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So where are all the AI apps?

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Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#311

Post by dalenw »

williamcotton wrote: post #293
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 agree 100%. Boring old software skills are part of what it took to "write" this DSL, complete with a fully featured LSP: https://github.com/williamcotton/webpipe https://github.com/williamcotton/webpipe-lsp (lots of animated GIFs to show off the LSP and debugger!) While I barely typed any of this myself I sure as heck read most of the generated code. But not all of it! Of course you have to consider my blog to be "…

I recently "vibe coded" a long term background job runner service... thing. It's rather specific to my job and a pre-existing solution didn't exist. I already knew what I wanted the code to be, so it was just a matter of explaining explicitly what I wanted to the AI. Software engineering concepts, patterns, al that stuff. And at the end of the day(s) it took about the same amount of time to code it with AI than it would've taken by hand.

It was a lot of reviewing and proofreading and just verifying everything by hand. The only thing that saved me time was writing the test suite for it.

Would I do it again? Maybe. It was kinda fun programming by explaining an idea in plain english than just writing the code itself. But I heavily relied on software engineering skills, especially those theory classes from university to best explain how it should be structured and written. And of course being able to understand what it outputs. I do not think that someone with no prior software engineering knowledge could do the same thing that I did.

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#312

Post by daemonk »

I AI coded an entire platform for my work. It works great for me. I also recognize that this is not something I want to make into a commercial product because it was so easy that there's just no value.

I think this might be more of an comment on software as a business than AI not coding good apps.

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#313

Post by Schiendelman »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #102
causal wrote: post #44

AI makes the first 90% of writing an app super easy and the last 10% way harder because you have all the subtle issues of a big codebase but none of the familiarity. Most people give up there.

I spent about a week doing an "experiment" greenfield app. I saw 4 types of issues: 0. It runs way too fast and far ahead. You need to slow it down, force planning only and explicitly present a multi-step (i.e. numbered plan) and say "we'll do #1 first, then do the rest in future steps". take-away: This is likely solved with experience and changing how I work - or maybe caring less? The problem is the model can produ…

I'm a product manager, and a lot of the things I see people do wrong is because they don't have any product management experience. It takes quite a bit of work to develop a really good theory of what should be in your functional spec. Edge cases come up all the time in real software engineering, and often handling all those cases is spread across multiple engineers. A good product manager has a view of all of it, expects many of those issues from the agent, and plans for coaching it through them.

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#314

Post by epolanski »

It's simple. AI speeds the 80% of development that was never the blocker.

Arguably makes the remaining 20% even harder to handle.

I'm sure that AI can be a huge boost to great, mature developers. Which are insanely rare in an industry that has consistently promoted brainless ivy league coders farming algo quizzes for months.

But those with a huge sensibility and experience can definitely be enabled to produce more.

But the 20% is still there and again, it's easy to make it way harder because you're less intimate with the brittle 80%.

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#315

Post by freedomben »

kubanczyk wrote: post #192
freedomben wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ope…

You know what else strongly disincentivized legitimate contributions from people? Having your code snatched and its copyright disregarded, to the benefit of some rando LLM vendor. People can just press "pause" and wait until they see whether they fuel something that brings joy to the world. (Which it might in the end. Or not.)

For sure, that's legit too. I've had to grapple with that feeling personally. I didn't get to a great place, other than hoping that AI is democratized enough that it can benefit humanity. When I introspected deep enough, I realized I contributed to open source for two reasons, nearly equally:

1. To benefit myself with features/projects

2. To benefit others with my work

1 by itself would mean no bothering with PR, modifications, etc. It's way easier to hoard your changes than to go through the effort getting them merged upstream. 2 by itself isn't enough motivation to spend the effort getting up to speed on the codebase, testing, etc. Together though, it's powerful motivation for me.

