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.
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.
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.
Oh and sadly, llm’s are useless for the imaginative part too. Shucks eh.
I have a list of ideas a mile long that gets longer every day, and LLMs help me burn through that list significantly faster.
However, the older I get, the more distraught I get that most people I meet "IRL" are simply not sitting on a list of problems they simply lack time to solve. I have... a lot of emotions around this, but it seems to be the norm.
If someone doesn't see or experience problems and intuitively start working out how they would fix them if they only had time, the notion that they could pair program effectively ideas that they didn't previously have with an LLM is absurd.
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.
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.
Writing lines of code? Nope. If one can imagine… trust me, writing lines of code is trivial.
Most people have no imagination. So sure they can produce more stuff with llm’s but it’ll just be mostly garbage.
Perhaps they can produce some peculiar workflow that works ‘for them’. Sure. But I think about the money invested into the LLM-based projects and I highly doubt we are going to see any returns that justify the spend. What we are going to see is a felling on the profession of software engineers, since the pipe dream of AGI isn’t coming and imagination is scarce.
This sounds unnecessarily judgmental. Doing this is your hobby. Other people have different ways they want to spend their time. That doesn't make you superior, just different.
You're describing arrogant superiority, which is a real thing. It is definitely me sometimes! I can own that.
What I'm describing is an observation that despite my closely held progressive ideals, most people simply do not appear to see the world through the lens of "lots of things could be better and I see several ways to start fixing them".
I could say a lot of [probably shitty and judgmental] things about perhaps why this divide exists and the myth of the wisdom of crowds vs the genius inventor.
We can concede that all great ideas are inevitably built on the shoulders of previous great ideas by people who often go uncredited - bless the lab techs - but this thread is about the fact that most people aren't even trying to be near where the innovations happen.
1. People aren't creating new apps, but enhancing existing ones
2. Companies are less likely to pay for new offerings when the barrier to entry is lowered due to AI. They'll just vibe code what they need.
Maybe they will vibe code small scripts, but nobody was really paying for software to do that in the first place. Saas-pocalypse is just people vibe investing, not really understanding the value proposition of saas in the first place (no maintenance, no deployments, SLAs, no database backups, etc).
Me, I'm not just chasing markets; I want to build things that create joy.
The same was true of all this computer science stuff too. We built parsers, compilers, calculators, ftp and http, all cool stuff that just builds up our own ecosystem. Look how that turned out.
An ecosystem has to hit a critical mass of sophistication before it breaks out to the mainstream. It's not going to take very long for AI.
What's this?
Beyond that, marketing is harder than ever. Trying to release an app on Shopify app store without very strong marketing usually just means you drop it into a void. No one trusts any of the new apps, because they're inevitably vibecoded slop and there's no way to share your app on social media because all the grifting and shilling have totally poisoned that avenue.
Take a look at Show HN now - there are tons of releases of apps every day, but nothing gets any traction because of the hostile/weird marketing environment and general apathy. Recently, I saw the only app to graduate from New Show HN likely used a voting cartel to push it to the top. And take a guess at what that app did? It summarized HN's top stories with an AI. Something any dev could make in about 10 minutes by scraping/requesting the front page and passing it through an LLM with a "summarize this" prompt.
The entire "indiehacker" community is just devs shilling their apps to each other as well. The entire space is extremely toxic, basically. Good apps might get released but fall into a void because everyone is both grifting and extremely skeptical of each other.
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).