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So where are all the AI apps?

answer.ai

131–140 of 448 posts

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#131
This is such copium for AI haters. I stopped working almost any single line of code at the beginning of this year and I've shipped 3 production projects that would have taken months or years to build by hand in a matter of days.

Except none of them are open source so they don't show up in this article's metrics.

But it's fine. Keep your head in the sand. It doesn't change the once in a lifetime shift we are currently experiencing.

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#133
post #28

It is incredibly easy now to get an idea to the prototype stage, but making it production-ready still needs boring old software engineering skills. I know countless people who followed the "I'll vibe code my own business" trend, and a few of them did get pretty far, but ultimately not a single one actually launched. Anyone who has been doing this professionally will tell you that the "last step" is what takes the maj…

Even if you have the app, you get to start the fun adventure of marketing it and actually trying to grow the damn thing

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#134

By "apps" this author apparently means "PyPi packages". This is a bafflingly myopic perspective in a world of myopic perspectives. Do we really expect people vibecoding "apps" to put anything on PyPi as a result? They're consumers of packagers, not creators. I don't blame people for responding to the title instead of the article, because the article itself doesn't bother to answer its own question.

Did you read the article? The author means software in general, not just user-facing apps.

Yes, I did, just to make sure it was as silly as I thought at first glance.

You do realize that "The author means software in general" is already a concession that they don't actually address the question in the title, right?

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#135
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wdym by "it does something interesting with Claude code I can't do programmatically"?

It means he has a girlfriend. And she goes to a different school. In Canada. You've never heard of it.

Perfect analogy actually

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#136
A friend of mine who is tech savvy and I would say has novice level coding experience decided to build his dream app. Its really been a disaster. The app is completely broken in many different ways, has functionality gaps, no security, no thought out infrastructure, its pretty much a dumpster fire. The problem is that he doesn't know what he doesn't know, so its impossible for him to actually fix it beyond instructing the AI over and over to simply "fix it". The more this is done, the worst the app becomes. He's tried all the major AI vendors, from scratch, same result, a complete mess of code. He's given up on it now and has moved on with his life.

Im not saying that AI is bad, infact, its the opposite, its one of the most important tools that I have seen introduced in my lifetime. Its like a calculator. Its not going to turn everyone into a mathematician, but it will turn those who have an understanding of math into faster mathematician.

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#137
post #28

It is incredibly easy now to get an idea to the prototype stage, but making it production-ready still needs boring old software engineering skills. I know countless people who followed the "I'll vibe code my own business" trend, and a few of them did get pretty far, but ultimately not a single one actually launched. Anyone who has been doing this professionally will tell you that the "last step" is what takes the maj…

> It is incredibly easy now to get an idea to the prototype stage

Yup. And for most purposes, that's enough. An app does not have to be productized and shipped to general audience to be useful. In fact, if your goal is to solve some specific problem for yourself, your friends/family, community or your team, then the "last step" you mention - the one that "takes majority of time and effort" - is entirely unnecessary, irrelevant, and a waste of time.

The productivity boost is there, but it's not measured because people are looking for the wrong thing. Products on the market are not solutions to problems, they're tools to make money. The two are correlated, because of bunch of obvious reasons (people need money, solving a problem costs money, people are happy to pay for solutions, etc.), but they're still distinct. AI is dropping the costs of "solving the problem" part, much more than that of "making a product", so it's not useful to use the lack of the latter as evidence of lack of the former.

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#138
The thesis has it backwards. We will see fewer published/downloaded apps/packages as people rely on others less. I'm not sure we're quite there yet but I'm increasingly likely to spend a few minutes giving an LLM a chance to make a tool I need instead of sifting through sketchy and dodgy websites for some slightly obscure functionality. I use fewer ad-heavy sites that for converting a one text file format to another.

Personally, I see the paid or adware software market shrinking, not growing, as a testament to the success of LLMs in coding.

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#139
I have a number of small apps and libraries I've prompted into existence and have never considered publishing. They work great for me, but are slop for someone else. All the cases I haven't used them for are likely incomplete or buggy or weird, the code quality is poor, and documentation is poor (worse than not existing in many cases.)

Plus you all have LLMs at home. I have my version that takes care of exactly my needs and you can have yours.

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#140
post #133
post #28

It is incredibly easy now to get an idea to the prototype stage, but making it production-ready still needs boring old software engineering skills. I know countless people who followed the "I'll vibe code my own business" trend, and a few of them did get pretty far, but ultimately not a single one actually launched. Anyone who has been doing this professionally will tell you that the "last step" is what takes the maj…

Even if you have the app, you get to start the fun adventure of marketing it and actually trying to grow the damn thing

Right. Which is something you neither need nor want if you just wanted to have an app.
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