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 LLMs, or tools to use LLMs to create software. But I’m not really seeing the output of this process (net new software).
If someone did make a mobile app, how would it get up take? Coding has never been the hard part about a successful software product.
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.
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).
Beyond that, marketing is harder than ever. Trying to release an app on Shopify app store without very strong marketing usually just means you drop it into a void. No one trusts any of the new apps, because they're inevitably vibecoded slop and there's no way to share your app on social media because all the grifting and shilling have totally poisoned that avenue.
Take a look at Show HN now - there are tons of releases of apps every day, but nothing gets any traction because of the hostile/weird marketing environment and general apathy. Recently, I saw the only app to graduate from New Show HN likely used a voting cartel to push it to the top. And take a guess at what that app did? It summarized HN's top stories with an AI. Something any dev could make in about 10 minutes by scraping/requesting the front page and passing it through an LLM with a "summarize this" prompt.
The entire "indiehacker" community is just devs shilling their apps to each other as well. The entire space is extremely toxic, basically. Good apps might get released but fall into a void because everyone is both grifting and extremely skeptical of each other.
Because it's better to sell shovels than to pan for gold.
In the current state of LLMs, the average no-experience, non-techy person was never going to make production software with it, let alone actually launch something profitable. Coding was never the hard part in the first place, sales, marketing & growth is.
LLMs are basically just another devtool at this point. In the 90s, IDEs/Rapid App Development was a gold rush. LLMs are today's version of that. Both made developer's life's better, but neither resulted in a huge rush of new, cheap software from the masses.
What's this?
Problem is that all these companies trying to push AI experiences know that giving users unfettered access to their data to build further customization is corporate suicide.
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.
Me, I'm not just chasing markets; I want to build things that create joy.
Oh and sadly, llm’s are useless for the imaginative part too. Shucks eh.
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 experience problems and intuitively start working out how they would fix them if they only had time, the notion that they could pair program effectively ideas that they didn't previously have with an LLM is absurd.
This sounds unnecessarily judgmental. Doing this is your hobby. Other people have different ways they want to spend their time. That doesn't make you superior, just different.
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 so what you put out there is somewhat legible.
