[HN Gopher] So where are all the AI apps?
___________________________________________________________________
So where are all the AI apps?
Author : tanelpoder
Score : 367 points
Date : 2026-03-24 14:19 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.answer.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.answer.ai)
| superkuh wrote:
| On my local computer used only by me because now I don't need a
| corporation to make them for me. In the past decades I'd make
| maybe one or two full blown applications for myself per 10 years.
| In the past year "I" (read: a corporate AI and I) have made
| dozens to scratch many itches I've had for a very long time.
|
| It's a great change for a human person. I'm not pretending I'm
| making something other people would buy nor do I want to. That's
| the point.
| chistev wrote:
| On Show HN.
| dawnerd wrote:
| Or the selfhosted subreddit.
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| here: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/vGKC9LpGnOQ
| ramesh31 wrote:
| No one needs another SaaS. Games are the real killer app for AI.
| Hear me out.
|
| I've wanted to make video games forever. It's fun, and scratches
| an itch that no other kind of programming does. But making a game
| is a _mountain_ of work that is almost completely unassailable
| for an individual in their free time. The sheer volume of assets
| to be created stops anything from ever being more than a silly
| little demo. Now, with Gemini 3.1, I can build an asset pipeline
| that generates an entire game 's worth of graphics in minutes,
| and actually be able to build a game. And the assets are _good_.
| With the right prompting and pipeline, Gemini can now easily
| generate extremely high quality 2d assets with consistent art
| direction and perfect prompt adherence. It 's not about asking AI
| to make a game for you, it's about enabling an individual to
| finally be able to realize their vision without having to resort
| to generic premade asset libraries.
| dawnerd wrote:
| Except all of the ai created games posted to the various
| subreddits are awful. No one likes them, no one plays them. The
| ones that make it to steam end up getting abandoned when the
| devs hit a performance wall.
|
| Game development just isn't something AI can do well. Good
| games are not just recreations of existing titles.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| >Except all of the ai created games posted to the various
| subreddits are awful. No one likes them, no one plays them.
|
| As with anything else, 95% of it will always be crap. Taste
| is now the great differentiator.
| skydhash wrote:
| High quality assets is orthogonal to fun. If you can create a
| fun concept with generic assets, I believe you may find an
| artist willing to produce the assets for you.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| >High quality assets is orthogonal to fun.
|
| Not necessarily. It's a very "programmer brain" thing to
| think that novel mechanics are the be-all end-all of what
| makes a fun game. Extremely simple games can become
| incredibly engaging given high quality detailed beautiful art
| design. Think of deck builders and board games that would be
| pointless with just placeholder images and spreadsheets of
| data, that actually become enjoyable because of the creative
| work that went into the assets.
| johndough wrote:
| I tried using Gemini for asset generation, but have not yet
| found a good way to animate them. It does not seem to
| understand sprite sheets or bone-based animation. Do you know a
| solution for that?
| ramesh31 wrote:
| >It does not seem to understand sprite sheets or bone-based
| animation. Do you know a solution for that?
|
| This is precisely what I'm running into as well. There's a
| few SaaS solutions that are _ok_ , but I gave up after an
| attempt at building a pipeline for it. Sticking with building
| 4X/strategy card games that don't need character animations
| for now until the models catch up.
| quikoa wrote:
| While a good post the title is a bit ambiguous. The post is about
| applications created using AI not applications with AI
| functionality embedded.
| turlockmike wrote:
| 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 their own workflow.
| skyberrys wrote:
| This sounds chaotic and fun.
| gear54rus wrote:
| Sounds more like satire.
| skyberrys wrote:
| I am easily caught by satire and I have a weakness for
| buttons.
| acessoproibido wrote:
| I would still be interested even if my personal workflow is
| different. These things can be very inspirational!
| Chris2048 wrote:
| Wdym by "it does something interesting with Claude code I can't
| do programmatically"?
| graeber_28927 wrote:
| I'm guessing it's not a hard coded function, the button
| invokes. Instead it spawns a claude code session with perhaps
| some oredefined prompts, maybe attaches logs, and let's
| claude code "go wild". In that sense the button's effect
| wouldn't be programmatical, it would be nondeterministic.
|
| Not OP, just guessing.
| bena wrote:
| It means he has a girlfriend. And she goes to a different
| school. In Canada. You've never heard of it.
| vladostman wrote:
| Perfect analogy actually
| actionfromafar wrote:
| I have had the thought to write little "programs" in text or
| markdown for things which would just a chore to maintain as a
| traditional program. (I guess we call them "skills" now?)
| Think scraping a page which might change its output a bit
| every so often. It the volume or cadence is low, it may not
| be worth it to create a real program to do it.
| sputknick wrote:
| This is probably my favorite gain from AI assisted coding: the
| bar for "who cares about this app" has dropped to a minimum of
| 1 to make sense. I recently built an app for grocery shopping
| that is specific to how and where I shop, would be useless to
| anyone other than my wife. Took me 20 minutes. This is the next
| frontier: I have a random manual process I do every week, I'll
| write an app that does it for me.
| MeetingsBrowser wrote:
| What exactly were you bale to build in 20 minutes?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Me, and photo editor tool to semi-automate a task of
| digitizing a few dozen badly scanned old physical photos
| for a family photo book. Needed something that could auto-
| straighen and auto-crop the photos with ability to quickly
| make manual adjustments, Gemini single-shotted me a working
| app that, after few minutes of back-and-forth as I used it
| and complained about the process, gained full four-point
| cropping (arbitrary lines) with snapping to lines detected
| in image content for minute adjustments.
|
| Before that, it single-shot an app for me where I can copy-
| paste a table (or a subsection of it) from Excel and print
| it out perfectly aligned on label sticker paper; it does
| instantly what used to take me an hour each time, when I
| had to fight Microsoft Word (mail merge) and my Canon
| printer's settings to get the text properly aligned on
| labels, and not cut off because something along the way
| decided to scale content or add margins or such.
|
| Neither of these tools is immediately usable for others.
| They're not meant to, and that's fine.
| stavros wrote:
| I built a small app to emit a 15 kHz beep (that most adults
| can't hear) every ten minutes, so I can keep time when I'm
| getting a massage. It took ten minutes, really, but I guess
| it's in the spirit of the question.
|
| For 20 minutes of time, I had a simple TTS/STT app that
| allows me to have a voice conversation with my AI
| assistant.
| sedawkgrep wrote:
| My buddy and I are writing our own CRUD web app to track
| our gaming. I was looking at a ticketing system to use for
| us to just track bug fixes and improvements. Nothing I
| found was simple enough or easy enough to warrant
| installing it.
|
| I vibe'd a basic ticketing system in just under an hour
| that does what we need. So not 20 mins, but more like
| 45-60.
| ElFitz wrote:
| More than that. Building a throwaway-transient-single-use web
| app for a single annoying use kind of makes sense now,
| sometimes.
|
| I had to create a bunch of GitHub and Linear apps. Without me
| even asking Codex whipped up a web page and a local server to
| set them up, collecting the OAuth credentials, and forward
| them to the actual app.
|
| Took two minutes, I used it to set up the apps in three
| clicks each, and then just deleted the thing.
|
| Code as transient disposable artifacts.
| BoneShard wrote:
| I posted it recently, but now this works differently
| https://xkcd.com/1205/
|
| You can get a throw away app in 5 mins, before I wouldn't
| even bother.
| shafyy wrote:
| That's fine and all, but how much are you ready to pay to
| Anthropic and OpenAI to be able to do this? Like, is it worth
| 100 bucks a month for you to have your own shopping app?
| joshmarinacci wrote:
| That is an excellent question. For me the answer is yes,
| but I'm unusual.
| shafyy wrote:
| Haha great. I guess my wider point is that most people
| won't be ready to pay for it, and in the end there will
| be only two ways to monetize for OpenAI et al: Ads or
| B2B. And B2B will only work if they invest a lot into
| sales or if the business owners see real productivity
| gains one the hype has died one.
| ryandrake wrote:
| It's not worth 100 bucks a month for me to have my own
| shopping app, but _maybe_ it 's worth 100 bucks a month
| to have ready access to a software garden hose that _I
| can use if I want_ to spew out whatever stupid app comes
| to my mind this morning.
|
| I'd rather not pay monthly for something (like water)
| that I'm turning on and off and may not even need for
| weeks. But paying per-liter is currently more expensive
| so that's what we currently do.
|
| I think the future is going to be local models running on
| powerful GPUs that you have on-prem or in your homelab,
| so you don't need your wallet perpetually tethered to a
| company just to turn the hose on for a few minutes.
| hamdingers wrote:
| It's easily worth the <$1 in tokens from a Chinese model.
| You don't need frontier reasoning capabilities to make a
| personalized grocery list app.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| Even if it's only useful to you it would be super educational
| to see your prompts and the result.
| JasperNoboxdev wrote:
| Same energy here. I was sitting on 50+ .env files across
| various projects with plaintext API keys and it always
| bothered me but never enough to actually fix it. AI dropped
| the effort enough that I just had a dedicated agent run at it
| for a few days -- kept making iterations while I was using it
| day to day until it landed on a pretty solid Touch ID-based
| setup.
|
| This mix of doing my main work on complex stuff (healthcare)
| with heavy AI input, and then having 1-2 agents building
| lighter tools on the side, has been surprisingly effective.
| kylecazar wrote:
| ... how did that replace vscode?
|
| Do you never open a code editor?
| headcanon wrote:
| Kind of. I'm finding that my terminal window in VSCode went
| from being at the bottom 1/3rd of my screen to filling the
| whole screen a lot of the time, replacing the code editor
| window. If AI is writing all of your code for you based on
| your chat session, a lot of editing capabilities aren't
| needed as much. While I wouldn't want to get rid of it
| entirely, I'd say an AI-native IDE would deemphasize code
| editing in favor of higher-level controls.
| skydhash wrote:
| > _I deleted vscode and replaced with a hyper personal
| dashboard that combines information from everywhere._
|
| Emacs with Hyperbole[0]?
|
| [0]: https://www.gnu.org/software/hyperbole/
| Igrom wrote:
| You can't mention Hyperbole and not say how you use it. I did
| not get past the "include the occasional action button in
| org-mode" phase.
| neonnoodle wrote:
| actually the rules say that no one can ever explain what
| Hyperbole is for
| EGreg wrote:
| Well, I'm sharing it. If someone wants an early preview or to
| work w me on this, the calendly link is on the site:
|
| https://safebots.ai
|
| But it requires A LOT of work to make sure it is actually safe
| for people and organizations. And no, an .md file saying
| "PLEASE DONT PWN ME, KTHX" isn't it at all. "Alignment" is only
| part of the equation.
|
| If you're not afraid to dive into rabbitholes, here is how it
| works: http://community.safebots.ai/t/layer-4-browser-
| extensions-pe...
| camdenreslink wrote:
| 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 LLMs, or tools to use LLMs
| to create software. But I'm not really seeing the output of
| this process (net new software).
| oro44 wrote:
| Well it's mostly explained by the fact that most people lack
| imagination and can't hold enough concepts about a particular
| experience to think about how to re-imagine it, to begin
| with.
|
| Oh and sadly, llm's are useless for the imaginative part too.
| Shucks eh.
| peteforde wrote:
| 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 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.
| skeledrew wrote:
| Also one of those with a mile-long ideas list that I can
| finally now burn through. I gotta say, it feels good!
| oro44 wrote:
| 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 so what you put out there is somewhat legible.
| peteforde wrote:
| 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.
| physicsguy wrote:
| I worked in an industry for five years and I could feasibly
| build a competitor product that I think would solve a lot of
| the problems we had before, and which it would be difficult
| to pivot the existing ones into. But ultimately, I could have
| done that before, it just brings the time to build down, and
| it does nothing for the difficult part which is convincing
| customers to take a chance on you, sales and marketing, etc.
| - it takes a certain type of person to go and start a
| business.
| amrocha wrote:
| Nobody's talking about starting businesses. The article is
| specifically about pypi packages, which don't require any
| sales and marketing. And there's still no noticeable uptick
| in package creation or updates.
| physicsguy wrote:
| My understanding reading it was that PyPi packages is
| just being used as a proxy variable
| enraged_camel wrote:
| Yes, you are correct. The parent is not following the
| conversation. They probably didn't even read the article.
| CodingJeebus wrote:
| I think this is the great conundrum with AI. I find it's most
| useful when I build my own tools from models. It's great for
| solving last-mile-problem types of situations around my
| workflow. But I'm not interested in trying to productize my
| custom workflow. And I've yet to encounter an AI feature on
| an existing app that felt right.
|
| 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.
| morkalork wrote:
| Before LLMs, there were code sweatshops in India, Vietnam,
| Latin America, etc. and they've been pumping out apps and
| SaaS products for _decades_ now.
| the-smug-one wrote:
| And it was all crap software, no? EDIT: If it was crap,
| then that is still good for AI.
| morkalork wrote:
| AI-powered devs are struggling to stand above it so it
| wasn't all crap, or, AI produced stuff is too
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| There is no money in mobile apps. It came out in the Epic
| Trial that 90% of App Store revenue comes from in app
| purchases for pay to win games. Most of the other money
| companies are making from mobile are front end for services.
|
| 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.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| > Wrappers around LLMs, or tools to use LLMs to create
| software. But I'm not really seeing the output of this
| process
|
| 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.
| Foobar8568 wrote:
| And SQL was that version in the 80s...
| skeledrew wrote:
| There really isn't much profit incentive actually, as
| everyone has access to the same capabilities now. It'd be
| like trying to sell ice to Eskimos.
