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So where are all the AI apps?

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331–340 of 448 posts

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#331
post #291
post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give me any new (i.e. released in 2026) app that does something useful? There's just not many good app ideas left after all..

That has some strong "Everything that can be invented has been invented" vibes. If that would be true then all these AIs are useless. Who needs them to built something that already exists?

"Everything that can be invented has been invented"

Ah my favorite, entirely made up quote.

Apocraphyly attributed to the U.S. Patent Office Commissioner in 1899.

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#332
post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is flat-earther level Ok, so do you have a counterexample?

Can you give me any new (i.e. released in 2026) app that does something useful? There's just not many good app ideas left after all..

I wrote my own note sharing app using free Claude. It's self-hosted, allows for non-simultaneous editing by multiple users (uses locks), it has no passwords on users, it shows all notes in a list. Very simple app, over all. It's one Go file and one HTML file. I like it, it's exactly what I want for sharing notes like shopping and todo lists with my partner.

The AI wouldn't have been able to do it by itself, but I wouldn't have been arsed to do it alone either.

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Tell me more! I'm trying to figure out how you got that.

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#334
What if this is just telling us that much of the coding being done in the world, or knowledge work in general, is just busy work? Just because you double the capacity of knowledge workers doesn't mean you double the amount of useful output. Maybe we have never been limited by our capacity to produce, but by our ability to come up with good ideas and socially coordinate ourselves around the best ones.

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#335
post #334

What if this is just telling us that much of the coding being done in the world, or knowledge work in general, is just busy work? Just because you double the capacity of knowledge workers doesn't mean you double the amount of useful output. Maybe we have never been limited by our capacity to produce, but by our ability to come up with good ideas and socially coordinate ourselves around the best ones.

That would imply that the majority of this AI hype is just additional bluster, and likely wouldn't improve anything in any significant manner.

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think that's an incredibly reductionist and sarcastic take. I'm also in Product, but was an engineer for over a decade prior. I find that having strong structured functional specifications and a good holistic understanding of the solution you're trying to build goes a long way with AI tooling. Just like any software project, eliminating false starts and getting a clear set of requirements up front can minimize engineering time required to complete something, as long as things don't change in the middle. When your cycle time is an afternoon instead of two quarters, that type of up front investment pays off much better.

I still think AI tooling is lacking, but you can get significantly better results by structuring your plans appropriately.

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maintaining desktop apps was not really harder than maintaining the current Kubernetes-Web-App behemoths, at least in my experience.

Yeah, we traded managing files and registry entries on desktops for something that violates all the principles of the science-of-systems, the kind of thing Perrow warns about in his book Normal Accidents.

I think that's oversimplifying it a bit. Managing files and registry entries wasn't much of a problem, but supporting an ever-growing matrix of versions across multiple platforms that were released into the wild was an issue. Modern evergreen apps kind of fix this, but you're still dealing with other people's computers and environments. Operating a service reliably is of course filled with different problems, but at least you have full control.

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#338
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…

> It is incredibly easy now to get an idea to the prototype stage Yup. And for most purposes, that's enough . An app does not have to be productized and shipped to general audience to be useful. In fact, 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,…

So your rebuttal to the claim that AI isn't increasing productivity in any measurable way is .. that it does actually increase productivity, but only for apps that aren't being publicly released/shared?

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#339
post #316

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 s…

Personally the only way I see to "imminentize" any sort of healthy software culture is to categorically dismiss people who make this kind of stuff, all these temporarily embarrassed CEOs, in every public channel available. Shut them out.

They can only be interested in one thing, self-advancement. No other explanation works! If they were interested in self-improvement, they might try reading or writing something themselves! Wouldn't it show if they had?

I recognize that models are getting better, but consider: if you already don't understand how programming or LLMs work, and you use LLMs precisely to avoid knowing how to do things, or how they work (the "CEO" mode), each incremental improvement will impress you more than it impresses others. There's no AI exception to Dunning-Kruger.

I recognize that "this" is a difficult thing to pin down in real time. But in the end we know it when we see it, and it has the fascinating and useful quality of not really being explainable by anything else.

Unless and until the culture gets to a place where no one would risk embarrassing themselves by doing something like this, we're stuck with it.

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#340
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…

> It is incredibly easy now to get an idea to the prototype stage Yup. And for most purposes, that's enough . An app does not have to be productized and shipped to general audience to be useful. In fact, 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,…

I agree with you. I am personally building small tools and apps to solve my own problems and I would not do that before AI - I would not know how.
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