Before AI assistance this simply wasn't in my possibility space. Not because I couldn't think through the problems, but because the gap between "I know what I want to build" and "I can actually build it" required years of skill acquisition I didn't have while raising my son and being a good husband (after some rough years ay).
The glut isn't visible yet because most of us aren't shipping to HN. We're shipping to our tiny audiences, our friends and family, our niche communities. The software exists ...it's just not venture-scale so nobody's writing about it.
I suppose if one is simultaneously ignorant when it comes to software and an expert at agentic workflow, then yeah sure, maybe--at the cost of how many tokens, though? But logically it seems that the former would preclude the latter.
Also, the "get it done in a weekend" seems to be a gross exaggeration.
Over the last couple of months I've seen a load of new "product launches" in my niche but when you look at them they're largely vibecoded and don't show deep understanding and sustainability, so it's pretty likely you'll never see them as successful businesses.
Looking at some of the related places like /r/sideproject/ there's a lot of releases and I'd be willing to suggest that most of them are using LLMs
There seems to be a lot of hype, and has been for years, but I’m not seeing it materialize as actual economic output. Surely by now there should be lots of businesses springing up to capture all of this value created by vibecoded software.
Whether that translates into more value for those larger corps is the trillion dollar question :) Writing code is a small part of the process of finding and shipping features that customers want, so it remains to be seen how much LLM tools translate it.
I think it's fairly widely accepted that from a financial standpoint we're in an AI/LLM bubble. There has been more investment than we're likely to see financial benefits, but it's impossible to predict to what degree (if you can predict that and the timing you can make a lot of money!!)
- CLI voice changer with cloned Overwatch voices on ElevenLabs.
- Brother P-Touch label maker using HTML/CSS. Their app is absolutely atrocious.
- Converted a FileMaker CRM into a Next.js/Supabase app.
- Dozens of drag-n-drop or 1-click/CLI tools. Think flattening a folder, a zip file.
- Dozens of Chrome Extensions and TamperMonkey user scripts. Think blocking ads with very targeted xpath.
But when I think about sharing them it feels like what's the point since anyone can make them themselves?
But I don't see it. Where is this glut of software?