I have to remind myself that both things are a net positive with AI training on my stuff. It's certainly not all pros (there's a lot of cons with AI too), but on the whole I think we're headed for a good destination, assuming open models continue to progress. If it ends up with winner-takes-all Anthropic or OpenAI, then that changes my calculus and will probably really piss me off. Luckily I've gotten positive value back from those companies, even considering having to pay for it.

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#316

Post by mlsu »

We have great software now!

YoloSwag (13 commits)

[rocketship rocketship rocketship]

YoloSwag is a 1:1 implementation of pyTorch, written in RUST [crab emoji]

- [hand pointing emoji] YoloSwag is Memory Safe due to being Written in Rust

- [green leaf emoji] YoloSwag uses 80% less CPU cycles due to being written in Rust

- [clipboard emoji] [engineer emoji] YoloSwag is 1:1 API compatible with pyTorch with complete ops specification conformance. All ops are supported.

- [recycle emoji] YoloSwag is drop-in ready replacement for Pytorch

- [racecar emoji] YoloSwag speeds up your training workflows by over 300%

Then you git clone yoloswag and it crashes immediately and doesn't even run. And you look at the test suite and every test just creates its own mocks to pass. And then you look at the code and it's weird frankenstein implementation, half of it is using rust bindings for pytorch and the other half is random APIs that are named similarly but not identical.

Then you look at the committer and the description on his profile says "imminentize AGI.", he launched 3 crypto tokens in 2020, he links an X profile (serial experiments lain avatar) where he's posting 100x a day about how "it's over" for software devs and how he "became a domain expert in quantum computing in 6 weeks."

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#317

Post by camdenreslink »

bdcravens wrote: post #269
camdenreslink wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. 1. People aren't creating new apps, but enhancing existing ones 2. Companies are less likely to pay for new offerings when the barrier to entry is lowered due to AI. They'll just vibe code what they need.

I don't think the 2nd point will make a huge impact on software sales. Who is vibe coding? Software developers or business types? They aren't going to vibe code a CRM, or their own bespoke version of Excel, or their own Datadog APM.

Maybe they will vibe code small scripts, but nobody was really paying for software to do that in the first place. Saas-pocalypse is just people vibe investing, not really understanding the value proposition of saas in the first place (no maintenance, no deployments, SLAs, no database backups, etc).

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#318

Post by freedomben »

JasperNoboxdev wrote: post #239
kubanczyk wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know what else strongly disincentivized legitimate contributions from people? Having your code snatched and its copyright disregarded, to the benefit of some rando LLM vendor. People can just press "pause" and wait until they see whether they fuel something that brings joy to the world. (Which it might in the end. Or not.)

Been going back and forth on this with open source tools I've built. The training data argument is valid, but honestly the more immediate version of the same problem is that someone can just take your repo, feed it to an agent, and have their own fork in an afternoon. The moat used to be effort, nobody wants to rewrite this from scratch (especially when it's free). What's left is actually understanding why the thing…

> but honestly the more immediate version of the same problem is that someone can just take your repo, feed it to an agent, and have their own fork in an afternoon.

Indeed, I've got a few applications I've built or contributed too that are (A)?GPL, and for those I do worry about this AI washing technique. For libraries that are MIT or permissive anyway, I don't really care. (I default to *GPL for applications, MIT/Apache/etc for libraries)

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#319

Post by hintymad »

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…

[dead]

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#320

Post by GorbachevyChase »

bigbadfeline wrote: post #234
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…

> 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…

Is the AI in the room with us now?

I get that people are upset that making a cool six figures off of stitching together React components is maybe not a viable long-term career path anymore. For those of us on the user side, the value is tremendous. I’m starting to replace what were paid enterprise software and plug-ins and tailoring them to my own taste. Our subject matter experts are translating their knowledge and work flows, which usually aren’t that complicated, into working products on their own. They didn’t have to spend six months or a year negotiating an agreement to build the software or have to beg our existing software vendors, who could not possibly care less, for the functionality to be added to software we are, for some reason, expected to pay for every single year, despite the absence of any operating cost to justify this practice.

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