| camdenreslink wrote:
| Most businesses do not have the capacity to use LLMs to
| produce software. If you have an idea that you can create
| into real high quality software that there is a demand for,
| then you should absolutely do it.
| bdcravens wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| camdenreslink wrote:
| I don't think the 2nd point will make a huge impact on
| software sales. Who is vibe coding? Software developers or
| business types? They aren't going to vibe code a CRM, or
| their own bespoke version of Excel, or their own Datadog
| APM.
|
| 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).
| aaroninsf wrote:
| Profit is not everyone's goal.
|
| Me, I'm not just chasing markets; I want to build things that
| create joy.
| GorbachevyChase wrote:
| Why on earth would you publish and monetize software anybody
| can reproduce with a $20 subscription and an hour of
| prompting? Why would you ever publish something you vibe
| coded to PyPI? Code itself isn't scarce anymore. If there is
| not some proprietary, secret data or profound insight behind
| it, I just don't think there is a good reason to treat it
| like something valuable.
| tbeseda wrote:
| Sorry, I'm not sure how this relates to the content of the
| article. Sounds like an interesting experience, but this is an
| analysis of the Python ecosystem pre+post ChatGPT.
| headcanon wrote:
| I've been getting close to that myself, I've been using VSCode
| + Claude Code as my "control plane" for a bunch of projects but
| the current interface is getting unwieldly. I've tried superset
| + conductor and those have some improvements but are
| opinionated towards a specific set of workflows.
|
| I do think there would be value in sharing your setup at some
| point if you get around to it, I think a lot of builders are in
| the same boat and we're all trying to figure out what the right
| interface for this is (or at least right for us personally).
| notjes wrote:
| All apps you are using are made with AI.
| Sharlin wrote:
| The reason why the release cadence of apps about AI has increased
| presumably reflects the simple facts that
|
| a) there are likely many more active, eager contributors all of a
| sudden, and
|
| b) there's suddenly a huge amount of new papers published every
| week about algorithms and techniques that said contributors then
| eagerly implement (usually of dubious benefit).
|
| More cynically, one might also hypothesize that
|
| c) code quality has dropped, so more frequent releases are
| required to fix broken programs.
| skyberrys wrote:
| Wouldn't the apps go into the Apple store and Android play? I
| guess looking at python packages is valid, but I don't think it's
| the first thing someone thinks to target with vibe coding. And
| many apps go to be websites, a website never tells me much about
| how it is made as a user of the site.
| jayd16 wrote:
| To be fair, those markets are dominated by entrenched market
| leaders.
| Brybry wrote:
| Steam game releases seem to be up maybe a bit more than
| expected. [1]
|
| And you can even see the number of new games that disclosed
| using generative AI (~21% in 2025). [2]
|
| And that's probably significantly undercounting because I doubt
| everyone voluntarily discloses when they use tools like Claude
| Code (and it's not clear how much Valve cares about code-
| assistance). [3]
|
| Also no one is buying or playing _a lot_ of these games.
|
| [1] https://steamdb.info/stats/releases/
|
| [2] https://steamdb.info/stats/releases/?tagid=1368160
|
| [3]
| https://store.steampowered.com/news/group/4145017/view/38624...
| Robdel12 wrote:
| We're in a personal software era. Or disposable software era
| however you want to look at it. I think most people are building
| for themselves and no longer needing to lean on community to get
| a lot of things done now.
|
| Self plug, but basically that's the TL;DR
| https://robertdelu.ca/2026/02/02/personal-software-era/
| ed_elliott_asc wrote:
| I think this is right, I can get cause to build me something
| for my own use that I'd have given up at before, getting to the
| point of being useable still doesn't make it shareable.
| dominotw wrote:
| I am now scared to talk to anyone. Eventually the conversation
| turns to AI and they want to talk or show their vibecoded app.
|
| I am just tired boss. I am not going to look at your app.
| CalRobert wrote:
| So far, as sideloaded APKs on my tablet. Most recently one that
| makes it easier to learn Dutch and quiz myself based on captions
| from tv shows
| j2kun wrote:
| Classic HN comment: ignore the article and respond directly to
| its title
| CalRobert wrote:
| Well I read the article discussing pypi packages but I think
| for a lot of people it's more single use tools. My little
| apks are ugly and buggy but work for me
| codybontecou wrote:
| Stuck behind Apple's app review process.
| EruditeCoder108 wrote:
| well, many apps i made are really good but i would never bother
| to share it, takes unnecessary effort and i don't really know
| what works best for me will work like that for others
| paxys wrote:
| 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 majority of time and effort.
| dominotw wrote:
| all they did is annoy their friends and family by sharing their
| vibeslop app and asking for "feedback".
|
| I really dont know how to respond to these requests. I am going
| to hide out and not talk to anyone till this fad passes.
|
| Reminds of the trend where everyone was dj wanting you to
| listen their mixtrack they made on abbleton live
| 101008 wrote:
| "I think it's great, you should deploy it! Let me know when
| it's in production"
| bogwog wrote:
| When someone sends me an AI generated project or proposal, I
| just send them an AI generated reply I know they're not going
| to bother reading either.
| highstep wrote:
| Is it really that big of a deal to help/encourage a
| friend/family in these simple ways?? Do you have no time in
| life to smell the flowers?
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| AI slop is not the flowers
| kevinsync wrote:
| Devil's advocate (because honestly I do agree with you,
| but..) -- help/encouragement often ends up turning into far
| more time and effort than it sounds like up front.
|
| ~18 months ago a friend of mine had a very viable, good
| idea for a physical product, but very fuzzy on the details
| of where to begin. My skillset backfilled everything he was
| missing to go from idea to reality to in-market.
|
| I began at arm's length with just advice and validation,
| then slowly got involved with CAD and prototyping to make
| sure it kept moving forward, then infrastructure/admin,
| graphic design, digital marketing and support, etc, while
| he worked on manufacturing, physical marketing, networking,
| fulfillment, sales, etc.
|
| Long story short, because I both deeply believe in the
| vision and know that teamwork makes the dream work, I am
| fully, completely, inextricably involved LOL -- and I don't
| have a single complaint about it either, but man, _watch
| out_ , because if you _don 't_ believe in the vision but
| _do_ have skills /expertise they're lacking, and opt out,
| friends and family will be the quickest and most aggrieved
| people you'll ever meet that think you're gatekeeping them
| from success.
| pak9rabid wrote:
| I hope this at least resulted in some equity of this
| project for you.
| kevinsync wrote:
| Yeah it turned out to be very fair, I just initially
| wasn't expecting to get as involved as I have hahaha
| moduspol wrote:
| I sure do. I hook up Claude to my browser via MCP and have
| it review and give feedback for my family and friends'
| projects. It's a win/win.
| pesus wrote:
| In this case, it's more like asking your friends to take
| time to smell some feces instead of flowers.
|
| Or to be a little less pessimistic, it's like asking them
| to stop and smell the flowers, except the flowers are fake
| and plastic and it makes your friends question your sanity.
| Either way, it's not a normal or enjoyable flower smelling
| experience, and doesn't add any enjoyment or simple
| pleasure to one's life like normal flower smelling would.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| It's helping with that part too. I was able to configure a
| grafana stack with the help of claude for our ansible scripts.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| That's no where near the end stage of launching a business.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| I used it to design my business cards!
| ghywertelling wrote:
| It is already having impact in triaging support tickets and
| faster resolution using logs.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| it's past the end stage, we are already in business. it's
| just something I am not an expert in, I have used in the
| past (by having real ops engineers build it for me) and now
| I have something that gives us insight into our production
| stack, alerts, etc, that isnt janky and covers my goals.
| So... yeah that is valuable and improves my business.
| adriand wrote:
| > 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 before the deluge starts,
| something on the order of six more months.
| lebuin wrote:
| 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.
| prhn wrote:
| Even beyond the engineering there are 100 other things to do.
|
| I launched a vibe coded product a few months ago. I spent the
| majority of my time
|
| - making sure the copy / presentation was effective on product
| website
|
| - getting signing certificates (this part SUCKS and is
| expensive)
|
| - managing release version binaries without a CDN (stupid)
|
| - setting up LLC, website, domain, email, google search
| indexing, etc, etc
| ryandrake wrote:
| Exactly. The "writing code" part is literally the easiest
| part of building a software business. And that was even
| _before_ LLM assisted coding. Now it 's pretty much trivial
| to just spew slop code until something works. The hard parts
| are still: making the right thing, making it good, getting
| feedback and idea validation, and the really hard part is
| turning it into a business.
| ryanbuening wrote:
| Agreed. However, I just recently "launched" a side project
| and Cloudflare made a lot of the stuff you mentioned easier.
| I also found that using AI helped with setting up my LLC when
| I had questions.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Exactly, there have been loads of tools over time to make
| software development easier - like Dreamweaver and Frontpage to
| build websites without coding, or low/no-code platforms to
| click and drag software together, or all frameworks ever, or
| libraries that solve issues that often take time - and I'm sure
| they've had a cumulative effect in developer productivity and /
| or software quality.
|
| But there's not one tool there that triggered a major boost in
| output or number of apps / libraries / products created -
| unless I missed something.
|
| Sure, total output has increased, especially since the early
| 2010's thanks to both Github becoming the social network of
| software development, and (arguably) Node / JS becoming one of
| the most popular languages/runtimes out there attracting a lot
| of developers to publish a lot of tools. But that's not down to
| productivity or output boosting developments.
| zdc1 wrote:
| Even if you have the app, you get to start the fun adventure of
| marketing it and actually trying to grow the damn thing
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Right. Which is something you neither need nor want if you
| just wanted to have an app.
| parpfish wrote:
| And you need to find a way to market it that prevents people
| from thinking "cool, I bet I can get Claude to whip up
| something similar real quick"
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _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, irrelevant, and a
| waste of time_.
|
| The productivity boost is there, but it's not measured because
| people are looking for the wrong thing. Products on the market
| are _not_ solutions to problems, they 're tools to make money.
| The two are correlated, because of bunch of obvious reasons
| (people need money, solving a problem costs money, people are
| happy to pay for solutions, etc.), but they're still distinct.
| AI is dropping the costs of "solving the problem" part, much
| more than that of "making a product", so it's not useful to use
| the lack of the latter as evidence of lack of the former.
| threetonesun wrote:
| I agree, although I'd also say for the majority of problems
| the first part of even prototyping it is probably a waste of
| time and most people would be better off asking a simple AI
| hooked up to search if an appropriate solution already
| exists, or can be easily made with existing tools.
| apsurd wrote:
| But the last "making a product" part does apply to nearly any
| tool, even a solution to a personal problem.
|
| I've started tons of scratch my own itch projects. There's
| adoption, UX, onboarding costs even if you're the only
| audience.
|
| TLDR: i don't even use my own projects. I churn.
| rurp wrote:
| > 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, irrelevant, and a
| waste of time.
|
| To a point, but I think this overstates it by quite a bit. At
| the moment I'm weighing some tradeoffs around this myself.
| I'm currently making an app for a niche interest of mine. I
| have a few acquaintances who would find it useful as well but
| I'm not sure if I want to take that on. If I keep the project
| for personal use I can make a lot of simplifying decisions
| like just running it on my own machine and using the CLI for
| certain steps.
|
| To deploy this to for non-tech users I need to figure out a
| whole deployment approach, make the UI more polished, and
| worry more about bugs and uptime. It sucks to get invested in
| some software that then constantly starts breaking or
| crashing. GenAI will help with this somewhat, but certainly
| won't drop the extra coding time cost down to zero.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| People today say "web applications suck", "Electron sucks",
| etc. They weren't around in the 1990s where IT departments
| were breaking under the load of maintaining desktop apps,
| when we were just getting on the security update treadmill,
| and where most shops that made applications for Windows had
| a dedicated InstallShield engineer and maybe even a
| dedicated tester for the install process.
| nogridbag wrote:
| I wish we had a dedicated InstallShield engineer! I had
| to design and burn my own discs for the desktop apps I
| built. And for some reason, the LightScribe drive was
| installed on the receptionist's computer. I have no idea
| why, but I was a new hire and I didn't question much.
| steve1977 wrote:
| Maintaining desktop apps was not really harder than
| maintaining the current Kubernetes-Web-App behemoths, at
| least in my experience.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Yeah, we traded managing files and registry entries on
| desktops for something that violates all the principles
| of the science-of-systems, the kind of thing Perrow warns
| about in his book _Normal Accidents._
| chickensong wrote:
| I think that's oversimplifying it a bit. Managing files
| and registry entries wasn't much of a problem, but
| supporting an ever-growing matrix of versions across
| multiple platforms that were released into the wild was
| an issue. Modern evergreen apps kind of fix this, but
| you're still dealing with other people's computers and
| environments. Operating a service reliably is of course
| filled with different problems, but at least you have
| full control.
| jhatemyjob wrote:
| Windows was so bad that it made the web bad. Imagine the
| world we'd be in today if Internet Explorer never
| existed.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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 to stop the
| crashes but then it was beachball... beachball...
| beachball...
|
| They took investment from Microsoft at their bottom and
| then they came out with OS X which is as POSIXy as any
| modern OS and was able to handle running a web browser.
|
| In the 1990s you could also run Linux and at the time I
| thought Linux was far ahead of Windows in every way.
| Granted there were many categories of software like
| office suites that were not available, but installing
| most software was ./configure
| make sudo make install
|
| but if your system was unusual (Linux in 1994, Solaris in
| 2004) you might need to patch the source somewhere.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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
| the goals and it is late and over budget.
|
| If you build you take the risks of building something that
| doesn't exist and may never exist.
