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So where are all the AI apps?

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Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#161

Post by edent »

EastLondonCoder wrote: post #128

I’ve done a event ticket system that’s in production. Stripe integration, resend for mailing and a scan app to scan tickets. It’s for my own club but it’s been working quite well. Took about 80 hours from inception to live with a focus on testing. I’ve done some experiments with reading gedcom files, and I think I’m quite close to a demoable version of a genealogy app. Biggest thing is a tool for remotely working mus…

Could you not have downloaded one of the hundreds of Open Source event systems and configured it in less time?

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#162

Post by meroes »

ballenf wrote: post #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.…

Ya maybe this. I’ve found some work at the “tool level”. I’m not a programmer, just did RLHF for a few years and AI has helped me make some tools such as a way to scrape and export to excel 35,000 contacts at a company for marketing purposes. Things like that. Yes I know libraries exist and someone who is already a programmer could do this, but also there’s some interesting logic in how to avoid duplicates and interact with modern websites that was impractical for me. And maybe this job is too small for a real programmer.

There are many small, different, and one-time tasks that don’t fit full blown apps. Which I would characterize an AI building a novel app as building a house out of random bits of lumber. It will work but will have no cohesive process and sounds like a nightmare.

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#163

Post by pipnonsense »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #151

Maybe the top 15,000 PyPi packages isn't the best way to measure this? Apparently new iOS app submissions jumped by 24% last year: > According to Appfigures Explorer, Apple's App Store saw 557K new app submissions in 2025, a whopping 24% increase from 2024, and the first meaningful increase since 2016's all-time high of 1M apps. The chart shows stagnant new iOS app submissions until AI. Here's a month by month bar ch…

i was curious, but I need a statista account to see it

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#164

Post by oro44 »

ElFitz wrote: post #89
oro44 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People just don’t learn do they? It’s truly amazing. This is why I’m not surprised people are ‘blown away’ by llm’s. They were never truly intrinsically intelligent - they were expert regurgitators of knowledge on demand. Steve already suffered from immense scar tissue of starting with the technology. And yet.. this wisdom blows over peoples minds. More fool them.

> Steve already suffered from immense scar tissue of starting with the technology. Funny. I just stumbled upon that specific OpenDoc video today. https://youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o

That’s exactly what I was referencing :)

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#165

Post by skeledrew »

camdenreslink wrote: post #43
turlockmike wrote: post #12

I deleted vscode and replaced with a hyper personal dashboard that combines information from everywhere. I have a news feed, work tab for managing issues/PRs, markdown editor with folders, calendar, AI powered buttons all over the place (I click a button, it does something interesting with Claude code I can't do programmatically). Why don't I share it? Because it's highly personal, others would find it doesn't fit th…

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…

There really isn't much profit incentive actually, as everyone has access to the same capabilities now. It'd be like trying to sell ice to Eskimos.

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#166

Post by lordmathis »

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…

I also experienced this with my personal projects. It was really easy to just workshop a new feature. I'd talk to claude and get a nice looking implementation spec. Then I'd pass it on to a coding agent which would get 80% there but the last 20% would actually take lot more time. In the meantime I'd workshop more and more features leading to an evergrowing backlog and an anxiety that an agent should be doing something otherwise I'm wasting time. I brought this completely on myself. I'm not building a business, nothing would happen if I just didn't implement another feature.

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#167

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

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…

Software engineering is not “coding” though.

Before AI for the last 8 or so years now first at a startup then working in consulting mostly with companies new to AWS or they wanted a new implementation, it’s been:

1. Gather requirements

2. Do the design

3. Present the design and get approval and make sure I didn’t miss anything

4. Do the infrastructure as code to create the architecture and the deployment pipeline

5. Design the schema and write the code

6. Take it through UAT and often go back to #4 or #5

7. Move it into production

8. Monitoring and maintenance.

#4 and #5 can be done easily with AI for most run of the mill enterprise SaaS implementations especially if you have the luxury of starting from the ground up “post AI”. This is something you could farm off to mid level ticket takers before AI.

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#168

Post by bsima »

It's silly to think that 'AI apps' must look like the enterprise, centrally-managed SaaS that we are used to. My AI apps are all bespoke, tailored to my exact needs, accessed only via my VPN. They would not be useful to anyone else, so why would I make them public?

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#169

Post by hamdingers »

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?

It's easily worth the <$1 in tokens from a Chinese model. You don't need frontier reasoning capabilities to make a personalized grocery list app.

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#170

Post by freedomben »

skeledrew wrote: post #159

I think this article is making a pretty big assumption: that people making things with AI are also going to be publishing them. And that's just the opposite of what should be expected, for the general case. Like I've been making things, and making changes to things, but I haven't published any of that because, well they're pretty specific to my needs. There are also things which I won't consider publishing for now, e…

Agree. There's also a weird ideological thing in open source right now, where any AI must be AI slop, and no AI is the only solution. That has strongly disincentivized legitimate contributions from people. I have to imagine that's having an impact.

There's a very real problem of low effort AI slop, but throwing out the baby with the bathwater is not the solution.

That said, I do kind of wonder if the old model of open source just isn't very good in the AI era. Maybe when AI gets a lot better, but for now it does take real human effort to review and test. If contributors were reviewing and testing like they should be doing, it wouldn't be an issue, but far too many people just run AI and don't even look at it before sending the PR. It's not the maintainers job to do all the review and test of a low-effort push. That's not fair to them, and even discarding that it's a terrible model for software that you share with anyone else.

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