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So where are all the AI apps?

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Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#371

Post by paulddraper »

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…

Yeah, PyPI packages are a strange measurement.

These tend to be utilities, and a lot of AI coding either reduces the need for utilities, or uses them but doesn't publish to a package index.

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#372

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

oblio wrote: post #370
l3x4ur1n wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Would you pay $1000 per month for that?

I have never come close to running into any limits using codex with my $20/momth ChatGPT subscription every day

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#373

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

lebuin wrote: post #125
adriand wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anyone who has been doing this professionally will tell you that the "last step" is what takes the majority of time and effort. This is true, and I bet there are thousands of people who are in this stage right now - having gotten there far faster than they would have without Claude Code - which makes me predict that the point made in the article will not age well. I think it’s just a matter of a bit more time befor…

I'd argue that LLMs are not yet capable of the last step, and because most sufficiently large AI-generated codebase are an unmaintainable mess, it's also very hard for a human developer to take over and go the last mile.

So what is the “last step”? I have one shotted a complete AWS CDK app to create infrastructure on an empty AWS account and deploy everything - networking, VPC endpoints, Docker based lambdas, databases, logging, monitoring alerts etc.

Yes I know AWS well and was detailed about the requirements z

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#374

Post by deaux »

thinkharderdev wrote: post #274
deaux wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Yes and no [0]. There's no chance I'm the only one. And no, it's not a chatbot or automation tool or anything else that's "selling shovels", it's an end product. I've had multiple people reach out to me organically with how much it has helped them, reviews are very good and so on.

But really, you don't even need this counterexample because it's trivial. It's like a C fanatic saying "No useful software can be made using Python", and then asking for a counterexample. Take all useful small applications created. Here's one, Maccy [1]. There's zero reason every line of its code has to have been written by hand rather than prompted. Maybe some of it in fact was. It's a nifty little app, does its job well.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47477440

[1] https://maccy.app/

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#375

Post by deaux »

croes wrote: post #288
deaux wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Just shown me a new killer app from the app store that is coded by AI and isn’t an AI app itself. Seems like the rest of the whole AI business, the only things going to the top are the AI tools themselves but not the things they are supposed to built.

> Just shown me a new killer app from the app store that is coded by AI and isn’t an AI app itself.

Goalposts. Show me a new killer app in general. If you look at the App Store rankings it's led by the likes of TikTok. Don't think that's what you're looking for. The rest of it is dominated by marketing.

I swear Android user versions of people like you would correctly judge F-Droid apps as being great for productivity, great apps, yet they're the opposite of "going to the top".

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#376

Post by jaredcwhite »

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…

Not only that, many of the apps & services I'm gravitating to are genuinely AI-skeptic either in how they're built or in how they market themselves to the general public. Slop-free is becoming hot stuff, and if you sound silly & AI-pilled you take on a significant amount of heat as you should.

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#377

Post by jaredcwhite »

planb wrote: post #286
thinkharderdev wrote: post #274

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..

Current, a brand-new handcoded RSS reader for i(Pad)OS/macOS is one of the best apps I've ever used. Seriously. I gladly purchased it and use it every day now (with Feedbin as the backend).

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#378

Post by jaredcwhite »

freedomben wrote: post #170
skeledrew wrote: post #159

I think this article is making a pretty big assumption: that people making things with AI are also going to be publishing them. And that's just the opposite of what should be expected, for the general case. Like I've been making things, and making changes to things, but I haven't published any of that because, well they're pretty specific to my needs. There are also things which I won't consider publishing for now, e…

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…

> That has strongly disincentivized legitimate contributions from people.

Citation needed. I'm seeing the opposite effect: that embracing AI slop in OSS is turning off human contributors who are aghast at projects not standing firm against the incursion of LLMs…even going so far as to fork projects prior to the introduction of slop. (I'm already using slop-free forked software, and I suspect this trend will grow which is sad but necessary.)

Re: So where are all the AI apps?

#379

Post by naasking »

camdenreslink wrote: post #43
turlockmike wrote: post #12

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…

> Yet, the majority of new apps and services that I see are all AI ecosystem stuff.

The same was true of all this computer science stuff too. We built parsers, compilers, calculators, ftp and http, all cool stuff that just builds up our own ecosystem. Look how that turned out.

An ecosystem has to hit a critical mass of sophistication before it breaks out to the mainstream. It's not going to take very long for AI.

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