|
| If you buy you have to pay for a lot of structure that pushes
| risks around in space and time. The vendor people needs
| marketing people not to figure out what you need, but what
| customers need in the abstract. Sales people are needed to
| help you match up your perception of what you need with the
| reality of the product. All those folks are expensive, not
| just because of their salaries but because a pretty good
| chunk of a salesperson's time is burned up on sales that
| don't go through, sales that take 10x as long they really
| should because there are too many people in the room, etc.
|
| When I was envisioning an enterprise product in the early
| 2010s for instance I got all hung up on the deployment model
| -- we figured some customers would insist on everything being
| on-premise, some would want to host in their own
| AWS/Azure/GCP and others would be happy if we did it all for
| them. We found the phrase "hybrid cloud" would cause their
| eyes to glaze over and maybe they were right because in five
| years this became a synonym for Kubernetes. Building our
| demos we just built things that were easy for us to deploy
| and the same would be true for anything people build in
| house.
|
| To some extent I think AI does push the line towards build.
| j45 wrote:
| True, but a basic production stage benefits from some amount
| of backups, dev/staging/prodution, and more than one
| database.
| thegrim33 wrote:
| So your rebuttal to the claim that AI isn't increasing
| productivity in any measurable way is .. that it does
| actually increase productivity, but only for apps that aren't
| being publicly released/shared?
| l3x4ur1n wrote:
| 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.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| You forgot the most important factor: able to wow an investor
| and get them to invest millions on your prototype. Invest
| that and churn a few years, say "it didn't work out", pocket
| any difference after the deal falls apart. If you can pull
| that off 2-3 times, you're set for life.
|
| Though, the economy does not seem to be in a good spot to try
| that strategy out as of now.
| danans wrote:
| > Anyone who has been doing this professionally will tell you
| that the "last step" is what takes the majority of time and
| effort.
|
| That's true, but even the "last step" is being accelerated. The
| 10% that takes 90% of the time has itself been cut in half.
|
| An example is turning debug logs and bug reports into bugfixes,
| and performance stats into infrastructure migrations.
|
| The time required to analyze, implement, and deploy those has
| been reduced by a large amount.
|
| It still needs to be coupled with software engineering skills -
| to decide between multiple solutions generated by an LLM, but
| the acceleration is significant.
| adamrezich wrote:
| So, how many years until we'll see results, then?
| danans wrote:
| > So, how many years until we'll see results, then?
|
| -0.75 years.
|
| Software development output (features, bugs, products) -
| especially at smaller companies like startups - has already
| accelerated significantly, while software development
| hiring has stayed flat or declined. So there has been a
| dramatic increase in human-efficiency. To me, that seems
| like a result, although it's cold comfort as a software
| engineer.
|
| You probably won't see this reflected as a multiplication
| of new apps because the app consumer's attention is already
| completely tapped. There's very little attention surface
| area left to capture.
| shimman wrote:
| You don't think capitalists are able to generate profit
| off of these LLMs currently? Why not? Are they just
| stupid or something?
| lordmathis wrote:
| I also experienced this with my personal projects. It was
| really easy to just workshop a new feature. I'd talk to claude
| and get a nice looking implementation spec. Then I'd pass it on
| to a coding agent which would get 80% there but the last 20%
| would actually take lot more time. In the meantime I'd workshop
| more and more features leading to an evergrowing backlog and an
| anxiety that an agent should be doing something otherwise I'm
| wasting time. I brought this completely on myself. I'm not
| building a business, nothing would happen if I just didn't
| implement another feature.
| freedomben wrote:
| Ha! I do this too and have also recently noticed. When scope
| creep is relatively cheap, it also gets unending and I'm
| never satisfied. I've had a couple of projects that I would
| otherwise open source that I've had to be realistic about and
| just accept it's only going to be useful for myself. Once I
| open it I feel a responsiblity for maintenance and stability
| that just adds a lot of extra work. I need to save those for
| the projects that might actually, realistically, be used.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Software engineering is not "coding" though.
|
| Before AI for the last 8 or so years now first at a startup
| then working in consulting mostly with companies new to AWS or
| they wanted a new implementation, it's been:
|
| 1. Gather requirements
|
| 2. Do the design
|
| 3. Present the design and get approval and make sure I didn't
| miss anything
|
| 4. Do the infrastructure as code to create the architecture and
| the deployment pipeline
|
| 5. Design the schema and write the code
|
| 6. Take it through UAT and often go back to #4 or #5
|
| 7. Move it into production
|
| 8. Monitoring and maintenance.
|
| #4 and #5 can be done easily with AI for most run of the mill
| enterprise SaaS implementations especially if you have the
| luxury of starting from the ground up "post AI". This is
| something you could farm off to mid level ticket takers before
| AI.
| SgtBastard wrote:
| What makes you think 1-2, 6-8 can't be done by agents?
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| 1. An agent is not going to talk to the "business" and
| solve XYProblems, conflicting agendas, and deal with
| strategy. I've had to push back on people in my own company
| that want to give customers "questionnaires" to fill out
| pre engagement and I refuse to do it on any project I lead.
| An agent can tell facial expressions, uncertainty etc.
|
| 2. AI is horrible at system design. One anecdote. I was
| vibe coding an internal website that will at most be used
| by 7 people in total. Part of it was uploading a file to S3
| and then loading the file into an Postgres table. It got
| the "create pre-signed S3 url and upload it directly to
| that instead of sending it to the API" correct (documented
| best practice). But then it did the naive "upload the file
| from S3 and do a bulk sql insert into the database". This
| would have taken 20 minutes. The optimized method that I
| already knew was just to use the Postgres AWS extension to
| load it directly from S3 - 30 seconds. I've heard from a
| lot of data engineers run into similar problems (I am not
| one. I play one sometime).
|
| 6. Involves talking to the customer and UX.
|
| 7. Moving to production doesn't take AI. Automation, stage
| deployments, automated testing and monitoring, blue /green
| deployments etc is a solved problem.
|
| 8. Monitoring is also a solve problem pre AI. It's what
| happens after a problem is what you need people for.
|
| So yes 1,2 and 7 are high value, high touch. If you look at
| the leveling guidelines for any BigTech company, you have
| to be good at 1 and 2 at least to get pass mid level.
|
| Then there is always "0" pre-sales. I can do inbound pre-
| sales (not chase customers). It's not that much different
| than what I do now as the first technical person who does a
| deep dive strategy conversation
| DanHulton wrote:
| It's really thrown off some old adages. It's now "the first 90%
| takes 90% of the time, the last 10% takes the other 90,000,000%
| of the time."
|
| Just doesn't have the same ring to it.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| It's more Zeno's paradox. You take one step, get 90% of the
| way to the finishing line. Now you look ahead and still a
| bunch of distance ahead of you. You take another step and get
| 90% of the way there. Now you look ahead and see there's
| still more distance ahead of you,...
| bwfan123 wrote:
| > the "last step" is what takes the majority of time and effort
|
| Having worked extensively with vibe-coded software, the main
| problem for me is that I have tuned-off from the ai-code, and I
| dont see any skin-in-the-game for me. This is dangerous because
| it becomes increasingly harder to root-cause and debug problems
| because that muscle is atrophying. use-it or lose-it applies to
| cognitive skills (coding/debugging). Now, I lean negatively to
| ai-code because, while it seduces us with fast progress in the
| first 80%, the end outcome is questionable in terms of quality.
| Finally, ai-coding encourages a prompt-and-test or trial-and-
| error approach to software engineering which is frustrating and
| those with experience would prefer to get it right by design.
| janalsncm wrote:
| I also wonder about this for myself. My feeling is that my
| debug skills are also atrophied a bit. But I would split
| debugging into two buckets:
|
| 1. Debugging my own code or obvious behavior with other
| libraries.
|
| 2. Debugging pain-in-the-ass behavior with other libraries.
|
| My patience with the latter is significantly less now, and so
| is perhaps my skill in debugging them. Libraries that change
| their apis for no apparent reason, libraries which use
| nonstandard parameter names, libraries which aren't working
| as advertised.
| genatron_ai wrote:
| It's also possible to heavily influence the design and what
| is sent to the AI model in the prompt to help ensure the
| output is the way you would like it. In existing codebases
| with your style and patterns or even in the prompt, it's
| possible to heavily influence the output so that you can
| hopefully get the best of both worlds.
| npilk wrote:
| How much longer will this be true, though? With improving
| computer use, it may be possible in the next ~year or so that
| agents will be able to wire up infrastructure and launch to
| production.
| ericmcer wrote:
| no
|
| I don't think with LLMs as the foundation we will ever have
| something that can build and launch something end to end.
|
| They just predict the next most likely token... no amount of
| clever orchestration can cover that up and make it into real
| intelligence.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| Nice bait
| hermitcrab wrote:
| 90% done, just the other 90% to do...
| davmar wrote:
| succinct and accurate.
| autotune wrote:
| 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.
| chrisandchris wrote:
| 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.
| autotune wrote:
| 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.
| balls187 wrote:
| > and a few of them did get pretty far, but ultimately not a
| single one actually launched.
|
| Having done this professionally for a very, very long time,
| software engineers aren't particularly good at launching
| products.
|
| Technology has drastically lowered the barriers to bring
| software products to customers, and AI is a continuation of
| that trend.
| roadside_picnic wrote:
| > not a single one actually launched.
|
| I think this represents a _fundamental_ misunderstanding of how
| these AI tools are used most effectively: not to write
| _software_ but to directly solve the problem you were going to
| solve with software.
|
| I used to not understand this and agreed with the "where is all
| the shovelware" comments, but now I've realized the real shift
| is not from automating software creation, but replacing the
| need for it in the first place.
|
| It's clear that we're still awhile away from this being really
| understood and exploited. People are still confusingly building
| webapps that aren't necessary. Here's two, somewhat related,
| examples I've come across (I spend a lot of time on image/video
| generation in my free time): A web service that automatically
| creates "headshots" for you, and another that will
| automatically create TikTok videos for you.
|
| I have bespoke AI versions of both of these I built myself in
| an afternoon, running locally, creating content for prices that
| simply can't be matched by anyone trying to build a SaaS
| company out of these ideas.
|
| What people are thinking: "I know, I can use AI to build a SaaS
| startup the sells content!" But building a SaaS company still
| requires _real software_ since it has to scale to multiple
| users and use cases. What more and more people are realizing is
| "I can created the content for basically free on my desktop,
| now I need to figure out how to leverage that content". I still
| haven't cracked the code for creating a rockstar TikTok
| channel, but it's not because I'm blocked on the content end.
|
| Similarly I'm starting to see that we're still not thinking
| about how to reorganize software teams to maximally exploit AI.
| Right now I see lots of engineers doing software the old way
| with an AI powered exo-skeleton. We know what this results in:
| massive PRs that clog up the whole process, and small bugs that
| creep up later. So long as we divide labor into hyper focused
| roles, this will persist. What I'm increasingly seeing is that
| to leverage AI properly we need to re-think how these roles
| actually work, since now one person can be much responsible for
| a much larger surface area rather than just doing one thing
| (arguably) faster.
| williamcotton wrote:
| I agree 100%. Boring old software skills are part of what it
| took to "write" this DSL, complete with a fully featured LSP:
|
| https://github.com/williamcotton/webpipe
|
| https://github.com/williamcotton/webpipe-lsp
|
| (lots of animated GIFs to show off the LSP and debugger!)
|
| While I barely typed any of this myself I sure as heck read
| most of the generated code. But not all of it!
|
| Of course you have to consider my blog to be "in production":
|
| https://github.com/williamcotton/williamcotton.com/blob/main...
|
| The reason I'm mentioning this project is because the article
| questions where all the AI apps are. Take a look at the git
| history of these projects and question if this would have been
| possible to accomplish in such a relatively short timeframe! Or
| maybe it's totally doable? I'm not sure. I knew nothing about
| quite a bit of the subsystems, eg, the Debug Adapter Protocol,
| before their implementation.
| dalenw wrote:
| I recently "vibe coded" a long term background job runner
| service... thing. It's rather specific to my job and a pre-
| existing solution didn't exist. I already knew what I wanted
| the code to be, so it was just a matter of explaining
| explicitly what I wanted to the AI. Software engineering
| concepts, patterns, al that stuff. And at the end of the
| day(s) it took about the same amount of time to code it with
| AI than it would've taken by hand.
|
| It was a lot of reviewing and proofreading and just verifying
| everything by hand. The only thing that saved me time was
| writing the test suite for it.
|
| Would I do it again? Maybe. It was kinda fun programming by
| explaining an idea in plain english than just writing the
| code itself. But I heavily relied on software engineering
| skills, especially those theory classes from university to
| best explain how it should be structured and written. And of
| course being able to understand what it outputs. I do not
| think that someone with no prior software engineering
| knowledge could do the same thing that I did.
| sixtyj wrote:
| Well... because it is not almost possible do it solo.
|
| Code is just one part of puzzle. Add: Pricing, marketing and
| ads, invoicing, VAT, make really good onboarding, measure churn
| rate, do customer service...
|
| A lot of vibe coders are solopreneurs. You have to be very
| consistent and disciplined to make final product that sells.
| arkensaw wrote:
| 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.
| dddgghhbbfblk wrote:
| Hmmm, my anecdotal experience doesn't match up with this article.
| Personally I _am_ seeing an explosion of AI-created apps. A
| number of different subreddits I use for disparate interests have
| been inundated with them lately. Show HN has experienced the same
| thing, no?
