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So where are all the AI apps?

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Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#271

Post by jhatemyjob »

PaulHoule wrote: post #225
rurp wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if your goal is to solve some specific problem for yourself, your friends/family, community or your team, then the "last step" you mention - the one that "takes majority of time and effort" - is entirely unnecessary, irrelevant, and a waste of time. To a point, but I think this overstates it by quite a bit. At the moment I'm weighing some tradeoffs around this myself. I'm currently making an app for a niche interes…

People today say "web applications suck", "Electron sucks", etc. They weren't around in the 1990s where IT departments were breaking under the load of maintaining desktop apps, when we were just getting on the security update treadmill, and where most shops that made applications for Windows had a dedicated InstallShield engineer and maybe even a dedicated tester for the install process.

Windows was so bad that it made the web bad. Imagine the world we'd be in today if Internet Explorer never existed.

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#272

Post by bdcravens »

I don't think people are using AI to create new dependencies that they're then submitting to open source package managers (which is what this shows)

This is more useful for discussing what kind of projects AI is being used for than whether it's being used.

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#273

Post by Plutarco_ink »

The article measures the wrong thing. PyPI package creation is a terrible proxy for AI-assisted software output because packages are published for reuse by others, which requires documentation, API design, and maintenance commitments that AI doesn't help with much.

The real output is happening in private repos, internal tools, and single-purpose apps that never get published anywhere. I've been building a writing app as a side project. AI got me from zero to a working PWA with offline support, Stripe integration, and 56 SEO landing pages in about 6 weeks of part-time work. Pre-AI that's easily a 6-month project for one person.

But I'm never going to publish it as a PyPI package. It's a deployed web app. The productivity gain is real, it just doesn't show up in the datasets this article is looking at.

The iOS App Store submission data (24% increase) that someone linked in the comments is a much better signal. That's where the output is actually landing.

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#274

Post by thinkharderdev »

deaux wrote: post #250
bigbadfeline wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apparently new iOS app submissions jumped by 24% last year: The amount of useless slop in the app store doesn't matter. There are no new and useful apps made with AI - apps that contribute to productivity of the economy as whole. The trade and fiscal deficits are both high and growing as is corporate indebtedness - these are the true measures for economic failure and they all agree on it. AI is a debt and energy gu…

> There are no new and useful apps made with AI - apps that contribute to productivity of the economy as whole. This is flat-earther level. It's like an environmentalist saying that nothing made with fossil fuels contributes to productivity. But they don't say that because they know it's not true. There are so many valid gripes to have with LLMs, pick literally any of them. The idea that a single line of generated co…

> This is flat-earther level

Ok, so do you have a counterexample?

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#275

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#276

Post by Vanshfin »

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Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#277

Post by balls187 »

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…

> and a few of them did get pretty far, but ultimately not a single one actually launched.

Having done this professionally for a very, very long time, software engineers aren't particularly good at launching products.

Technology has drastically lowered the barriers to bring software products to customers, and AI is a continuation of that trend.

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#278

Post by micimize »

Thoughts: 1. Some hype-types may have been effusive about AI-assisted coding since ChatGPT, but IMO the commonly agreed paradigm shift was claude code, and especially 4.5, very very recent. 2. Anchoring biases in reaction to hype is still letting one's perspective be defined by hype. Yes the cursor post is a joke, but leading with that is a strawman. This article does not aim to take it's subject seriously, IMO. 3. While I agree the hype is currently at comical levels, the utility of the current LLMs is obvious, and reasons for "skilled" usage not being easily quantifiable are also obvious.

IE, using agents to iterate through many possible approaches, spike out migrations, etc might save a project a year of misadventures, re-designs, etc, but that productivity gain _subtracts_ the intermediate versions that _didn't_ end up being shipped.

As others have mentioned, I think yak-shaving is now way more automated. IE, If I want to take a new terminal for a spin, throw together a devtool to help me think about a specific problem better, etc, I can do it with very low friction. So "personal" productivity is way higher.

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#280

Post by bigstrat2003 »

micimize wrote: post #278

Thoughts: 1. Some hype-types may have been effusive about AI-assisted coding since ChatGPT, but IMO the commonly agreed paradigm shift was claude code, and especially 4.5, very very recent. 2. Anchoring biases in reaction to hype is still letting one's perspective be defined by hype. Yes the cursor post is a joke, but leading with that is a strawman. This article does not aim to take it's subject seriously, IMO. 3. W…

> the utility of the current LLMs is obvious

In that they obviously have no real utility, sure. There hasn't been a paradigm shift, they still suck at programming, and anyone trying to tell you otherwise almost certainly has something to sell you.

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