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So where are all the AI apps?

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321–330 of 448 posts

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#321

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…

There really isn't much profit incentive actually, as everyone has access to the same capabilities now. It'd be like trying to sell ice to Eskimos.

Most businesses do not have the capacity to use LLMs to produce software. If you have an idea that you can create into real high quality software that there is a demand for, then you should absolutely do it.

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#322
post #153

Claude Code was released for general use in May 2025. It's only March. Also using PyPI as a benchmark is incredibly myopic. Github's 2025 Octoverse[0] is more informative. In that report, you can see a clear inflection point in total users[1] and total open source contributions[2]. The report also notes: > In 2025, 81.5% of contributions happened in private repositories, while 63% of all repositories were public [0]:…

> Claude Code was released for general use in May 2025. It's only March. Detractors of AI are often accused of moving the goalposts, but I think your comment is guilty of the same. Before Claude Code, we had Cursor, Github Copilot, and more. Each of these was purportedly revolutionizing software engineering. Further, the core claim for AI coding is that it lets you ship code 10x or 100x faster. So why do we need to w…

Amongst people who use AI regularly, November 2025 is widely regarded as a watershed moment. Opus 4.5 was head and shoulders above anything that came before it. It marked the first time my previously AI-disliker friends begrudgingly came to accept that it may actually be useful.

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#323

I deleted vscode and replaced with a hyper personal dashboard that combines information from everywhere. I have a news feed, work tab for managing issues/PRs, markdown editor with folders, calendar, AI powered buttons all over the place (I click a button, it does something interesting with Claude code I can't do programmatically). Why don't I share it? Because it's highly personal, others would find it doesn't fit th…

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…

Why on earth would you publish and monetize software anybody can reproduce with a $20 subscription and an hour of prompting? Why would you ever publish something you vibe coded to PyPI? Code itself isn’t scarce anymore. If there is not some proprietary, secret data or profound insight behind it, I just don’t think there is a good reason to treat it like something valuable.

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#324
They're private, that's the beauty. Code is so cheap now, we can ween ourselves off massive dependency chains.

200 years ago text was much more expensive, and more people memorized sayings and poems and quotations. Now text is cheap, and we rarely quote.

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#325
I'm not convinced that PyPI is the right metric to use to answer this question. Some (admittedly anecdotal) observations:

1) I'm a former SWE in a business role at a small-market publishing company. I've used Claude Code to automate boring processes that previously consumed weeks of our ops and finance teams' time per year. These aren't technically advanced, but previously would have required in-house dev talent that would not have been within reach of small businesses. I wouldn't have had the time to code these things on my own, but with AI assistance the time investment is greatly reduced (and mostly focused on QA). The only needle moved here is on a private Github repo, but it's real shipped code with small but direct impact.

2) I used to often find myself writing simple Perl wrappers to various APIs for personal or work use. I'd submit these to CPAN (Perl's equivalent to PyPI) in case anyone else could use them to save the 30-60 minutes of work involved. These days I don't bother -- most AI tools can build these in a matter of seconds; publishing them to CPAN or even Github now feels like unnecessary cruft, especially when they're likely to go without active maintenance. So, my LOC published to public repos is down, even though the amount of software produced is the same. It's just that some of that software has become less useful to the world writ large.

3) The code that's possible to ship quickly with pure AI (vibe coding) is by definition not the kind of reusable code you'd want to distribute on PyPI. So, I'd expect that any productivity impact from AI on OSS that's designed to be reusable would be come very slowly, versus "hockey stick" impact.

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#327
post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

You don't think capitalists are able to generate profit off of these LLMs currently? Why not? Are they just stupid or something?

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, exp…

Poe’s law is strong with this one

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#329
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…

Well… because it is not almost possible do it solo.

Code is just one part of puzzle. Add: Pricing, marketing and ads, invoicing, VAT, make really good onboarding, measure churn rate, do customer service…

A lot of vibe coders are solopreneurs. You have to be very consistent and disciplined to make final product that sells.

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