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| https://gethuman.sh
| alasano wrote:
| I wonder when we'll reach saturation of opinionated all-in-one
| frameworks like these.
|
| superpowers/get-shit-done type bloated workflows that try to do
| everything.
|
| this seems a bit different but still in the same mental
| category for me
| brontosaurusrex wrote:
| Intel AI denoiser in Blender.
| vjvjvjvjghv wrote:
| There is a ton of AI use in photography software. It has
| improved masking dramatically, denoise is much better, removing
| objects is easier. But these aren't sold as "AI apps" but as
| photo editing tools that use AI as a tool.
| causal wrote:
| AI makes the first 90% of writing an app super easy and the last
| 10% way harder because you have all the subtle issues of a big
| codebase but none of the familiarity. Most people give up there.
| ing33k wrote:
| Agree. I've also noticed that feature creep tends to increase
| when AI is writing most of the code.
| DougN7 wrote:
| Well put. And that last 10% was always the hardest part, and
| now it's almost impossible because emotionally you're even less
| prepared for the slog ahead.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| I spent about a week doing an "experiment" greenfield app. I
| saw 4 types of issues:
|
| 0. It runs way too fast and far ahead. You need to slow it
| down, force planning only and explicitly present a multi-step
| (i.e. numbered plan) and say "we'll do #1 first, then do the
| rest in future steps".
|
| take-away: This is likely solved with experience and changing
| how I work - or maybe caring less? The problem is the model can
| produce much faster than you can consume, but it runs down dead
| ends that destroy YOUR context. I think if you were running a
| bunch of autonomous agents this would be less noticeable, but
| impact 1-3 negatively and get very expensive.
|
| 1. lots of "just plain wrong" details. You catch this
| developing or testing because it doesn't work, or you know from
| experience it's wrong just by looking at it. Or you've already
| corrected it and need to point out the previous context.
|
| take-away: If you were vibe coding you'd solve all these
| eventually. Addressing #0 with "MORE AI" would probably help
| (i.e. AI to play/validate, etc).
|
| 2. Serious runtime issues that are not necessarily bugs.
| Examples: it made a lot of client-side API endpoints public
| that didn't even need to exist, or at least needed to be scoped
| to the current auth. It missed basic filtering and SQL clauses
| that constrained data. It hardcoded important data (but not
| necessarily secrets) like ports, etc. It made assumptions that
| worked fine in development but could be big issues in public.
|
| take-away: AI starts to build traps here. Vibe coders are in
| big trouble because everything works but that's not really the
| end goal. Problems could range from 3am downtime call-outs to
| getting your infrastructure owned or data breaches. More
| serious: experienced devs who go all-in on autonomous coding
| might be three months from their last manual code review and be
| in the same position as a vibe coder. You'd need a week or more
| to onboard and figure out what was going on, and fix it, which
| is probably too late.
|
| 3. It made (at least) one huge architectural mistake (this is a
| pretty simple project so I'm not sure there's space for more).
| I saw it coming but kept going in the spirit of my experiment.
|
| take-away: TBD. I'm going to try and use AI to refactor this,
| but it is non trivial. It could take as long as the initial app
| did to fix. If you followed the current pro-AI narrative you'd
| only notice it when your app started to intermittently fail -
| or you got you cloud provider's bill.
| Schiendelman wrote:
| I'm a product manager, and a lot of the things I see people
| do wrong is because they don't have any product management
| experience. It takes quite a bit of work to develop a really
| good theory of what should be in your functional spec. Edge
| cases come up all the time in real software engineering, and
| often handling all those cases is spread across multiple
| engineers. A good product manager has a view of all of it,
| expects many of those issues from the agent, and plans for
| coaching it through them.
| nevertoolate wrote:
| Poe's law is strong with this one
| Schiendelman wrote:
| Tell me more! I'm trying to figure out how you got that.
| tristor wrote:
| I think that's an incredibly reductionist and sarcastic
| take. I'm also in Product, but was an engineer for over a
| decade prior. I find that having strong structured
| functional specifications and a good holistic
| understanding of the solution you're trying to build goes
| a long way with AI tooling. Just like any software
| project, eliminating false starts and getting a clear set
| of requirements up front can minimize engineering time
| required to complete something, as long as things don't
| change in the middle. When your cycle time is an
| afternoon instead of two quarters, that type of up front
| investment pays off much better.
|
| I still think AI tooling is lacking, but you can get
| significantly better results by structuring your plans
| appropriately.
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| And as we all know, the first 90% of writing an app takes the
| first 90% of the time, and the last 10% takes the other 90% of
| the time.
| terrabitz wrote:
| The 90-90 rule may need an update for a POST-LLM world
|
| "The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 9% of the
| development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for
| the other 9000% of the development time"
| esafak wrote:
| So the way is to read every line of code along the way.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| Comprehension Debt
|
| https://addyosmani.com/blog/comprehension-debt/
| moralestapia wrote:
| I agree with the premise of the article, in the sense that there
| has not been, and I don't think there will be, a 100x increase in
| "productivity".
|
| However, PyPi is not really the best way to measure this as the
| amount of people who take time to wrap their code into a proper
| package, register into PyPi, push a package, etc... is quite low.
| Very narrow sampling window.
|
| I do think AI will directly fuel the creation of a lot of
| _personal_ apps that will not be published anywhere. AI lower the
| barrier of entry, as we all know, so now regular folks with a bit
| of technical knowledge can just build the app they want tailored
| to their needs. I think we'll see a lot of that.
| vjvjvjvjghv wrote:
| This remains me so much of the .COM bubble in 2000. A lot of
| clueless companies thought that they just need to "do internet"
| without any further understanding or strategy. They burned a ton
| of money and got nothing out of it. Other companies understood
| that the internet is an enabling technology that can support a
| lot of business processes. So they quietly improved their
| business with the help of the internet.
|
| I see the same with AI. Some companies will use AI quietly and
| productively without much fuzz. Others are just using it as a
| marketing tool or an ego trip by execs but no real understanding.
| rzerowan wrote:
| Yep and the LLM tools are giving flasbacks to the
| Frontpage/DreanWeaver to geocities ipeline for building the
| sites.
|
| Still early innings but i bet this plays out the same way - not
| everyone will have the time sink to vibecode all the software
| workflows they require.Maintainance iwse and security wise
| holes will still remain for the personaly non tech user. Devs
| and orgs will probably limit the usage to a helper sidecar
| rather than the hyped 100% LLM generated apps. Reminds me about
| the hype
| saidnooneever wrote:
| maybe some developers are more productive while the rest of em is
| laid off.. keeping the same release cadence but with fewer devs?
|
| i know maybe this is not to your analysis as its about open
| source stuff, but this is the sentiment i see with some
| companies. rather than have 10x output which their clients dont
| need, they produce things cheaper and earn more money from what
| they produce. (and later lose that revenue to a breach :p)
| enraged_camel wrote:
| This article is very poorly researched and reasoned, but it's in
| the "AI hater" category so I guess it's no surprise it's on the
| front page.
|
| Number of iOS apps has exploded since ChatGPT came out, according
| to Sensor Tower: https://i.imgur.com/TOlazzk.png
|
| Furthermore, most productivity gains will be in private repos,
| either in a work setting or individuals' personal projects.
| erythro wrote:
| Not all of us get addicted to the rat race and wake up at 3am to
| run more Ralph loops. Some are perfectly content getting the same
| amount of work done as before, just with less investment of time
| and effort.
| severak_cz wrote:
| My guess - these are not not on PyPI because of libraries. AI
| generating is good when you don't care about how your app works,
| when implementation details does not matter.
|
| When you are developing library it's exact opposite - you really
| care about how it works and which interface it provides so you
| end up writing it mostly by hand.
| chaostheory wrote:
| I feel that your assumption that everyone will want to share is a
| flawed one.
| peteforde wrote:
| Not sure that I'd look at python package stats to build this
| particular argument on.
|
| First, I find that I'm using a lot fewer libraries in general
| because I am less constrained by the mental models imposed by
| library authors upon what I'm actually trying to do. Libraries
| are often heavy and by nature abstract low-level calls from API.
| These days, I'm far more likely to have 2-3 functions that make
| those low-level calls directly without any conceptual baggage.
|
| Second, I am generalizing but a reasonable assertion can be made
| that publishing a package is implicitly launching an open source
| project, however small in scope or audience. Running OSS projects
| is a) extremely demanding b) a lot of pain for questionable
| reward. When you put something into the universe you're taking a
| non-zero amount of responsibility for it, even just
| reputationally. Maintainers burn out all of the time, and not
| everyone is signed up for that. I don't think there's going to be
| anything remotely like a 1:1 Venn for LLM use and package
| publishing.
|
| I would counter-argue that in most cases, there might already be
| too many libraries for everything under the sun. Consolidation
| around the libraries that are genuinely amazing is not a terrible
| thing.
|
| Third, one of the most recurring sentiments in these sorts of
| threads is that people are finally able to work through the long
| lists of ideas they had but would have never otherwise gotten
| around to. Some of those ideas might have legs as a product or
| OSS project, but a lot of them are going to be thought
| experiments or solve problems for the person writing them, and
| IMO that's a W not an L.
|
| Fourth, once most devs are past the "vibe" party trick phase of
| LLM adoption, they are less likely to squat out entire projects
| and far, far more likely to return to doing all of the things
| that they were doing before; just doing them faster and with less
| typing up-front.
|
| In other words, don't think project-level. Successful LLM use
| cases are commit-level.
| threethirtytwo wrote:
| This is so stupid. I don't know whether AI has improved things
| but this is clearly cope, we're not even a year into the
| transition since agentic coding took over so any data you gather
| now is not the full story.
|
| But people are desperate for data right? Desperate to prove that
| AI hasn't done shit.
|
| Maybe. But this much is true. If AI keeps improving and if the
| trendline keeps going, we're not going to need data to prove
| something equivalent to the ground existing.
| jimbob21 wrote:
| Why would package be used as the standard? What person fully
| leveraging AI is going to put up packages for release? They
| (their AI model) write the code to leverage it themselves. There
| is no reason to take on the maintenance of a public package just
| because you have AI now. If anything, packages are a net drag on
| new AI productivity because then you'd have to worry about
| breaking changes, etc. As far as actual apps being built by AI,
| the same indie hackers that had garbage codebases that worked
| well enough for them to print money are just moving even faster.
| There are plenty of stories about that.
| tiborsaas wrote:
| I fail to see why the author thinks Python packages are a good
| proxy for AI driven/built code. I've built a number of projects
| with AI, but I haven't created any new packages.
|
| It's like looking at tire sales to wonder about where the EV cars
| are.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| Nitpick, but tire sales _are_ a good proxy for determining
| where EVs are, since the owners are usually suckered into
| buying special "EV" tires.
| npilk wrote:
| I believe EVs also wear tires out faster (because they are
| heavier), so they need more frequent replacement.
| tiborsaas wrote:
| Interesting, didn't know that
| bodge5000 wrote:
| This is addressed, though not quantified (I suppose because
| theres no central repository for that), in the introduction. To
| use your analogy, the author heard EV sales were through the
| roof, couldnt find any evidence that more EV's were actually on
| the road, so looked at tire sales to see if the answer was in
| there.
| patchorang wrote:
| I've been vibe-coding a Plex music player app for MacOS and iOS.
| (I don't like PlexAmp) I've got to the point where they are the
| apps I use for listening to music. But they are really just in an
| alpha/beta state and I'm having a pretty hard time getting past
| that. The last few weeks have felt like I'm playing wack-a-mole
| with bugs and issues. It's definitely not at the point others
| will be willing to use it as their daily app. I'm having to
| decide now if I keep wanting to put time into it. The vibe-coding
| isn't as fun when you're just fixing bugs.
| peteforde wrote:
| 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?
| patchorang wrote:
| 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
| peteforde wrote:
| 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.
| arjie wrote:
| I won't make any claims as to the Python ecosystem and why there
| is no effect seen here (and I suppose no effect seen of the
| Internet on productivity) but one thing that is entirely normal
| for me now is that I never see the need to open-source anything.
| I also don't use many new open-source projects. I can usually
| command Claude Code to build a highly idiosyncratic thing of
| greater utility. The README.md is a good source of feature
| inspiration but there are many packages I simply don't bother
| using any more.
|
| Besides, it's working for me. If it isn't working for others I
| don't want to convince them of anything. I do want to hear from
| other people for whom it's working, though, so I'm happy to share
| when things work for me.
| zabil wrote:
| I am learning music. I used codex to create a native metronome
| app, a circle of fifths app, a practice journal app. I try to
| build a native app alternatives.
|
| I have no plans of publishing them or making the open source, so
| it will not be a part of this metric. I believe others are doing
| this too.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| By "apps" this author apparently means "PyPi packages". This is a
| bafflingly myopic perspective in a world of myopic perspectives.
| Do we really expect people vibecoding "apps" to put anything on
| PyPi as a result? They're consumers of packagers, not creators.
|
| I don't blame people for responding to the title instead of the
| article, because the article itself doesn't bother to answer its
| own question.
| mehagar wrote:
| Did you read the article? The author means software in general,
| not just user-facing apps.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Yes, I did, just to make sure it was as silly as I thought at
| first glance.
|
| You do realize that "The author means software in general" is
| already a concession that they don't actually address the
| question in the title, right?
| esafak wrote:
| A better data set would have been the BigQuery Github stats.
| tantalor wrote:
| Where are they? Well they aren't being uploaded to PyPI. 90% of
| the "AI apps" one-off scripts that get used by exactly one person
| and thrown away. The rest are too proprietary, too personal, or
| too weird to share.
| gos9 wrote:
| I, for one, am not publishing my "apps" for others to use because
| my "apps" make me money
| justacatbot wrote:
| The bottleneck shifted but didn't disappear. Getting to a working
| prototype in a weekend is real, but error handling, edge cases,
| and ops work hasn't gotten much faster. Distribution is
| completely unchanged too. A lot of these 'where are the AI apps'
| questions are really asking why there aren't more successful AI
| businesses, which is a harder and very different problem.
| sid_talks wrote:
| AI does make me more productive. At least until the stage of
| getting my idea to the "working prototype stage". But in my
| personal experience, no one has been realistically able to get to
| the 10x level that a lot of people claim to have achieved with
| LLMs.
|
| Yes, you do produce more code. But LoC produced is never a
| healthy metric. Reviewing the LLM generated code, polishing the
| result and getting it to production-level quality still very much
| requires a human-in-the-loop with dedicated time and effort.
|
| On the other hand, people who vibe code and claims to be 10x
| productive, who produces numerous PRs with large diffs usually
| bog down the overall productivity of teams by requiring tenuous
| code reviews.
|
| Some of us are forced to fast-track this review process so as to
| not slow down these "star developers" which leads to the slow
| erosion in overall code quality which in my opinion would more
| than offset the productivity gains from using the AI tools in the
| first place.
| somewhatjustin wrote:
| > So where are all the AI apps?
|
| They're in the app stores. Apple's review times are skyrocketing
| at the moment due to the influx of new apps.
