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So where are all the AI apps?
201–210 of 448 posts
Re: So where are all the AI apps?
#202> So, let’s ask again, why? Why is this jump concentrated in software about AI?...Money and hype The AI field right now is drowning in hype and jumping from one fad to another. Don't get me wrong: there are real productivity gains to be had, but the reality is that building small one-offs and personal tools is not the same thing as building, operationalizing, and maintaining a large system used by paying customers an…
People will dismiss this critical-thinking shutoff loop as doomer conspiracy, but it's literally the strategy that ai founders describe in interviews. Also people somehow can't or don't remember that uber was almost free when it came out and the press ran endless articles about the "end of car ownership", but replacing your car with uber today would be 10x more expensive. Ai companies are in a mad dash to kill the software industry so that they can "commoditize intelligence". There will be thousands of dead software startups that pile slop on slop until they run out of vc funny-money.
Re: So where are all the AI apps?
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think its a very specific tech/HN bias. I observe the complete opposite with some of my non-tech friends. While we are sharing anecdotes and personal opinion: I think most people don't care too much if its "AI" or not, they just want their problems solved...
Most of my nontechnical friends are either AI neutral, or have a negative AI sentiment. I don’t actually know anybody nontechnical that is enthusiastic about AI.
It's honestly baffling how much the technical crowd has swallowed the AI hype. You would think we would be the ones who know better, but nope
Re: So where are all the AI apps?
#204Title asks where the AI apps are. Analysis looks at Python libraries. Kind of a non-sequitur, no?
Re: So where are all the AI apps?
#205Earlier 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?
My buddy and I are writing our own CRUD web app to track our gaming. I was looking at a ticketing system to use for us to just track bug fixes and improvements. Nothing I found was simple enough or easy enough to warrant installing it.
I vibe'd a basic ticketing system in just under an hour that does what we need. So not 20 mins, but more like 45-60.
Re: So where are all the AI apps?
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
all they did is annoy their friends and family by sharing their vibeslop app and asking for "feedback". I really dont know how to respond to these requests. I am going to hide out and not talk to anyone till this fad passes. Reminds of the trend where everyone was dj wanting you to listen their mixtrack they made on abbleton live
Is it really that big of a deal to help/encourage a friend/family in these simple ways?? Do you have no time in life to smell the flowers?
Devil's advocate (because honestly I do agree with you, but..) -- help/encouragement often ends up turning into far more time and effort than it sounds like up front.
~18 months ago a friend of mine had a very viable, good idea for a physical product, but very fuzzy on the details of where to begin. My skillset backfilled everything he was missing to go from idea to reality to in-market.
I began at arm's length with just advice and validation, then slowly got involved with CAD and prototyping to make sure it kept moving forward, then infrastructure/admin, graphic design, digital marketing and support, etc, while he worked on manufacturing, physical marketing, networking, fulfillment, sales, etc.
Long story short, because I both deeply believe in the vision and know that teamwork makes the dream work, I am fully, completely, inextricably involved LOL -- and I don't have a single complaint about it either, but man, watch out, because if you don't believe in the vision but do have skills/expertise they're lacking, and opt out, friends and family will be the quickest and most aggrieved people you'll ever meet that think you're gatekeeping them from success.
Re: So where are all the AI apps?
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 dep…
So, how many years until we'll see results, then?
> So, how many years until we'll see results, then?
-0.75 years.
Software development output (features, bugs, products) - especially at smaller companies like startups - has already accelerated significantly, while software development hiring has stayed flat or declined. So there has been a dramatic increase in human-efficiency. To me, that seems like a result, although it's cold comfort as a software engineer.
You probably won't see this reflected as a multiplication of new apps because the app consumer's attention is already completely tapped. There's very little attention surface area left to capture.
Re: So where are all the AI apps?
#208One pattern I've noticed: the apps that work best
combine multiple models rather than relying on one.
Single-model outputs have too much variance for
production use cases.
Re: So where are all the AI apps?
#209It 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 if you have the app, you get to start the fun adventure of marketing it and actually trying to grow the damn thing
And you need to find a way to market it that prevents people from thinking “cool, I bet I can get Claude to whip up something similar real quick”
Re: So where are all the AI apps?
#210One problem with a lot of the skepticism around AI produced software is that it focuses on existing ways of packaging and delivering software. PyPi packages are one example, shipping “apps” another.
While it’s interesting to see that in open source software the increase is not dramatic, this ignores however many people are now gen-coding software they will never publish just for them, or which winds up on hosting platforms like Replit.