Making the app is the easy part. The hard part is getting users. Also I have doubts if AI can make a sufficiently complex app.
It's a whole lot easier if the app is intended to have only one user.
AI is going to kill app subscriptions
161–170 of 250 posts
Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think you overestimate the ability of AI to write perfectly secure apps. Humans can't do it, and AI is trained on their work. Ironically, AI tend to be better at securing code, because unlike the squishy human, it is much more cable of creating tons of tests and figuring out weaknesses. Let alone the issue when lots of meatbags with different skill levels are working on the same codebases. I have barely seen any…
> Ironically, AI tend to be better at securing code, because unlike the squishy human, it is much more cable of creating tons of tests and figuring out weaknesses. Sentences like this make me think AI is honestly the best thing that happened for my imposter syndrome. AI is great for simulating test case, and that's it. If you leave it, it write the most basic, useless tests (i mean, half of them might be usefull when…
Frankly, i feel like the people downvoting my comment, are still using older LLMs. When Opus 4.5 entered the picture, there was a noticeable improvement in the way the LLM (for me), interacted with the code base, and the issues that it was able to find.
I ran Opus on some public source code, and lets just say that the picture was less rosy for the whole "human as security".
I understand people have a aversion to LLMs but it irked me the wrong way to see the amount of downvotes on here, because people disagree with a opinion. Its starting the become like reddit. As i stated before, its still your tasks as the person working with the LLM to guide it on security practices. But as somebody now 30 years in the industry, the amount of absolute crap i have seen produced as code (and security issues), makes LLMs frankly security wizards.
Stupid example: I have yet to see LLMs not use placeholders to prevent SQL injection (despite it being trained on a lot of bad code).
The amount of code i have seen, where humans just injected variables directly into the SQL... Yea, what a surprise that SQL database content get stolen like its nothing. When doing a security audit on some public code, one of the items always found by the LLMs, yep ... SQL injectable code everywhere.
A lot of practices are easy, but anybody can overlook something in their own code base. This is where LLMs are so great. You audit with multiple LLMs and you will find points that are weak or where you forgot something, even if you code security wse.
So yea, i have no issue doing discussions but the ridiculous downvotes on what seems to come from people with no clue, is amazing. Going to take a break from here.
Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions
#163Good luck making your own clone of "simple" file sharing and synchronization app like Google Drive!
You mean like FTP and cron?
Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions
#164I’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…
> the standards will just go up.
This industry is in a deep quality slump. If it takes an existential threat to improve that, then it's all good news
Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions
#165Building a UI is fairly simple, all things considered. Building a full-scale system? Much harder. Deploying it so it can be multi-user? Maintaining it? These are things that separate toys from products.
Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions
#166AI won’t kill subscriptions but it will drive prices down. Viable competitors will emerge and incumbency will become a less viable long term play.
Non-experts will build progressively more interesting things as model capability goes up - but experts will always be able to produce yet more complex things than that.
So user expectations will keep rising.
The cost of software development will go down for software at and below some level of complexity, but up for anything above that level. The level where that tips will keep changing, just as it always has. To understand this, consider that tipping point across today’s and yesterday’s “hand-typed software”: it has been moving the whole time, thanks to frameworks and libraries and languages improving.
The world of software will remain much as it is today - a mix of free and non-free stuff. But on average and in the large it’ll be of way higher quality, and bring corresponding improvements in your quality of life.
Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Ironically, AI tend to be better at securing code, because unlike the squishy human, it is much more cable of creating tons of tests and figuring out weaknesses. Sentences like this make me think AI is honestly the best thing that happened for my imposter syndrome. AI is great for simulating test case, and that's it. If you leave it, it write the most basic, useless tests (i mean, half of them might be usefull when…
Frankly, i feel like the people downvoting my comment, are still using older LLMs. When Opus 4.5 entered the picture, there was a noticeable improvement in the way the LLM (for me), interacted with the code base, and the issues that it was able to find. I ran Opus on some public source code, and lets just say that the picture was less rosy for the whole "human as security". I understand people have a aversion to LLMs…
I must only work with genius (or rather, extremely competent seniors) who keep their codebase very clean, because that never happened to me. Even in my worst job at a bank, with idiotic product dev who couldn't read a Java trace to save their lives, security was the only thing that mattered.
But like i said, this whole discussion on LLMs since Opus is out is _great_ for my ego. At first i thought i used it wrong, then my company made weekly meeting on "how to use AI" with devs who swore by it, now i'm confident I might be a bit above average after all.
Maybe it's different for tooling/network/security devs than for product devs, but i doubt our backend are _that_ complex.
Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
I stopped using em dashes - because of LLMs. And it's a bullshit way too: everyone has heard about it and it's easy to make the LLM output something else than em dashes.
Pray how do those "ai detectors" work? I trust those even less than I trust ai: AI detectors use simple heuristics and take advantage of your gullibility.
Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions
#169After 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.
I think a more apt comparison is "human computers" and live telephone operators.
Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions
#170Honestly, AI is just going to accelerate app subscriptions. Since it costs nothing to build now, you can just make your own SaaS and charge some money.