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| > So, let's ask again, why? Why is this jump concentrated in
| software about AI?...Money and hype
|
| The AI field right now is drowning in hype and jumping from one
| fad to another.
|
| Don't get me wrong: there are real productivity gains to be had,
| but the reality is that building small one-offs and personal
| tools is not the same thing as building, operationalizing, and
| maintaining a large system used by paying customers and
| performing critical business transactions.
|
| A lot of devs are surrendering their critical thinking facilities
| to coding agents now. This is part of why the hype has to exist:
| to convince devs, teams, and leaders that they are "falling
| behind". Hand over more of your attention (and $$$) to the model
| providers, create the dependency, shut off your critical
| thinking, and the loop manifests itself.
|
| The providers are no different from doctors pushing OxyContin in
| this sense; make teams dependent on the product. The more they
| use the product, the more they build a dependency. Junior and
| mid-career devs have their growth curves fully stunted and become
| entirely reliant on the LLM to even perform basic functions.
| Leaders believe the hype and lay off teams and replace them with
| agents, mistaking speed for velocity. The more slop a team codes
| with AI, the more they become reliant on AI to maintain the
| codebase because now no one understands it. What do you do now?
| Double down; more AI! _Of course, the answer is an AI code
| reviewer!_. Nothing that _more tokens_ can 't solve.
|
| I work with a team that is heavily, heavily using AI and I'm
| building much of the supporting infrastructure to make this work.
| But what's clear is that while there are productivity gains to be
| had, a lot of it is also just hype to keep the $$$ flowing.
| wrqvrwvq wrote:
| People will dismiss this critical-thinking shutoff loop as
| doomer conspiracy, but it's literally the strategy that ai
| founders describe in interviews. Also people somehow can't or
| don't remember that uber was almost free when it came out and
| the press ran endless articles about the "end of car
| ownership", but replacing your car with uber today would be 10x
| more expensive. Ai companies are in a mad dash to kill the
| software industry so that they can "commoditize intelligence".
| There will be thousands of dead software startups that pile
| slop on slop until they run out of vc funny-money.
| happyPersonR wrote:
| This is going to cause people to react, but I think those of us
| that truly love opensource don't push AI generated code upstream
| because we know it's just not ready for use beyond agentic use.
| It's just not robust for alot of use common use cases because the
| code produces things that are hyper hardcoded by default, and the
| bugs are so basic, i doubt any developer that actually cared
| would push something so shamefully sloppy upstream with their
| name on it.
|
| The tools for generating AI code aren't yet capable of producing
| code that is decent enough for general purpose use cases, with
| good robust tests, and clean and quality.
| jmarchello wrote:
| Looking at Python packages, or any developer-facing form of
| software, is not a good indicator of AI-based production. The key
| benefit of AI development is that our focus moves up a few layers
| of abstraction, allowing us to focus on real-world solutions.
| Instead of measuring Github, you need to measure feature
| releases, internal tools created, single-user applications built
| for a single niche use case.
|
| Measuring python packages to indicate AI-based production is like
| measuring saw production to measure the effectiveness of the
| steam engine. You need to look at houses and communities being
| built, not the tools.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| I absolutely hate web development with a passion and haven't done
| a new from the ground up web app in 25 years and even since then
| it was mostly a quick copy and paste to add a feature.
|
| But since late last year even when it's not part of the
| requirements leading app dev + cloud consulting projects, I'll
| throw in a feature complete internal web admin site to manage
| everything for a project with a UI that looks like something I
| would have done 25 years ago with a decent UX.
|
| They are completely vibe coded, authenticated with Amazon Cognito
| and the only things I verify are that unauthenticated users can't
| access endpoints, the permissions of the lambda hosting
| environment (IAM role) and the database user it's using
| permissions.
|
| Only at most 5 people will ever use the website at a time - but
| yeah I get scalability for free (not that it matters) because
| it's hosted on Lambda. (yes with IAC)
|
| The website would not exist at all if it weren't for AI.
|
| Now just to be clear, if a website is meant for real people and
| the customer's customers. I'll insist on a real web _designer_
| and a real web developer be assigned to the project with me.
| Feuilles_Mortes wrote:
| I like using it to make personal apps that are specific to my
| use-case and solve problems I've had for ages, but I like my job
| (scientist), and I don't want to run an app company.
| EastLondonCoder wrote:
| I've done a event ticket system that's in production. Stripe
| integration, resend for mailing and a scan app to scan tickets.
| It's for my own club but it's been working quite well. Took about
| 80 hours from inception to live with a focus on testing.
|
| I've done some experiments with reading gedcom files, and I think
| I'm quite close to a demoable version of a genealogy app.
|
| Biggest thing is a tool for remotely working musicians. It's
| about 10000 lines of well written rust, it is a demoable state
| and I wish I could work more on it but I just started a new job.
|
| But yeah, this wouldn't have been possible if I hadn't been a
| very experienced dev who knows how to get things live. Also I've
| found a way to work with LLMs that works for me, I can quickly
| steer the process in the right way and I understand the code
| thats written, again it's possible that a lot of real experience
| is needed for this.
| edent wrote:
| Could you not have downloaded one of the hundreds of Open
| Source event systems and configured it in less time?
| EastLondonCoder wrote:
| Possibly, but probably not in less time and the point was
| partly learn to use agentic coding and also having it do
| exactly what I wanted.
| nemo44x wrote:
| AI is unbelievably useful and will continue to make an impact but
| a few things:
|
| - The 80/20 rule still applies. We've optimized the 20% of time
| part (a lot!) but all the hype is only including the 80% of work
| part. It looks amazing and is, but you can't escape the reality
| of ~80% of the time is still needed on non-trivial projects.
|
| - Breathless AI CEO hype because they need money. This stuff
| costs a lot. This has passed on to run of the mill CEOs that want
| to feel ahead of things and smart.
|
| - You should be shipping faster in many cases. Lots of hype but
| there is real value especially in automating lots of
| communication and organization tasks.
| Kye wrote:
| Cool data. What do I do with it? None of my use cases involve
| writing software, so I don't think this is _for_ me since my
| extensive AI use wouldn't show up in git commits, but I'm not
| sure who it's for. When I'm talking to artist friends, musician
| friends, academic friends, etc data is nice to have but I'm
| talking in stories: the real thing I did and how it made me
| better at the thing.
| imperio59 wrote:
| This is such copium for AI haters. I stopped working almost any
| single line of code at the beginning of this year and I've
| shipped 3 production projects that would have taken months or
| years to build by hand in a matter of days.
|
| Except none of them are open source so they don't show up in this
| article's metrics.
|
| But it's fine. Keep your head in the sand. It doesn't change the
| once in a lifetime shift we are currently experiencing.
| sesm wrote:
| Vibe coding is actually a brilliant MLM scheme: people buy tokens
| to generate apps that re-sell tokens (99% of those apps are AI-
| something).
| nyc_pizzadev wrote:
| A friend of mine who is tech savvy and I would say has novice
| level coding experience decided to build his dream app. Its
| really been a disaster. The app is completely broken in many
| different ways, has functionality gaps, no security, no thought
| out infrastructure, its pretty much a dumpster fire. The problem
| is that he doesn't know what he doesn't know, so its impossible
| for him to actually fix it beyond instructing the AI over and
| over to simply "fix it". The more this is done, the worst the app
| becomes. He's tried all the major AI vendors, from scratch, same
| result, a complete mess of code. He's given up on it now and has
| moved on with his life.
|
| Im not saying that AI is bad, infact, its the opposite, its one
| of the most important tools that I have seen introduced in my
| lifetime. Its like a calculator. Its not going to turn everyone
| into a mathematician, but it will turn those who have an
| understanding of math into faster mathematician.
| ballenf wrote:
| The thesis has it backwards. We will see fewer
| published/downloaded apps/packages as people rely on others less.
| I'm not sure we're quite there yet but I'm increasingly likely to
| spend a few minutes giving an LLM a chance to make a tool I need
| instead of sifting through sketchy and dodgy websites for some
| slightly obscure functionality. I use fewer ad-heavy sites that
| for converting a one text file format to another.
|
| Personally, I see the paid or adware software market shrinking,
| not growing, as a testament to the success of LLMs in coding.
| meroes wrote:
| Ya maybe this. I've found some work at the "tool level". I'm
| not a programmer, just did RLHF for a few years and AI has
| helped me make some tools such as a way to scrape and export to
| excel 35,000 contacts at a company for marketing purposes.
| Things like that. Yes I know libraries exist and someone who is
| already a programmer could do this, but also there's some
| interesting logic in how to avoid duplicates and interact with
| modern websites that was impractical for me. And maybe this job
| is too small for a real programmer.
|
| There are many small, different, and one-time tasks that don't
| fit full blown apps. Which I would characterize an AI building
| a novel app as building a house out of random bits of lumber.
| It will work but will have no cohesive process and sounds like
| a nightmare.
| furyofantares wrote:
| I have a number of small apps and libraries I've prompted into
| existence and have never considered publishing. They work great
| for me, but are slop for someone else. All the cases I haven't
| used them for are likely incomplete or buggy or weird, the code
| quality is poor, and documentation is poor (worse than not
| existing in many cases.)
|
| Plus you all have LLMs at home. I have my version that takes care
| of exactly my needs and you can have yours.
| CrzyLngPwd wrote:
| The first 80% is the easy part, and good ol' Visual Basic was
| fabulous at it, but the last 80% is the time suck.
|
| Same with vibe-coded stuff.
| noemit wrote:
| Theres tons of ai apps. They're all general use chatbots or
| coding agents. Manus, Cursor, ChatGPT. Almost every app that has
| a robust search uses a reranker llm. AI is everywhere.
|
| As far as totally new products - I built one (Habit.am - wordless
| journaling for mental health) and new products require new
| habits, people trying new things, its not that easy to change
| people's behavior. It would be much easier for me to sell my
| little app if it was a literal plain old journal.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| I'll ask another question. Why isn't software getting better?
| Seems like software is buggier than ever. Can't we just have an
| LLM running in a loop fixing bugs? Apparently not. Is this the
| future? Just getting drowned in garbage software faster and
| faster?
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| 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 chart from 2019 to Feb 2026:
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/1020964/apple-app-store-...
|
| Also, if you hang out in places with borderline technical people,
| they might do things like vibe-code a waybar app and proudly post
| it to r/omarchy which was the first time they ever installed
| linux in their life.
|
| Though I'd be super surprised if average activity didn't pick up
| big on Github in general. And if it hasn't, it's only because we
| overestimate how fast people develop new workflows. Just by going
| by my own increase in software output and the projects I've taken
| on over the last couple months.
|
| Finally, December 2025 (Opus 4.5 and that new Codex one) was a
| big inflection point where AI was suddenly good enough to do all
| sorts of things for me without hand-holding.
| pipnonsense wrote:
| i was curious, but I need a statista account to see it
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Heh, I got a solid five seconds with the chart until the
| paywall popped up.
| klibertp wrote:
| But there's no labels on the X axis - and removing the
| popover with dev tools shows a chart that doesn't really
| support what OP says. So we might be looking at some sample
| chart instead of a real one.
| robot-wrangler wrote:
| > Heh, I got a solid five seconds with the chart until the
| paywall popped up.
|
| Relevant! If the maximalist interpretation of AI
| capabilities were close to real, and if people tend to
| point their new super powers at their biggest pain points..
| wouldn't it be a big blow for all things advertising /
| attention economy? "Create a driver or wrapper app that
| skips all ads on Youtube/Spotify" or "Make a browser plugin
| that de-emphasizes and unlinks all attention-grabbing
| references to pay-walled content".
|
| If we're supposed to be in awe of how AI can do anything,
| and we notice repeatedly that nope, it isn't really
| empowering users yet, then we may need to reconsider the
| premise.
| deaux wrote:
| https://cdn.statcdn.com/Statistic/1020000/1020964-blank-754..
| ..
