This. But instead of 700 it's more likely that everyone will be a founder (more or less). It's already scary how easy it is to launch an MVP or produce prototypes with the latest models.
The app really is just several simple forms with some if/else logic, but claude code allowed them to get the app up and running and deployed on vercel's free tier, and it's Good Enough™ to save them an hour or so each day lost in messaging and chasing up things.
I don't think anyone would ever have targeted an app for sale to them, and it would have been hard to twist some sort of flow management app and integrate it with Zapier or something to handle external api calls. With claude code they could just tell it what they wanted and solve their very niche issue. That's why I think that even though LLM coding has improved so much you might not see more software for sale - it's easier for people to just...make their own software.
I have seem several people use AI to write apps to automate a process and along they way finally ask the question 'do we even need this process?'.
Regrettably this does not happen everywhere.
That said, I meant more like production grade apps that have to serve N>1, which is IME where the hard part LLMs suck at comes in. I saw a tweet somewhere along the lines of “CEOs/execs are so divorced from the last mile effort that they are uniquely susceptible to believing AI can replace engineers end to end”
When 100% does not exist. Most software out there has issues, bugs, compliance problems, security weaknesses, scaling, redundancy, availability issues...etc. A lot of this is not actually related to how good or bad software engineers are. It's about costs and time to ROI. Greed is an issue too.
So people seem to have this idea that software created by humans is perfect (its not). And that deterministic (human created software with if/then) is alway going to be better than probabilistic (LLMs). Which in a perfect world is the case, but we live in a capitalistic world where this is not the case.
