Of course, the answer is an AI code reviewer!. Nothing that more tokens can't solve.

I work with a team that is heavily, heavily using AI and I'm building much of the supporting infrastructure to make this work. But what's clear is that while there are productivity gains to be had, a lot of it is also just hype to keep the $$$ flowing.

Me, and photo editor tool to semi-automate a task of digitizing a few dozen badly scanned old physical photos for a family photo book. Needed something that could auto-straighen and auto-crop the photos with ability to quickly make manual adjustments, Gemini single-shotted me a working app that, after few minutes of back-and-forth as I used it and complained about the process, gained full four-point cropping (arbitrary lines) with snapping to lines detected in image content for minute adjustments.

Before that, it single-shot an app for me where I can copy-paste a table (or a subsection of it) from Excel and print it out perfectly aligned on label sticker paper; it does instantly what used to take me an hour each time, when I had to fight Microsoft Word (mail merge) and my Canon printer's settings to get the text properly aligned on labels, and not cut off because something along the way decided to scale content or add margins or such.

Neither of these tools is immediately usable for others. They're not meant to, and that's fine.

Is it really that big of a deal to help/encourage a friend/family in these simple ways?? Do you have no time in life to smell the flowers?

> Anyone who has been doing this professionally will tell you that the "last step" is what takes the majority of time and effort.

This is true, and I bet there are thousands of people who are in this stage right now - having gotten there far faster than they would have without Claude Code - which makes me predict that the point made in the article will not age well. I think it’s just a matter of a bit more time before the deluge starts, something on the order of six more months.

Looking at Python packages, or any developer-facing form of software, is not a good indicator of AI-based production. The key benefit of AI development is that our focus moves up a few layers of abstraction, allowing us to focus on real-world solutions. Instead of measuring Github, you need to measure feature releases, internal tools created, single-user applications built for a single niche use case.

Measuring python packages to indicate AI-based production is like measuring saw production to measure the effectiveness of the steam engine. You need to look at houses and communities being built, not the tools.