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Seems they use old data unless you craft a request with
| origin/referrer: curl 'https://cdn.statcd
| n.com/Statistic/1020000/1020964-blank-754.png' \
| -H 'Origin: https://www.statista.com' \ -H
| 'Referer: https://www.statista.com/' \ --output
| chart.png
|
| Assuming it's a real chart, that will give you the image
| with the uptick in the last year.
| philipphutterer wrote:
| https://archive.md/tM9Kg
| contravariant wrote:
| I can't really think of a polite way to phrase this, but I'm
| not surprised throwaway mobile apps do benefit, while
| relatively mature python packages do not. That matches my
| estimation of how much programming skill you can reasonable
| extract from the current LLMs.
|
| Really the one thing that conclusively has changed is that the
| 'ask it on stackoverflow' has become 'ask it an LLM'. Around
| 95% of the stackoverflow questions can be answered by an LLM
| with access to the documentation, not sure what will happen to
| the other 5%. I don't think stackoverflow will survive a
| 20-fold reduction in size, if only because their stance on not
| allowing repeat questions means that exponential growth was the
| main thing preventing them from becoming stale.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| > I'm not surprised throwaway mobile apps do benefit, while
| relatively mature python packages do not.
|
| Right.
|
| I don't think you even need cynicism or whatever you felt you
| were having impolite thoughts about:
|
| I'd expect the top mature libraries to be the most resistant
| to AI tool use for various reasons. They already have
| established processes, they don't accept drive-by PR spam,
| the developers working on them might be the least likely to
| be early adopters, and -- perhaps most importantly -- the
| todo list of those projects might need the most human comms,
| like directional planning rather than the sort of yolo
| feature impl you can do in a one-man greenfield.
|
| All to further bury signals you might find elsewhere in
| broader ecosystems.
| bigbadfeline wrote:
| > 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 guzzling endeavor which sucks the
| capital juice out of the economy in return for meager benefits.
|
| I can't think of a reason for the present unjustified AI rush
| and hype other than war, but any success towards that goal is a
| total loss for the economy and environment - that's the
| relation between economics and deadly destruction in a
| connected world, reality is the proof.
| deaux wrote:
| > 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 code can't possibly be productivity net positive is
| nonsensical. And if one line can, then so can many lines.
| thinkharderdev wrote:
| > This is flat-earther level
|
| Ok, so do you have a counterexample?
| planb wrote:
| 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..
| croes wrote:
| That has some strong "Everything that can be invented has
| been invented" vibes.
|
| If that would be true then all these AIs are useless. Who
| needs them to built something that already exists?
| appletrotter wrote:
| "Everything that can be invented has been invented"
|
| Ah my favorite, entirely made up quote.
|
| Apocraphyly attributed to the U.S. Patent Office
| Commissioner in 1899.
| my-next-account wrote:
| I wrote my own note sharing app using free Claude. It's
| self-hosted, allows for non-simultaneous editing by
| multiple users (uses locks), it has no passwords on
| users, it shows all notes in a list. Very simple app,
| over all. It's one Go file and one HTML file. I like it,
| it's exactly what I want for sharing notes like shopping
| and todo lists with my partner.
|
| The AI wouldn't have been able to do it by itself, but I
| wouldn't have been arsed to do it alone either.
| dash2 wrote:
| Here's mine. It's not big or important (at all!) but I
| think it is a perfectly valid app that might be useful to
| some people. It's entirely vibe-coded including code, art
| and sounds. Only the idea was mine.
|
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/kaien/id6759458971
| croes wrote:
| 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.
| GorbachevyChase wrote:
| Is the AI in the room with us now?
|
| I get that people are upset that making a cool six figures
| off of stitching together React components is maybe not a
| viable long-term career path anymore. For those of us on the
| user side, the value is tremendous. I'm starting to replace
| what were paid enterprise software and plug-ins and tailoring
| them to my own taste. Our subject matter experts are
| translating their knowledge and work flows, which usually
| aren't that complicated, into working products on their own.
| They didn't have to spend six months or a year negotiating an
| agreement to build the software or have to beg our existing
| software vendors, who could not possibly care less, for the
| functionality to be added to software we are, for some
| reason, expected to pay for every single year, despite the
| absence of any operating cost to justify this practice.
| fny wrote:
| Claude Code was released for general use in May 2025. It's only
| March.
|
| Also using PyPI as a benchmark is incredibly myopic. Github's
| 2025 Octoverse[0] is more informative. In that report, you can
| see a clear inflection point in total users[1] and total open
| source contributions[2].
|
| The report also notes:
|
| > In 2025, 81.5% of contributions happened in private
| repositories, while 63% of all repositories were public
|
| [0]: https://github.blog/news-insights/octoverse/octoverse-a-
| new-...
|
| [1]: https://github.blog/wp-
| content/uploads/2025/10/octoverse-202...
|
| [2]: https://github.blog/wp-
| content/uploads/2025/10/octoverse-202...
| chromacity wrote:
| > Claude Code was released for general use in May 2025. It's
| only March.
|
| Detractors of AI are often accused of moving the goalposts, but
| I think your comment is guilty of the same. Before Claude Code,
| we had Cursor, Github Copilot, and more. Each of these was
| purportedly revolutionizing software engineering.
|
| Further, the core claim for AI coding is that it lets you ship
| code 10x or 100x faster. So why do we need to wait years to see
| the result? Shouldn't there be an explosion in every type of
| software imaginable?
| gwern wrote:
| > Detractors of AI are often accused of moving the goalpost,
| but I think your comment is guilty of the same. Before Claude
| Code, we had Cursor, Github Copilot, and more. Each of these
| war purportedly revolutionizing software engineering.
|
| What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. If you
| make that argument that 'I don't believe in kinks or
| discontinuities in code release due to AI, because so many AI
| coding systems have come out incrementally since 2020', then
| OP _does_ provide strong evidence for an AI acceleration -
| the smooth exponential!
| enraged_camel wrote:
| Amongst people who use AI regularly, November 2025 is widely
| regarded as a watershed moment. Opus 4.5 was head and
| shoulders above anything that came before it. It marked the
| first time my previously AI-disliker friends begrudgingly
| came to accept that it may actually be useful.
| ertgbnm wrote:
| Does the data not support a 2X increase in packages?
|
| Pre-ChatGPT, in ~2020, there were about 5,000 new packages per
| month. Starting in 2025 (the actual year agents took off), there
| is a clear uptick in packages that is consistently about 10,000
| or 2X the pre-ChatGPT era.
|
| In general, the rate of increase is on a clear exponential. So
| while we might not see a step change in productivity, there comes
| a point where the average developer is in fact 10X productive
| than before. It just doesn't feel so crazy because it can about
| in discrete 5% boosts.
|
| I also disagree with the dataset being a good indicator of
| productivity. I wouldn't actually suspect the number of packages
| or the frequency of updates to track closely with productivity.
| My first order guess would that AI would actually be
| deflationary. Why spend the time to open source something that AI
| can gen up for anyone on a case by case basis specific to the
| project. it takes a certain level of dedication and passion for a
| person to open source a project and if the AI just made it for
| them, then they haven't actually made the investment of their
| time and effort to make them feel justified in publishing the
| package.
|
| The metrics I would expect to go up are actually the size of
| codebases, the number of forks of projects that create hyper
| customized versions of tools and libraries, and other metrics
| like that.
|
| Overall, I'd predict AI is deflationary on the number of products
| that exist. If AI removes the friction involved with just making
| a custom solution, then the amount of demand for middleman
| software should actually fall as products vertically integrate
| and reduce dependencies.
| skeledrew wrote:
| 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, even if generally useful because,
| well the moat has moved from execution effort to ideas, and we
| all want to maintain some kind of moat to boost our market value
| (while there's still one). Everyone has reasonable access to the
| same capabilities now, so everyone can reasonably make what they
| need according to their exact specs easily, quickly _and_
| cheaply.
|
| So while there are many things being made with AI, there is ever-
| decreasing reasons to publish most of it. We're in an era of
| highly personalized software, which just isn't worth generalizing
| and sharing as the effort is now greater than creating from
| scratch or modifying something already close enough.
| freedomben wrote:
| 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 open source
| just isn't very good in the AI era. Maybe when AI gets a lot
| better, but for now it does take real human effort to review
| and test. If contributors were reviewing and testing like they
| _should_ be doing, it wouldn 't be an issue, but far too many
| people just run AI and don't even look at it before sending the
| PR. It's not the maintainers job to do all the review and test
| of a low-effort push. That's not fair to them, and even
| discarding that it's a terrible model for software that you
| share with anyone else.
| kubanczyk wrote:
| You know what else strongly disincentivized legitimate
| contributions from people?
|
| Having your code snatched and its copyright disregarded, to
| the benefit of some rando LLM vendor. People can just press
| "pause" and wait until they see whether they fuel something
| that brings joy to the world. (Which it might in the end. Or
| not.)
| JasperNoboxdev wrote:
| Been going back and forth on this with open source tools
| I've built. The training data argument is valid, but
| honestly the more immediate version of the same problem is
| that someone can just take your repo, feed it to an agent,
| and have their own fork in an afternoon.
|
| The moat used to be effort, nobody wants to rewrite this
| from scratch (especially when it's free). What's left is
| actually understanding why the thing works the way it does.
| Not sure that's enough to sustain open source long-term? I
| guess we all have to get used to it?
| freedomben wrote:
| > _but honestly the more immediate version of the same
| problem is that someone can just take your repo, feed it
| to an agent, and have their own fork in an afternoon._
|
| Indeed, I've got a few applications I've built or
| contributed too that are (A)?GPL, and for those I do
| worry about this AI washing technique. For libraries that
| are MIT or permissive anyway, I don't really care. (I
| default to *GPL for applications, MIT/Apache/etc for
| libraries)
| freedomben wrote:
| For sure, that's legit too. I've had to grapple with that
| feeling personally. I didn't get to a great place, other
| than hoping that AI is democratized enough that it can
| benefit humanity. When I introspected deep enough, I
| realized I contributed to open source for two reasons,
| nearly equally:
|
| 1. To benefit myself with features/projects
|
| 2. To benefit others with my work
|
| 1 by itself would mean no bothering with PR, modifications,
| etc. It's way easier to hoard your changes than to go
| through the effort getting them merged upstream. 2 by
| itself isn't enough motivation to spend the effort getting
| up to speed on the codebase, testing, etc. Together though,
| it's powerful motivation for me.
|
| I have to remind myself that both things are a net positive
| with AI training on my stuff. It's certainly not all pros
| (there's a lot of cons with AI too), but on the whole I
| think we're headed for a good destination, assuming open
| models continue to progress. If it ends up with winner-
| takes-all Anthropic or OpenAI, then that changes my
| calculus and will probably really piss me off. Luckily I've
| gotten positive value back from those companies, even
| considering having to pay for it.
| skeledrew wrote:
| > where any AI must be AI slop, and no AI is the only
| solution
|
| Yep, also a huge factor. Why publish something you built with
| an AI assistant if you know it's going to be immediately
| dunked on not because the quality may be questionable, but
| because someone sees an em-dash, or an AI coauthor, and
| immediately goes on a warpath? Heck I commented[0] on the
| attitude just a few hours ago. I find it really irritating.
|
| [0] https://github.com/duriantaco/fyn/issues/4#issuecomment-4
| 117...
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >where any AI must be AI slop, and no AI is the only
| solution.
|
| AI as of now is like ads. Ads as a concept are not evil. But
| what it's done to everyday life is evil enough that I
| wouldn't flinch at them being banned/highly regulated one day
| (well, not much. The economic fallout would be massive, but
| my QoL would go way up).
|
| That's how I feel here. And looking at the PRs some popular
| repos have to deal with, we're well into the "shove this pop
| up ad with a tiny close button you can't reach easily" stage
| of AI.
| chromacity wrote:
| > 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.
|
| The premise is that AI has already fundamentally changed the
| nature of software engineering. Not some specific, personal use
| case, but that everything has changed and that if you're not
| embracing these tools, you'll perish. In light of this, I don't
| think your rebuttal works. We should be seeing evidence of
| meaningful AI contributions all over the place.
| edgarvaldes wrote:
| Hard agree. A 10x productivity increase would bleed outside
| the personal or internal use cases, even without effort.
| olup wrote:
| A bit tangential to the article themes, but I feel in some
| workplaces that engineering velocity has gone up while product
| cycles and agile processes have stayed the same. People end up
| churning tickets faster and working less, while general
| productivity has not changed.
|
| Of course these are specific workplaces designed around moving
| tickets on a board, not high-agentic, fast-moving startups or
| independent projects--but they might represent a lot of the
| developer workforce.
|
| I also know this is not everyone's experience and probably a rare
| favorable outcome of productivity gain captured by a worker that
| is not and won't stay the norm.
| bsima wrote:
| It's silly to think that 'AI apps' must look like the enterprise,
| centrally-managed SaaS that we are used to. My AI apps are all
| bespoke, tailored to my exact needs, accessed only via my VPN.
| They would not be useful to anyone else, so why would I make them
| public?
| shevy-java wrote:
| I am still waiting for them.
| karmakurtisaani wrote:
| As we haven't seen new operating systems or web browsers and the
| like, I'm guessing the reason is the same the corporation execs
| still have to find out: producing the code is just a small part
| of it. The big part is iterating bug fixes, compatibility,
| maintenance etc.
| vicchenai wrote:
| the pypi metric feels off. most of the ai stuff i see shipping is
| either internal tooling that never hits pypi, or its built on top
| of existing packages (langchain, openai sdk, etc) rather than
| creating new ones.
|
| the real growth is in apps that use ai as a feature, not ai-first
| packages. like every saas just quietly added an llm call
| somewhere in their stack. thats hard to measure from dependency
| graphs.
| kartikarti wrote:
| i think it's hard to measure this, it's kinda like measuring
| productivity through number of commits / PRs
| wrs wrote:
| Title asks where the AI _apps_ are. Analysis looks at Python
| _libraries_. Kind of a non-sequitur, no?
| dev_tools_lab wrote:
| One pattern I've noticed: the apps that work best combine
| multiple models rather than relying on one. Single-model outputs
| have too much variance for production use cases.
