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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

#141

Post by pan69 »

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…

> reverse engineer my grocery store's API

Your grocery store has a free API you can use? Even if that is the case, that will then soon change. If app building becomes "free" then the cost will shift over to the data access.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#143

Post by pan69 »

marcuskaz wrote: post #41

I just did this at work, I was working with Postman testing an API and wanted it work in a slightly different way and be able to do some bulk testing, saving responses, all slightly different then how Postman worked. I clone just the features I wanted in about 15 minutes and now have my own API test tool that works exactly how I want. It is not something I would ever release or need to share, just a local tool for me…

>something I would ever release or need to share, just a local tool for me to use.

>This also got me thinking about open source might be dying.

Just because you can generate a wrapper app for a very specific use-case doesn't mean open source is dead or dying. As if open source was all just about people sharing their crappy specific use-case apps.

And software isn't getting weird. A part of the software development life cycle is being automated.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#144

Post by barnabee »

benjiro wrote: post #129
barnabee wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It never made sense, it was just possible to get away with it because there's often been no alternative for many people. Good riddance to software subscriptions. I hope proprietary software goes the same way entirely. If it's trivial to build an open source competitor, why pay for software can't modify (also trivially).

> Good riddance to software subscriptions. Counter argument ... at what point is software still profitable to be sold? I am running my Office 2007 still, and that thing is now almost 20 years old. That was a one time sale, with no other revenue for Microsoft. I am not condoning subscriptions but one time selling software only works good, if your a small team with low overhead. The more you sell, the more support beco…

I buy the support argument for companies.

I also buy the argument that a lot of time people are actually paying for cloud storage. While I'd love to see a generic protocol for cloud or self-hosted storage that every app can sync to, I expect we'll continue to see subscription software persist by locking down and gatekeeping cloud storage and sync, too.

But really I would be happy for that to go away.

I don't use much software that's sold in any way[0], and I'd prefer it to be none. The ideal situation is for it to always be better to collaborate on open source software than to build in private and keep it to yourself.

[0] I do donate to projects I like and use, though

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#145

Post by rubb3rDucc »

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…

This thread hits very close to home for me. I'm engineering the frontend for a grocery list app as a capstone project right now and I'm handling a lot of the product and feature decisions, and the discussion about "just prompt Claude to build it" versus the reality of those decisions is something my team deals with constantly.

The example of reverse-engineering your grocery store's API and building a custom solution is awesome, and it's exactly the kind of thing that's now possible. But what I've found is that even with AI assistance, there are so many interconnected decisions that make this more than a one-shot prompt project.

I pushed for us to build a mobile app specifically to take advantage of portability (use it at home for planning, at the store for shopping) and the camera (image recognition with OpenAI and scanning barcodes with expo-camera). That sounds simple, but it cascades into hundreds of UX decisions about offline-first architecture, gesture patterns, camera permissions, and more.

The units and quantities problem mentioned in this thread is just the tip of the iceberg. I'm trying to figure out a data model that mirrors how people naturally think about groceries: how they categorize items, how they plan meals versus staples versus impulse buys, how they track what's running low. Modeling those mental models is genuinely hard.

What helps is that I worked as an ecommerce shopper at Whole Foods, and I learned that stores are meticulously organized with numbered bays and predetermined routes optimized for efficiency. Translating that knowledge into a system that can intelligently sort a shopping list based on store layout (which varies by location!) and typical shopping patterns is genuinely complex.

One of my teammates put it well: this is a simple idea, but it requires a level of care, expertise, and experience to get it right. AI's incredibly helpful for implementing solutions once we've made these decisions, but the decisions themselves require domain knowledge, user research, and taste. That's the part that's hard to automate, and it's what makes this a real engineering project rather than a weekend Claude experiment.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#146

Post by barnabee »

Sytten wrote: post #138
barnabee wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It never made sense, it was just possible to get away with it because there's often been no alternative for many people. Good riddance to software subscriptions. I hope proprietary software goes the same way entirely. If it's trivial to build an open source competitor, why pay for software can't modify (also trivially).

And we will all love from fresh water and love, can't wait for that world! Seriously, you pay for software so people can make a living to improve it. It is a service like anything else.

The paid software I use is the worst software I use.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#147

Post by neya »

tasuki wrote: post #113
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 .

It's not that hard to find out. Copy paste the text into any AI detector online. I pasted it into Grammarly and it says it's AI content with a 99% accuracy.

Easiest way, however - any article that uses em dashes instead of regular hyphens is most likely AI. Normal bloggers, particularly in casual tech circles don't use em dashes. When was the last time you ever used an em dash? Me? Never.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#148

Post by QuantumGood »

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…

Oversimplified, Rocket Internet (Samwer brothers) generated billions cloning apps and services. Many other examples exist. Thinking of costs as "almost nothing" is misleading, but the low cost of cloning services and apps is a business model with a strong track record that seems to have accelerated due to AI. Of course, competition within this business model is also accelerating, making profitability more complex, and ethics is always complex in this space.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#149

Post by fatfox »

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…

Exactly. I think only software developers believe AI is going to kill app subscriptions, because they're the ones who can actually wrangle the output into something maintainable.

For anyone without dev or product experience, getting beyond a basic feature set and keeping it running reliably (or roll it out to > 1 user) is still a massive challenge.

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