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jopsen

Is gen ai app development really that important?

Does it make real apps? Or only prototypes and trash?

Do we need quantity or quality apps?

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I find it reasonably useful given these conditions:

1. I know what I want.

2. I don't know off the top of my head how to accomplish it.

3. However, I do know enough to tell whether what the AI generated works right.

So for me it covers cases like "I know databases and I know programming, but I don't know enough Python to do a DB query without looking for docs. Have Copilot generate some working sample code, and then I can pick things up from there".

I'm sure bigger things can be done but I think just that alone is extremely useful. Saves a bunch of time on googling, making it past all the ads, the requests to subscribe, the far too long introductions, etc. Sometimes all I want is 20 lines of sample code and nothing else, and AI seems to do very well at that without leaving the IDE.

Give OpenAI 25 years and they're going to be throwing up plenty of ads in our faces. Source: I remember using Google in 1999.

Momento mori to anything raising tens of billions of dollars from VCs and PE's. The UX is going to get much worse, surprisingly quickly.

They will just make it more subtle.

User: How do I do X?

AI: Well {FAANG} has this great product ...

AI: This is how you do X but doing Y which is just like X you can save $100 a month with {MAMAA}.

User: I just want to do X.

AI: It is too complicated for a single person to do X. Why not contact {BUSINESS} and they can do it for you because they specialize in X.

AI: Are you sure you don't want to save money with {MAMMA}. Here is a coupon to save even more.

LLMs already can be run on expensive consumer hardware (eg, a higher end Mac Studio), so I expect that to be quite temporary.

It’s not about running an LLM that serves/doesnt-serve up ads, it’s about making one by yourself so you know it won’t serve up ads.

I’m really not looking forward to the day when they start serving ads through LLMs. Hopefully local is solid enough by then to do most of the same stuff.

This is a good point and it reminds me of a link to an news article someone had shared some weeks earlier about how AI-generated literature in the form of ebooks is already flooding public libraries that subscribe to certain lending platforms. In a sense, it could be an advantage to have systems where it is so cumbersome to get LLMs to help you with generation so that people have to put at least a little bit of effort.

I recently saw a niche industry specific chatgpt wrapper. I don't think anyone is actually building anything of value with gen AI.

I did. I do.

I don't use it for everything, but it is a 2x-10x multiplier.

This is a pretty big range. Are you saying the overall multiplier for all of your work is somewhere between 2 and 10x, or that some tasks are 2x and others are 10x?

Looking at your profile page, do you use a local model then?

relevant username

It's not.

However, the fact that integrating these tools with any sort of Apple toolchain is a nightmare is still a problem. Because even if you don't care about AI slop coding, there's plenty of other things that developers are used to that become far more difficult when the only option[0] is proprietary dev tools with very strict hardware licensing requirements attached to it. This puts a very real cost on iOS development.

The only reason why developers put up with iOS now is because it has half the US mobile market, so brown-nosing Apple is mandatory for certain app classes. This doesn't make the cost go away, it just means it gets spread around[1], like how everyone has to pay credit card fees or mobile storefront fees even when they're paying with cash or buying straight from the developer. But when that market power isn't there, such as on macOS[2] or visionOS (lol), developers just straight-up don't bother supporting the platform because Apple is disrespectful to developers.

[0] I am aware of that one non-Apple iOS toolchain, it still requires you grab the SDK files yourself off a Real Mac™ which is a pain in the ass and not going to pass a corporate compliance department's muster.

[1] The exact mechanism that forces cost-sharing is called a most favored nation agreement. You are required to offer the best pricing to people paying your junk fee and cannot discount around the fee.

[2] People often blame Metal for macOS gaming being terrible. This is missing the point. iOS has the same core technology requirement; so all the middleware has to support Metal anyway. But if you don't need to be on mobile, you don't need to support any Apple platforms, which is preferable.

It saves a lot of time. You don't need it to generate whole app - just do some tedious bits.

It's basically electric screwdriver. You can open & close your laptop with old piece of iron. It even won't be worse in terms of quality, but if you want to fix 20 of them in a day it doesn't make sense.

It seems to me that ai apps are great for prototyping and getting to v0. Maintenance and continuous improvement seem to be more challenging.

Maybe... quantity? Of apps an features. The idea that software is some sort of art form that should be upheld is largely dev/designer centric instead of consumer-centric.

The only type of quality that matters to me is I can achieve what I want to do quickly, so sorry your fancy native components and animation actually get in the way of it.

> Is gen ai app development really that important?

Yes, it already has fundamentally shifted software development and it will continue to do so. We're just getting started. And it's not going away.

> Does it make real apps?

Yes, it can, in whole or in part.

> Or only prototypes and trash?

Not only, but yes, it creates plenty of that, too.

> Yes, it can, in whole or in part.

False.

I’ll admit you’re right when AI can generate a replacement for Explorer.exe for Windows 11 from a single prompt. We’re still a long way off from that.

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