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So where are all the AI apps?

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Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#351

Post by autotune »

chrisandchris wrote: post #263
autotune wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I launched a draw.io competitor to the point that it is in production, but there is little activity on the site as far as signups are concerned. Doesn't deliver enough business value.

Out of curiosity: What is your USP? Why should I prefer your product over draw.io? IMHO (this may not apply to you!) a lot of people launch a "competitor" of a product which seems to be a clone of the product without improving something that the other product misses/is very bad at.

Specifically because it generates Terraform code along with the diagrams, but I guess it's not the selling point that I thought it would be.

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#352

Post by arkensaw »

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…

Not to get too political, but there's a lot of talk this week about the US military using AI to select targets and be more effective in Iran, which is not un-similar.

In both cases, AI is making people think they can achieve things that were previously judged to unachievable, whether those things are building an app without any effort and getting rich, or effecting regime change without any actual strategic planning.

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#353

Post by avadodin »

Vanshfin wrote: post #276

There is one AI app that is not just an app it is your personal assistant which will work on your assign task and give you the results you can connect it with your social media it will deploy in just 3 single step also has free trial try it now becuase your saas needs an personal assistant that work on behalf of you Give it try: https://clawsifyai.com/

What you say?

Not just an app but someone set up us the bomb!?

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#354

Post by peteforde »

oro44 wrote: post #249
peteforde wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I share this particular cynicism. I have a list of ideas a mile long that gets longer every day, and LLMs help me burn through that list significantly faster. However, the older I get, the more distraught I get that most people I meet "IRL" are simply not sitting on a list of problems they simply lack time to solve. I have... a lot of emotions around this, but it seems to be the norm. If someone doesn't see or experi…

Yeah and frankly the innovation would occur irrespective of llm’s. Would it be harder? Sure. And perhaps the difficulty adds an additional cost of passion being a necessary condition to embark on the innovation. Passion leads to really good stuff. My personal fear is we get landfill sites of junk software produced. To some extent it should be costly to convert an idea to a concept - the cost being thinking carefully…

Yes, it'd be better if people kept their inner Oppenheimer in check.

However, I suspect it's much more like the three types of people talking about 3D printers:

- 3D printing jigs and prototypes has completely changed my workflow

- I can't find any more things to print from the vendor provided gallery

- why on earth would I want a 3D printer, you guys are geeks

LLMs are not creating a risk that nihilist socialites will disrupt how device drivers get written.

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#355

Post by peteforde »

patchorang wrote: post #181
peteforde wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuinely curious: are you actually vibe coding (as in not writing or looking at the code) or are you pair programming with a current model (eg. Sonnet or Opus) using plan -> agent -> debug loops in something like Cursor?

I haven’t written or looked at a single line of code. I do use plan though, and have a technical background but haven’t meaningfully coded in 15 years

I think it's great that you've gotten back into coding, even if you're hands-off for the time being.

However, I strongly urge you to leave not touching the code behind as a silly self-inflicted constraint. It is pretty much guaranteed to only get you to about 40% of the way there for anything more than a quick prototype.

Hardcore cyclists can confidently ride without touching their handlebars, but nobody is talking about getting their handlebars removed. It's just a goofy thing that you might try for a few seconds now and then on a lark.

That's vibe coding.

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#356

Post by jhatemyjob »

PaulHoule wrote: post #305
jhatemyjob wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well back in the 1990s Apple was on the ropes. Classic MacOS was designed to support handling events from the keyboard, mouse and floppy in 1984 and adding events from the internet broke it. It was fun using a Mac and being able to get all your work done without touching a command line, but for a while it crashed, crashed and crashed when you tried to browse the web until that fateful version where they added locks t…

If it wasn't for NeXT and Valve we would still be in the dark ages. Linux sucked for gaming until Valve poured all that money into Wine.

I started with Windows 98. Didn't experience OSX until 2010. 9 years wasted.

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#357

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

PaulHoule wrote: post #223
TeMPOraL wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

In enterprise software there is an eternal discussion of "buy vs build" and most organizations go through a cycle of: -- we had a terrible time building something so now we're only going to buy things -- we had a terrible time buying something so now we're only going to build things -- repeat... Either way you can have a brilliant success and either way you fail abjectly, usually you succeed at most but not all of th…

AI no more pushes things toward build then the unmaintable mess that was internal VB/Access/FoxPro apps before.

I’m not opposed to AI or bemoaning “vibe coding”. The answer is still the same with build vs buy “does it make the beer taste better?”. “Do I get a competitive advantage by building vs buying”?

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#358

Post by tabs_or_spaces »

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 would add that getting customers, especially paid customers for your app is not easily solved with ai too.

Only a few get lucky with funding, only a few have a profitable business.

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#359

Post by pigpop »

Easy, the problem was never writing code. The problem is and always has been finishing the job and shipping it and driving user adoption. AI has done nothing to help that part and so the rate of released and successfully marketed apps stays the same.

The caveat here is to say it hasn't helped with this YET. It's very possible that one or more people/companies come up with a way to have AI handle this process whether it's from a purely autonomous approach like ralph looping until done, deploying and then buying ads or posting about it or from an AI CEO approach of managing the human or hiring humans to do some of those tasks or from a handholding den mother approach of motivating the human to complete all the necessary steps.

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#360

Post by oro44 »

peteforde wrote: post #354
oro44 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah and frankly the innovation would occur irrespective of llm’s. Would it be harder? Sure. And perhaps the difficulty adds an additional cost of passion being a necessary condition to embark on the innovation. Passion leads to really good stuff. My personal fear is we get landfill sites of junk software produced. To some extent it should be costly to convert an idea to a concept - the cost being thinking carefully…

Yes, it'd be better if people kept their inner Oppenheimer in check. However, I suspect it's much more like the three types of people talking about 3D printers: - 3D printing jigs and prototypes has completely changed my workflow - I can't find any more things to print from the vendor provided gallery - why on earth would I want a 3D printer, you guys are geeks LLMs are not creating a risk that nihilist socialites wi…

As I’ve said in my other post, I’m very confident that imagination is the true bottle neck.

Writing lines of code? Nope. If one can imagine… trust me, writing lines of code is trivial.

Most people have no imagination. So sure they can produce more stuff with llm’s but it’ll just be mostly garbage.

Perhaps they can produce some peculiar workflow that works ‘for them’. Sure. But I think about the money invested into the LLM-based projects and I highly doubt we are going to see any returns that justify the spend. What we are going to see is a felling on the profession of software engineers, since the pipe dream of AGI isn’t coming and imagination is scarce.

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