| rupertsworld wrote:
| One problem with a lot of the skepticism around AI produced
| software is that it focuses on _existing_ ways of packaging and
| delivering software. PyPi packages are one example, shipping
| "apps" another.
|
| While it's interesting to see that in open source software the
| increase is not dramatic, this ignores however many people are
| now gen-coding software they will never publish just for them, or
| which winds up on hosting platforms like Replit.
| happyopossum wrote:
| I'm not a developer by trade. I've screwed around with some
| programming classes when I was in school, and have written some
| widely used but highly specific scripts related to my work, but
| I've never been a capital-D developer.
|
| In the last few months, Gemini (and I) have written for highly
| personal, very niche apps that are perfect for my needs, but I
| would never dream of releasing. Things like cataloguing and
| searching my departed mom's recipe cards, or a text message based
| budget tracker for my wife and I to share.
|
| These things would never be released or available as of source or
| commercial applications in the way that I wanted them, and it
| took me less time to have them built with AI then it would have
| taken me to Research existing alternatives and adapt my
| workflow/use case to fit whatever I found.
|
| So yeah, there are more apps but I would venture to say you'll
| never see most of them...
| nickserv wrote:
| There has been a 2x and sometimes even 10x in PR _size_ ,
| measured in LoC...
|
| But that's not really what we were promised.
| kwar13 wrote:
| Apparently everyone has evidence to the complete contrary
|
| "THE APPLE APP STORE IS DROWNING IN AI SLOP"
| https://x.com/shiri_shh/status/2036307020396241228
| satiated_grue wrote:
| If one were to release an AI app - what would be an appropriate
| license? Genuine question.
| a3w wrote:
| Jury is still out on that.
| bilater wrote:
| I'd take this info with a grain of salt. You have to understand
| how new some of these developments are. It's only been a couple
| of months since we hit the opus 4.5+ threshold. I created 4 react
| packages for kicks in a weekend:
| https://www.hackyexperiments.com/blog/shipping-react-librari...
| heliumtera wrote:
| The thing to shill now is agents.
|
| So they are all producing products to produce products. My guess
| is 50% of token usage globally is to produce mediocre articles on
| "how I use Claude code to tell HN how I use Claude code".
| vivzkestrel wrote:
| - this would be much more insightful if the author takes the
| number of submissions to producthunt and the top 10 saas
| directories as the measure to see how many new apps were created
| pre AI and post AI era
|
| - product hunt or app sumo is something i believe everyone tries
| to get a submission to which would truly measure how many new
| apps are we having per month these days
| calebpeterson wrote:
| Even taking the "we're all 100x more efficient at writing code"
| argument at face value... there's still all of the product/market
| fit, marketing, sales, etc "schlep" which is very much non-
| trivial.
|
| Are there any agentic sales and marketing offerings?
|
| Because being able to reliably hand off that part of the value
| chain to an agent would close a real gap. (Not sure this can be
| done in reality)
| collinmanderson wrote:
| There are more apps, fewer libraries.
|
| You don't need as many libraries when functionality can be vibe-
| coded.
|
| You don't need help from the open source community when you have
| an AI agent.
|
| The apps are probably mostly websites and native apps, not
| necessarily published to PyPI.
|
| "Show HN" has banned vibe-coded apps because there's been so
| many.
| mentalgear wrote:
| > So what?
|
| As mentioned in a comment here:
|
| > 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
|
| Looks like most LLM generated code is used by amateurs/slop
| coders to generate end-user apps they hope to sell - these user
| profiles are not the type of people who contribute to the
| data/code commons. Hence there's no uptick in libs. So basically
| a measurement issue.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| Coding assistants/agents/claws whatever the current trend is are
| over-hyped but also quite useful in good hands.
|
| But the mistake is to expect a huge productivity boost.
|
| This is highly related to Amdahl's law, also The Mythical Man-
| Month.
|
| Some tasks can be accomplished so fast that it seems magical, but
| the entire process is still very serial, architecture design and
| debug are pretty weak on the AI side.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| My take is you are missing out on a barrage of "Shadow AI" and
| bespoke LoB and B2B software (By "Shadow AI" I mean the
| (unsanctioned) use of GenAI in Shadow IT, traditionally dominated
| by Excel and VBA).
|
| All of the above are _huge_ software markets outside of the
| typical Silicon Valley bubble.
| QuantumNoodle wrote:
| Internally, we've created such good debugging tools that can
| aggregate a lot from a lot of sources. We've yet to address the
| quality of vibecoded critical applications so they aren't merged,
| but one off tools for incall,alert debugging and internal
| workflows has skyrocketed.
| lhl wrote:
| Like others have mentioned, I think the premise of looking at the
| most popular few projects (pypi.org currently lists 771,120
| projects) on pypi as any sort of proxy for AI coding is terribly
| misguided/unrepresentative and that almost no one is going to be
| packaging up their vibe-coded projects for distribution on pypi.
|
| That being said, I've personally put 3 up recently (more than
| I've published in total). I'm sure they have close to zero
| downloads (why would they? they're brand new, solve my own
| problems, I'm not interested in marketing them or supporting
| them, they're just shared because they might be useful to others)
| so they wouldn't show up in their review. 2 of these are pretty
| meaty projects that would have taken weeks if not months of work
| but instead have been largely just built over a weekend or a few
| days. I'd say it's not just the speed, but that w/o the lowered
| effort, these projects just wouldn't ever have crossed the
| effort/need bar of ever being started.
|
| I've probably coded 50-100X more AI-assisted code that will never
| go to pypi, even as someone that has released pypi packages
| before (which already puts me in a tiny minority of programmers,
| much less regular people that would even think about uploading a
| pypi project).
|
| For those interested in the scope of the recent projects:
|
| https://pypi.org/project/realitycheck/ - first pypi: Jan 21 - 57K
| SLoC - "weekend" project that kept growing. It's a framework that
| leverages agentic coding tools like Codex/Claude Code to do
| rigorous, systematic analysis of claims, sources, predictions,
| and argument chains.It has 400+ tests, and does basically
| everything I want it to do now. The repo has 20 stars and I'd
| estimate only a handful of people are using it.
|
| https://pypi.org/project/tweetxvault/ - first pypi: Mar 16 - 29K
| SLoC - another weekend project (followup on a second weekend).
| This project is a tool for archiving your Twitter/X bookmarks,
| likes, and tweets into a local db, with support for importing
| from archives and letting you search through them. I actually
| found 3 or 4 other AI-coded projects that didn't do _quite_ what
| I wanted so it I built my own. This repo has 4 stars, although a
| friend submitted a PR and mentioned it solved exactly their
| problem and saved them from having to build it themselves, so
| that was nice and justifies publishing for me.
|
| https://pypi.org/project/batterylog/ - first pypi: Mar 22 - 857
| SLoC - this project is actually something I wrote (and have been
| using daily) 3-4 years ago, but never bothered to properly
| package up - it tracks how much battery is drained by your laptop
| when asleep and it's basically the bare minimum script/installer
| to be useful. I never bothered to package it up b/c quite
| frankly, manual pypi releases are enough of a PITA to not bother,
| but LLMs now basically make it a matter of saying "cut a
| release," so when I wanted to add a new feature, I packaged it up
| as well, which I would never have done this otherwise. This repo
| has 42 stars and a few forks, although probably 0 downloads from
| pypi.
|
| (I've spent the past couple years heavily using AI-assisted
| workflows, and only in the past few months (post Opus 4.6,
| GPT-5.2) would I have even considered AI tools reliable enough to
| consider trusting them to push new packages to pypi.)
| relation_al wrote:
| Well, it's kind of like asking about streaming media. If anyone
| can have their own "tv show" or anyone can be their own "music
| producer" then the ratios are so radically altered vis-a-vis
| content/attention calculation. The question has never been "more
| means more success stories" because musicians make $.000001 per
| stream, so even if they stream millions of songs ... you get the
| point. So surely there are good apps, but the accompanying deluge
| makes them seem less significant.
| tunesmith wrote:
| Isn't most of the positive impact not going to be "new projects"
| but the relative strength of the ideas that make it into the
| codebase? Which is almost impossible to measure. You know, the
| bigger ideas that were put off before and are now more tractable.
| soerxpso wrote:
| This is just counting pypi packages. Why would I go to the effort
| of publishing a library or cli tool that took me ten minutes to
| create? Especially in an environment where open source
| contributions from strangers are useless. If anything I'd expect
| useful AI to reduce the number of new pypi packages.
| bdcravens wrote:
| I don't think people are using AI to create new dependencies that
| they're then submitting to open source package managers (which is
| what this shows)
|
| This is more useful for discussing what kind of projects AI is
| being used for than whether it's being used.
| Plutarco_ink wrote:
| The article measures the wrong thing. PyPI package creation is a
| terrible proxy for AI-assisted software output because packages
| are published for reuse by others, which requires documentation,
| API design, and maintenance commitments that AI doesn't help with
| much.
|
| The real output is happening in private repos, internal tools,
| and single-purpose apps that never get published anywhere. I've
| been building a writing app as a side project. AI got me from
| zero to a working PWA with offline support, Stripe integration,
| and 56 SEO landing pages in about 6 weeks of part-time work. Pre-
| AI that's easily a 6-month project for one person.
|
| But I'm never going to publish it as a PyPI package. It's a
| deployed web app. The productivity gain is real, it just doesn't
| show up in the datasets this article is looking at.
|
| The iOS App Store submission data (24% increase) that someone
| linked in the comments is a much better signal. That's where the
| output is actually landing.
| droidjj wrote:
| Serious question: Did you use AI to write this or do you just
| sound like an LLM after having used them so much?
| Vanshfin wrote:
| 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/
| avadodin wrote:
| What you say?
|
| Not just an app but someone set up us the bomb!?
| micimize wrote:
| Thoughts: 1. Some hype-types may have been effusive about AI-
| assisted coding since ChatGPT, but IMO the commonly agreed
| paradigm shift was claude code, and especially 4.5, very very
| recent. 2. Anchoring biases in reaction to hype is still letting
| one's perspective be defined by hype. Yes the cursor post is a
| joke, but leading with that is a strawman. This article does not
| aim to take it's subject seriously, IMO. 3. While I agree the
| hype is currently at comical levels, the utility of the current
| LLMs is obvious, and reasons for "skilled" usage not being easily
| quantifiable are also obvious.
|
| IE, using agents to iterate through many possible approaches,
| spike out migrations, etc might save a project a year of
| misadventures, re-designs, etc, but that productivity gain
| _subtracts_ the intermediate versions that _didn't_ end up being
| shipped.
|
| As others have mentioned, I think yak-shaving is now way more
| automated. IE, If I want to take a new terminal for a spin, throw
| together a devtool to help me think about a specific problem
| better, etc, I can do it with very low friction. So "personal"
| productivity is way higher.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > the utility of the current LLMs is obvious
|
| In that they obviously have no real utility, sure. There hasn't
| been a paradigm shift, they still suck at programming, and
| anyone trying to tell you otherwise almost certainly has
| something to sell you.
| micimize wrote:
| Based on my direct experience I find this remaining
| commonality of this opinion surprising, at least with regards
| to opus in claude code. I'm not as extreme as some who think
| we can/should avoid touching code or w/e but especially in
| exploratory contexts and debugging I find them extremely
| useful.
|
| Maybe I should have said "obvious to me," but I guess I just
| struggle to see how a serious crack at using modern opus in
| claude code doesn't make it obvious at this point.
|
| I'd really recommend trying the "spike out a self-contained
| minimal version of this rearchitecture/migration and
| troubleshoot it iteratively until it works, then make a
| report on findings" use-case for anyone that hasn't had luck
| with them thus far and is serious about trying to reach
| conclusions based on direct experience.
| cossray wrote:
| I feel they're largely here, on this platform. Hacker News,
| currently, could be renamed to AI News, without any loss of
| generality.
| devmor wrote:
| My experience with AI-driven and AI-assisted development so far
| is that it has actually enhanced my workflow despite how much I
| dislike it.
|
| With a caveat.
|
| If you were to compare my workflow to a decade ago, you wouldn't
| see much difference other than my natural skill growth.
|
| The rub is that the tools, communities and services I learned to
| rely on over my career as a developer have been slowly getting
| worse and worse, and I have found that I can leverage AI tools to
| make up for where those resources now fall short.
| vanyaland wrote:
| I think part of the mismatch is that people are still looking for
| "more apps" as the output metric.
|
| A lot of the real value shows up as workflow compression instead.
| Internal tools, one-off automations, bespoke research flows,
| coding helpers, things that would never have justified becoming a
| product in the first place.
| aaroninsf wrote:
| Among the various ways this analysis is flawed,
|
| two that are drawn from my own experience are:
|
| - meaningful software still takes meaningful time to develop
|
| - not all software is packaged for everyone
|
| I've seen a lot of examples shared of software becoming narrow-
| cast, and/or ephemeral.
|
| That that doesn't show up in library production or even app store
| submissions is not interesting.
|
| I'm working on a large project that I could never have undertaken
| prior to contemporary assistance. I anticipate it will be months
| before I have something "shippable." But that's because it's a
| large project, not a one shot.
|
| I was musing that this weekend: when do we see the first crop of
| _serious_ and novel projects shipping, which could not have been
| done before (at least, by individual devs)... but which still
| took serious time.
|
| Could be a while yet.
| czhu12 wrote:
| Is this the best way to measure this? I think the biggest
| adopters of AI coding has been companies who are building
| features on existing apps, not building new apps entirely.
| Wouldn't it make more sense looking at how quickly teams are able
| to build and ship within companies?
