Is finding gaps just hard now? As a 24 yo, everything seems to be done already

Then what you’ll see is there are A LOT of snake oil salesman (just pour some AI on it). There is also just a lot of bad quality/ limitations in almost all products. Solving practical, sometimes boring, problems, in a way that actually consistently delights users, is actually by far the exception.

Only by learning the domain, and trying to solve it, ideally with yourself as the main user, can you cut through all the BS and noise.

In other words care more about a domain first, be of service to people in that domain, try to solve problems with existing tools. You’ll see there gaps. The real problems/products will fall out naturally.

In my experience: Everything always seems like it is already done, until something changes in the world, and then a bunch of obvious gaps emerge.

Which is to say that it is quite possible that earlier people did have it easier than what you are experiencing right now, but that doesn't mean it was always easy for them. They had to wait for the right moment.

The gaps will find you when they are ready. The bigger challenge is in being ready to accept them when they come. From what I have seen, when the obvious gaps start to come, you start getting pulled in a lot of different directions and, if not properly focused, can easily see the opportunity go by.

There is a reason why Zapier has 5 billion dollar valuation, and its basically just a bunch of api calls from a technical perspective.

Most of the easy “I wish I could” problems that are directly related to what a typical software engineer does on a day to day basis are indeed well solved, because that’s the lowest of the low hanging fruit.

Even going to mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, whatever, you’d immediately be like “wow there’s really no software to do X for you?” Not being an expert in the field will make it easy to underestimate the complexity of ideas, so be weary of that, but there are definitely still low hanging fruit ideas once you get off the beaten software engineer path.