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So where are all the AI apps?

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Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#141

Post by stavros »

MeetingsBrowser wrote: post #65
sputknick wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is probably my favorite gain from AI assisted coding: the bar for "who cares about this app" has dropped to a minimum of 1 to make sense. I recently built an app for grocery shopping that is specific to how and where I shop, would be useless to anyone other than my wife. Took me 20 minutes. This is the next frontier: I have a random manual process I do every week, I'll write an app that does it for me.

What exactly were you bale to build in 20 minutes?

I built a small app to emit a 15 kHz beep (that most adults can't hear) every ten minutes, so I can keep time when I'm getting a massage. It took ten minutes, really, but I guess it's in the spirit of the question.

For 20 minutes of time, I had a simple TTS/STT app that allows me to have a voice conversation with my AI assistant.

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#143

Post by joshmarinacci »

shafyy wrote: post #123
sputknick wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is probably my favorite gain from AI assisted coding: the bar for "who cares about this app" has dropped to a minimum of 1 to make sense. I recently built an app for grocery shopping that is specific to how and where I shop, would be useless to anyone other than my wife. Took me 20 minutes. This is the next frontier: I have a random manual process I do every week, I'll write an app that does it for me.

That's fine and all, but how much are you ready to pay to Anthropic and OpenAI to be able to do this? Like, is it worth 100 bucks a month for you to have your own shopping app?

That is an excellent question. For me the answer is yes, but I'm unusual.

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#144

Post by noemit »

Theres tons of ai apps. They're all general use chatbots or coding agents. Manus, Cursor, ChatGPT. Almost every app that has a robust search uses a reranker llm. AI is everywhere.

As far as totally new products - I built one (Habit.am - wordless journaling for mental health) and new products require new habits, people trying new things, its not that easy to change people's behavior. It would be much easier for me to sell my little app if it was a literal plain old journal.

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#145

Post by esafak »

causal wrote: post #44

AI makes the first 90% of writing an app super easy and the last 10% way harder because you have all the subtle issues of a big codebase but none of the familiarity. Most people give up there.

So the way is to read every line of code along the way.

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#146

Post by npilk »

stronglikedan wrote: post #96
tiborsaas wrote: post #84

I fail to see why the author thinks Python packages are a good proxy for AI driven/built code. I've built a number of projects with AI, but I haven't created any new packages. It's like looking at tire sales to wonder about where the EV cars are.

Nitpick, but tire sales are a good proxy for determining where EVs are, since the owners are usually suckered into buying special "EV" tires.

I believe EVs also wear tires out faster (because they are heavier), so they need more frequent replacement.

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#147

Post by yoyohello13 »

I’ll ask another question. Why isn’t software getting better? Seems like software is buggier than ever. Can’t we just have an LLM running in a loop fixing bugs? Apparently not. Is this the future? Just getting drowned in garbage software faster and faster?

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#148

Post by danans »

paxys wrote: 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…

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

That's true, but even the "last step" is being accelerated. The 10% that takes 90% of the time has itself been cut in half.

An example is turning debug logs and bug reports into bugfixes, and performance stats into infrastructure migrations.

The time required to analyze, implement, and deploy those has been reduced by a large amount.

It still needs to be coupled with software engineering skills - to decide between multiple solutions generated by an LLM, but the acceleration is significant.

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#149

Post by amrocha »

physicsguy wrote: post #69
camdenreslink wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technical people (which is by far the minority of people out there) building personal apps to scratch an itch is one thing. But based on the hype (100x productivity!), there should be a deluge of high quality mobile apps, Saas offerings, etc. There is a huge profit incentive to create quality software at a low price. Yet, the majority of new apps and services that I see are all AI ecosystem stuff. Wrappers around LLM…

I worked in an industry for five years and I could feasibly build a competitor product that I think would solve a lot of the problems we had before, and which it would be difficult to pivot the existing ones into. But ultimately, I could have done that before, it just brings the time to build down, and it does nothing for the difficult part which is convincing customers to take a chance on you, sales and marketing, e…

Nobody’s talking about starting businesses. The article is specifically about pypi packages, which don’t require any sales and marketing. And there’s still no noticeable uptick in package creation or updates.

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#150

Post by ryandrake »

prhn wrote: post #118
paxys wrote: 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 beyond the engineering there are 100 other things to do. I launched a vibe coded product a few months ago. I spent the majority of my time - making sure the copy / presentation was effective on product website - getting signing certificates (this part SUCKS and is expensive) - managing release version binaries without a CDN (stupid) - setting up LLC, website, domain, email, google search indexing, etc, etc

Exactly. The "writing code" part is literally the easiest part of building a software business. And that was even before LLM assisted coding. Now it's pretty much trivial to just spew slop code until something works. The hard parts are still: making the right thing, making it good, getting feedback and idea validation, and the really hard part is turning it into a business.
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