|
| It seems like all tech executives are saying they are seeing big
| increases in productivity among engineering teams. Of course
| everyone says they're just [hyping, excusing layoffs, overhired
| in 2020, etc], but this would be the most relevant metric to look
| at I think.
| lucas_the_human wrote:
| There are actually a lot of new startups coming out with agentic
| workflows, and they're probably moving fast. But to your point,
| there's probably still a lot of friction that keeps the average
| person/dev from launching new companies.
| hknceykbx wrote:
| How do packages measure anything? This is a biased sample.
| Average user of AI/developer would not ever in their life make a
| package or any open source contribution. They would probably work
| on the proprietary software. Not to say that conclusions are
| wrong though.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| I am worried for people using write ups like this as a huge, much
| appreciated dose of copium.
|
| Try it out and don't stop trying. If something improves at this
| rate, even if you think it's not there right now, don't assume it
| is going to stop. Be honest about the things we were always
| obviously bad at, that the ai has been getting quickly better at,
| and assume that it will continue getting better. If this were
| true, what would that mean for you?
| erelong wrote:
| I think this is a great question to ask and maybe I need my own
| blog to post about these things as I might reply with a big
| comment
|
| Making Unpublished Software for Themselves
|
| One issue is, I think maybe a lot of people are making software
| for themselves and not publishing it - at least I find myself
| doing this a lot. So there's still "more software produced than
| before", but it's unpublished
|
| LOC a Good Measure?
|
| Another question is like Lines of Code, about if we best measure
| AI productivity by new packages that exist. AI might make certain
| packages obsolete and there may be higher quality, but less,
| contributions made to existing packages as a result. So actually
| less packages might mean more productivity (although, generally
| we seem to think it's the opposite, conventionally speaking)
|
| Optimizing The Unnoticeable
|
| Another issue that comes up is maybe AI optimizes unnoticeable
| things: AI may indeed make certain things go 100x faster or
| better. But say a website goes from loading in 1 second to
| 1/100th of a second... it's a real 100x gain, but in practice
| doesn't seem to be experienced as a whole lot bigger of a gain.
| It doesn't translate in to more tangible goods being produced.
| People might just load 100 pages in the same amount of time,
| which eats up the 100x gain anyway (!).
|
| Bottleneck of Imagination
|
| I think also this exposes a bottleneck of imagination: what do we
| want people to be building with AI? People may not be building
| things, because we need more creative people to be dreaming up
| things to build. AI is only fed existing creative solutions and,
| while it does seem to mix that together to generate new ideas,
| still the people reading the outputs are only so creative. I've
| thought standard projects would be 1) creating open source
| alternatives to existing proprietary software, 2) writing new
| software for old hardware (like "jailbreaking" but doesn't have
| to be?) to make it run new software so that it can be used for
| something other than be e-waste. 3) Reverse engineering a bunch
| of designs so you can implement some new design on them, where
| open source code doesn't exist and we don't know how they
| function (maybe kind of like #1). So like there is maybe a need
| for a very "low tech" creation of spaces where people are just
| regularly swapping ideas on building things they can only build
| themselves so much, to either get the attention of more capable
| individuals or to build up teams.
|
| Time Lag to Adapt
|
| Also, people may still be getting adjusted to using AI stuff. One
| other post detailed that the majority of the planet does not use
| AI, and an even smaller subset pays for subscriptions. So there's
| still a big lag in society of adoption, and of adopters knowing
| how to use the tools. So I think people might really experience
| optimizing something at 100x, but they may not know how to
| leverage that to publish it to optimize things for everyone else
| at 100x amount, yet.
|
| Social Media Breakdown?
|
| Another problem is, I have made stuff I'd like to share but...
| social media is already over-run with over-regulation and bots.
| So where do I publish new things? Even on HN, there was that post
| about how negative the posters can be, who have said very
| critical things about projects that ended up being very
| successful. So I wonder if this also fuels people just quietly
| creating more stuff for their own needs.
|
| Has GDP Gone Up or Time Been Saved?
|
| Do other measures of productivity exist? GDP appears to have
| probably only gone up a bit. But again, could people be having
| gains that don't translate to GDP gains? People do seem to post
| about saving time with AI but... the malicious thing about
| technology is that, when people save 10 hours from one tool, they
| usually just end up spending that working on something else. So
| unless we're careful, technology for some people doesn't save
| them much time at all (in fact, a few people have posted about
| being addicted to AI and working even more with it than before
| AI!).
|
| Are There Only So Many "10x Programmers"?
|
| Another issue is, maybe there are only a minority of people who
| get "10x" gains from AI; at the same time, "lesser" devs (like
| juniors?) have apparently been displaced by AI with some layoffs
| and hiring freezes.
|
| Conclusion
|
| I guess we are trying to account for real gains and "100x
| experiences" people have, with a seeming lack of tangible output.
| I don't think these things are necessarily at odds with each
| other for some of the aforementioned reasons written above. I
| imagine maybe in 5 years we'll see more clearly if there is some
| noticeable impact or not, and... not to be a doomer / pessimist,
| but we may have some very negative experience from AI development
| that seems to negate the gains that we'll have to account for,
| too.
| bredren wrote:
| The models are not well trained on bringing products to market.
|
| And even "product engineers" often do not have experience going
| from zero to post sales support on a saas on their own.
|
| It is a skill set of its own to make product decisions and not
| only release but stick with it after the thing is not immediately
| successful.
|
| The ability to get some other idea going quickly with AI actually
| works against the habits needed to tough through the valley(s).
| butz wrote:
| Please, be patient. Wrangling AI agents, writing and rewriting
| prompts, waiting for the start of another month because tokens
| ran out - there are so many challenges here, you cannot expect
| everyone to ship an app a day or something.
| INTPenis wrote:
| I have published 4 open source projects thanks to the
| productivity boost from AI. No apps though, just things I needed
| in my line of work.
|
| But I have been absolutely flooded with trailers for new and
| upcoming indie games. And at least one indie developer has
| admitted that certain parts of their game had used the aide of
| AI.
|
| I also noticed sometimes when I think of writing something, I ask
| AI first if it exists, and AI throws up some link and when I
| check the link it says "made with <some AI>".
|
| So I'm not sure what author is trying to say here but I
| definitely feel like I am noticing a rise in software output due
| to AI.
|
| But with that said, I also am noticing the burden of taking care
| of those open source projects. Sometimes it feels like I took on
| a 2nd job.
|
| I think a lot of software is being produced with AI and going
| unnoticed, they don't all end up on the front page of HN for
| harassing developers.
| daemonk wrote:
| I AI coded an entire platform for my work. It works great for me.
| I also recognize that this is not something I want to make into a
| commercial product because it was so easy that there's just no
| value.
|
| I think this might be more of an comment on software as a
| business than AI not coding good apps.
| epolanski wrote:
| It's simple. AI speeds the 80% of development that was never the
| blocker.
|
| Arguably makes the remaining 20% even harder to handle.
|
| I'm sure that AI can be a huge boost to great, mature developers.
| Which are insanely rare in an industry that has consistently
| promoted brainless ivy league coders farming algo quizzes for
| months.
|
| But those with a huge sensibility and experience can definitely
| be enabled to produce more.
|
| But the 20% is still there and again, it's easy to make it way
| harder because you're less intimate with the brittle 80%.
| mlsu wrote:
| We have great software now!
|
| YoloSwag (13 commits)
|
| [rocketship rocketship rocketship]
|
| YoloSwag is a 1:1 implementation of pyTorch, written in RUST
| [crab emoji]
|
| - [hand pointing emoji] YoloSwag is Memory Safe due to being
| Written in Rust
|
| - [green leaf emoji] YoloSwag uses 80% less CPU cycles due to
| being written in Rust
|
| - [clipboard emoji] [engineer emoji] YoloSwag is 1:1 API
| compatible with pyTorch with complete ops specification
| conformance. All ops are supported.
|
| - [recycle emoji] YoloSwag is drop-in ready replacement for
| Pytorch
|
| - [racecar emoji] YoloSwag speeds up your training workflows by
| over 300%
|
| Then you git clone yoloswag and it crashes immediately and
| doesn't even run. And you look at the test suite and every test
| just creates its own mocks to pass. And then you look at the code
| and it's weird frankenstein implementation, half of it is using
| rust bindings for pytorch and the other half is random APIs that
| are named similarly but not identical.
|
| Then you look at the committer and the description on his profile
| says "imminentize AGI.", he launched 3 crypto tokens in 2020, he
| links an X profile (serial experiments lain avatar) where he's
| posting 100x a day about how "it's over" for software devs and
| how he "became a domain expert in quantum computing in 6 weeks."
| mpalmer wrote:
| Personally the only way I see to "imminentize" any sort of
| healthy software culture is to categorically dismiss people who
| make this kind of stuff, all these temporarily embarrassed
| CEOs, in every public channel available. Shut them out.
|
| They can only be interested in one thing, self-advancement. No
| other explanation works! If they were interested in self-
| improvement, they might try reading or writing something
| themselves! Wouldn't it show if they had?
|
| I recognize that models are getting better, but consider: if
| you _already_ don 't understand how programming or LLMs work,
| and you use LLMs precisely to avoid knowing how to do things,
| or how they work (the "CEO" mode), each incremental improvement
| will impress you more than it impresses others. There's no AI
| exception to Dunning-Kruger.
|
| I recognize that "this" is a difficult thing to pin down in
| real time. But in the end we know it when we see it, and it has
| the fascinating and useful quality of not really being
| explainable by anything else.
|
| Unless and until the culture gets to a place where no one would
| risk embarrassing themselves by doing something like this,
| we're stuck with it.
| gitpusher wrote:
| > it crashes immediately and doesn't even run.
|
| Technically, that's as "Memory Safe" as you can get!
| fritzo wrote:
| They're private, that's the beauty. Code is so cheap now, we can
| ween ourselves off massive dependency chains.
|
| 200 years ago text was much more expensive, and more people
| memorized sayings and poems and quotations. Now text is cheap,
| and we rarely quote.
| mjaquilina wrote:
| I'm not convinced that PyPI is the right metric to use to answer
| this question. Some (admittedly anecdotal) observations:
|
| 1) I'm a former SWE in a business role at a small-market
| publishing company. I've used Claude Code to automate boring
| processes that previously consumed weeks of our ops and finance
| teams' time per year. These aren't technically advanced, but
| previously would have required in-house dev talent that would not
| have been within reach of small businesses. I wouldn't have had
| the time to code these things on my own, but with AI assistance
| the time investment is greatly reduced (and mostly focused on
| QA). The only needle moved here is on a private Github repo, but
| it's real shipped code with small but direct impact.
|
| 2) I used to often find myself writing simple Perl wrappers to
| various APIs for personal or work use. I'd submit these to CPAN
| (Perl's equivalent to PyPI) in case anyone else could use them to
| save the 30-60 minutes of work involved. These days I don't
| bother -- most AI tools can build these in a matter of seconds;
| publishing them to CPAN or even Github now feels like unnecessary
| cruft, especially when they're likely to go without active
| maintenance. So, my LOC published to public repos is down, even
| though the amount of software produced is the same. It's just
| that some of that software has become less useful to the world
| writ large.
|
| 3) The code that's possible to ship quickly with pure AI (vibe
| coding) is by definition not the kind of reusable code you'd want
| to distribute on PyPI. So, I'd expect that any productivity
| impact from AI on OSS that's designed to be reusable would be
| come very slowly, versus "hockey stick" impact.
| nizsle wrote:
| What if this is just telling us that much of the coding being
| done in the world, or knowledge work in general, is just busy
| work? Just because you double the capacity of knowledge workers
| doesn't mean you double the amount of useful output. Maybe we
| have never been limited by our capacity to produce, but by our
| ability to come up with good ideas and socially coordinate
| ourselves around the best ones.
| SpaceNoodled wrote:
| That would imply that the majority of this AI hype is just
| additional bluster, and likely wouldn't improve anything in any
| significant manner.
| fcatalan wrote:
| Making complete coherent products is as hard as ever, or even
| harder if you intend to trade robustness for max agentic
| velocity.
|
| What I do very successfully is low stakes stuff for work (easy
| automations, small QoL improvements for our tooling, a drive-by
| small Jira plugin)
|
| And then I do a lot of crazy exploring, or hyper-personal just
| for myself stuff that can only exist because I can now spawn and
| abandon it in a couple days instead of weeks or months.
| Andrei_dev wrote:
| They exist. Go look at any "I built this in a weekend with
| Cursor" post -- there are hundreds. The problem is most of them
| ship broken and stay broken. Auth that doesn't actually check
| anything, API keys in the frontend, falls over with 5 concurrent
| users.
|
| The quantity is there. Nobody's asking "does this thing actually
| work" before hitting deploy. That's the real gap.
| keeda wrote:
| Other comments have pointed out that packages on PyPi might not
| be the best metric and posted other countering evidence like
| spikes in GitHub contributions or mobile app submissions or even
| mobile app revenue. However I think open source package numbers
| are still worth watching as an _inverse_ measure of AI adoption.
|
| That is, I expect the numbers (at least the frequency of
| downloads, if not the number of new packages) to go _down_ over
| time as AI makes generating functionality easier than hunting
| down and adding a dependency.
|
| The number of new packages could still go up as people may still
| open-source their generated code, for street cred if not actual
| utility. But it's not clear how much of those incentives apply if
| the code is not very generally useful and the effort put into is
| minimal.
| apf6 wrote:
| If you look at IOS app store submissions then there is a pretty
| obvious increase that lines up with recent AI tooling (especially
| the release of Claude Code):
| https://www.reddit.com/r/iOSProgramming/comments/1qlpm2l/cha...
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