The upside here is that it's become extremely easy to make these kind of single-purpose hobbyist apps, and it's only going to get easier.
Yes, selling software may be dead. But instead you'll just prompt your own software for whatever niche problem you're personally solving.
The downside is that since everyone can do it, without understanding the "it" properly, security issues will be boundless and not understood, being rooted will be commonplace, and what you thought was safe and secure will be widly broadcast.
For most people, though, prompting your own software is beyond the realm, since they have day jobs to attend to, groceries to buy, children to herd, and lawns to mow, and they will be oblivious to the scams, fakes, and charlatans who have vibed up something to look useful but only aimed at getting hold of personal info and credit card details.
The future is scammy, at best.
Again with the optimistic take, but I do not think this will be an intractable problem. LLMs are becoming good at finding security vulnerabilities.
This would certainly be a radical change in how the software ecosystem operates. But I think you are ignoring the advantages of more flexible, abundant, customized software.
If anyone can make an app from a spec, how can you profitably sell an app? A million people will make their own copy tomorrow.
We're seeing the end of "simple" for-sale software. Like OPs CRUD app, a UI front-end on-top of a database, of which there are a gazillion examples so some AI can easily synthesize some approximation of whatever requested variation.
The selling of software was always in the "moat", not how fast you were able to churn out CRUD apps. We used offshore that to a more viable economy, but now we're offshoring that to an automated process.
We're not seeing the end of for-sale software, we're seeing the beginning of the end-to-end solo founder.
I posted more or less the same thing in a comment over on lobste.rs[1] - being able to create your own bespoke software tools, without any developer experience is (mostly) a really cool thing.
This isn't someone being inspired to build something: It's the automated "drive-by" cloning and scammy, dubious nature of these clones that bothers me along with the copying of personas & identities to spam them across social media.
You've been able to generate full books using ChatGPT for even longer. Somehow, authors continue selling books.
It's almost as if people recognize and will pay for quality creative output from human beings.
I listened to one. It was pretty good!! There’s no lyrical content, but the production was strong.
In that niche of “music you don’t really pay attention to” I predict AI generated music will only grow.
