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AI is going to kill app subscriptions

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Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#191

Post by rkuodys »

signatoremo wrote: post #183
chickenimprint wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their business is making money. If they can build money printing machines, they're not going to refuse to use them because that's "not their business". Do you really think they would be out donating trillions of dollars to other companies out of the goodness of their hearts, instead of just bankrupting everyone in the software industry if they could?

Huh? What kind of question is that? Who waste the opportunity to win the AI race to become another Jira vendor? Everything has the opportunity cost. Didn’t you already learn that?

Isnt that point kind of the counterpoint to the AI-first narrative. With standard, human driven operations its true about opportunity costs. What we are told is that AI will replace human, essentially saying that opportunity cost becomes cash only. Then the question of why doesnt AI lab start SaaS fully managed by AI becomes ever more interesting. Maybe because it's not that simple. Hence, it's not that easy in other companies as well to just replace devs, engineers and so on with AI

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#192

Post by tonyedgecombe »

dist-epoch wrote: post #151
anonymous908213 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you have to waste ultra-expensive engineers on it? You have agents . And verifying your product works as it is claimed should absolutely be part of your mission. How can you possibly claim that your models are revolutionising software development if you haven't even used them to revolutionise your own software development in-house? Not only that, it would produce a huge marketing coup that would immediately le…

They did revolutionise software development in-house. Both Codex/Claude Code are 90% agent written these days, and bring in billions of dollars of revenue. Cloning Slack would bring in $0 dollars.

>Both Codex/Claude Code are 90% agent written these days, and bring in billions of dollars of revenue.

So they say.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#193

Post by mdavid626 »

signatoremo wrote: post #183
chickenimprint wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their business is making money. If they can build money printing machines, they're not going to refuse to use them because that's "not their business". Do you really think they would be out donating trillions of dollars to other companies out of the goodness of their hearts, instead of just bankrupting everyone in the software industry if they could?

Huh? What kind of question is that? Who waste the opportunity to win the AI race to become another Jira vendor? Everything has the opportunity cost. Didn’t you already learn that?

Then why are they letting their models write browsers and compilers?

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#194

Post by torginus »

I wonder if this was the true message of the Claude C compiler - not that Claude can clone a compiler, but that Anthropic has built a harness, which it can use to observe the behavior and outputs of an existing program (GCC) - it can recreate it with a good enough (at least functioning) replica.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#195

Post by Havoc »

> Apps that need servers (sync, AI features, storage) will still have subscriptions

This makes me excited about what we will see in the self hosted space. Cause now many can both set up say a S3 backend entirely on their own and write/vibe the code that users it.

Now I just need to figure out the iPhone app ecosystem haha (and how to implement mTLS on it)

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#196

Post by J_Shelby_J »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #192
dist-epoch wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did revolutionise software development in-house. Both Codex/Claude Code are 90% agent written these days, and bring in billions of dollars of revenue. Cloning Slack would bring in $0 dollars.

>Both Codex/Claude Code are 90% agent written these days, and bring in billions of dollars of revenue. So they say.

Yeah this got a chuckle from me.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#197

Post by J_Shelby_J »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #186
qnleigh wrote: post #185

I suspect there's a bit of a chance to learn from history here. It was predicted that radiologists would get put out of the job by AI tools. But this didn't happen, largely because trust and liability matter just as much as the service itself. This isn't a counterargument to the idea that AI is going to kill a lot of app subscriptions, but it tells us about what kinds of apps will get killed, and what apps will have…

It's early days yet. You'd have to be crazy to go into radiology, if you were just starting out as a freshly-minted MD. And yes, this is going to be a problem, possibly a big one. See also: air traffic control.

“Claude write me an app to do air traffic control. Make sure planes don’t crash. Here is a hundred years of rules and their context.”

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#198

Post by anonzzzies »

Longer term this can happen but currently... I'm sure that even people who are not software people and do this for them alone, if they do this, will jump of a bridge after a few months when yet somehow something else (the vacation pics before 2014) just disappeared and AI comes with 'I found the bug! The migration blabhalbha. All your data gone. Question, Do you have a backup?' etc. And this potentially every change. Software devs deal with that all the time, but this is not going to work yet otherwise. We get tremendous value out of it for our company but we didn't drop our extreme rigid development process for some vibe coding; we vibe code but with a lot of guardrails which we built up over decades to deal with outsourcing companies (many of them far worse than any modern LLM tool) for our clients.

One of our top earners always was(is still) simple; companies to hire/fire cheap cans of devs, but cans of devs are crap quality (generally) so we help companies set up, based on their stack, guardrails preventing full out bloodshed. We always got a lot of flack from 'modern devs' because we take away the freedom; seems it was a good thing; llms + freedom is misery. Well, I guess it's also performance art of sorts.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#199

Post by tonyedgecombe »

benoau wrote: post #79

Competition is absolutely going to crush the concept of mooching off a simple app costing $6/week or $10/month, but it doesn't matter where that competition comes from the problem is a guitar tuner shouldn't cost $100/year, it was always artificially successful derived from preventing users any other way to get apps. If AI doesn't kill this it will be 3rd party marketplaces or open source app distribution that does i…

I' not sure for the reason that for every one of the successful subscription apps there were dozens of free or nearly free competitors. The app stores have been awash with wannabe clones from the start.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#200

Post by tonyedgecombe »

LordHumungous wrote: post #31

> For apps that run locally—no servers, no cloud costs—subscriptions make no sense anymore. Did it ever make sense? I always scoffed at the idea of paying a subscription to use a text editor or paint tool.

>Did it ever make sense? I always scoffed at the idea of paying a subscription to use a text editor or paint tool.

Whether it made sense for you is mostly irrelevant. The question is whether it worked for the developer. You can read endless complaints about Adobe's subscription model but the profits kept rolling in.

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