This just returns us to the question — if it makes all these things so easy and fast, where are the AI-generated apps? Where is the productivity boost?
People start announcing that they're using AI to do their job for them? Devs put "AI generated" banners all over their apps? No, because people are incentivised to hide their use of AI.
Businesses, on the other hand, announce headcount reductions due to AI and of course nobody believes them.
If you're talking about normal people using AI to build apps those apps are all over the place, but I'm not sure how you would expect to find them unless you're looking. It's not like we really need that many new apps right now, AI or not.
That's a silly argument. Someone could have made all of those clones before, but didn't. Why didn't they? Hint: it's not because it would have taken them longer without AI.
I feel like these anti-AI arguments are intentially being unrealistic. Just because I can use Nano Banana to create art does not mean I'm going to be the next Monet.
Yes it is. "How much will this cost us to build" is a key component of the build-vs-buy decision. If you build it yourself, you get something tailored to your needs; however, it also costs money to make & maintain.
If the cost of making & maintaining software went down, we'd see people choosing more frequently to build rather than buy. Are we seeing this? If not, then the price of producing reliable, production-ready software likely has not significantly diminished.
I see a lot of posts saying, "I vibe-coded this toy prototype in one week! Software is a commodity now," but I don't see any engineers saying, "here's how we vibe-coded this piece of production-quality software in one month, when it would have taken us a year to build it before." It seems to me like the only software whose production has been significantly accelerated is toy prototypes.
I assume it's a consequence of Amdahl's law:
> the overall performance improvement gained by optimizing a single part of a system is limited by the fraction of time that the improved part is actually used.
Toy prototypes proportionally contains a much higher amount of the type of rote greenfield scaffolding that agents are good at writing. The sticker problems of brownfield growth and robustification are absent.
I am very willing to believe that there are many obscure and low-quality apps being generated by AI. But this speaks to the fact that mere generation of code is not productive, that generating quality applications requires other forms of labor that is not presently satisfied by generative AI.
IMO you're not seeing this because nobody is coming up with good ideas because we're already saturated with apps. And apps are already releasing features faster than anyone wants them. How many app reviews have you read that say: "Was great before the last update". Development speed and ability isn't the thing holding us back from great software releases.
The link at the bottom of the post (https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware...) goes over this exactly.
> Businesses, on the other hand, announce headcount reductions due to AI and of course nobody believes them.
It’s an excuse. It’s the dream peddled by AI companies: automate intelligence so you can fire your human workers.
Look at the graphs in the post, then revisit claims about AI productivity.
The data doesn’t lie. AI peddlers do.
This reminds me of the people who said that we shouldn't raise the alarm when only a few hundred people in this country (the UK) got Covid. What's a few hundred people? A few weeks later, everyone knew somebody who did.
From my perspective, it's not the worst analogy. In both cases, some people were forecasting an exponential trend into the future and sounding an alarm, while most people seemed to be discounting the exponential effect. Covid's doubling time was ~3 days, whereas the AI capabilities doubling time seems to be about 7 months.
I think disagreement in threads like this often can trace back to a miscommunication about the state today / historically versus. Skeptics are usually saying: capabilities are not good _today_ (or worse: capabilities were not good six months ago when I last tested it. See: this OP which is pre-Opus 4.5). Capabilities forecasters are saying: given the trend, what will things be like in 2026-2027?
Re the Covid metaphor; that only works because Covid was the pandemic that did break out. It is arguably the first one in a century to do so. Most putative pandemics actually come to very little (see SARS1, various candidate pandemic flus, the mpox outbreak, various Ebola outbreaks, and so on). Not to say we shouldn’t be alarmed by them, of course, but “one thing really blew up, therefore all things will blow up” isn’t a reasonable thought process.
When it comes to "AI-generated apps" that work out of the box, I do not believe in them - I think for creating a "complete" app, the tools are not good enough (yet?). Context & co is required, esp. for larger apps and to connect the building blocks - I do not think there will be any remarkable apps coming out of such a process.
I see the AI tools just as a junior developer who will create datastructures, functions, etc. when I instruct it to do so: It attends in code creation & optimization, but not in "complete app architecture" (maybe as sparring partner)