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Comment by stavros | Hacker News Reader

So enabled, in fact, that there's almost no point in downloading an already-made app when you can just trivially tailor-make your own. The builder is massively enabled to quickly make anything they want, for an audience of exactly one.

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For tiny apps, sure. Some people are making larger projects that take weeks or months even with AI, that they never could have done otherwise.

Strongly disagree. You think you’d be able to prompt your way through creating an app with even half the feature set of Microsoft word, for example? I would be very time consuming to be able to think through how the app should work for many use cases you care about or didn’t think about. This time isn’t free. Now consider having to do this iteration across many apps you depend on. And, count on introducing regressions when your next prompt is incompatible with existing features. If you are not retired, this is a huge ongoing time sync.

You think you were able to prompt your way through creating hello world five years ago? Models improve and they need less and less guidance.

Combined with the fact that my use cases aren't your use cases, yes, it might be cheaper for me to make my own than to slog though software that wasn't built to serve my exact needs.

I’m not saying that there’s no need for specialty apps optimized for specific use cases or that you can’t use llms to create them more cheaply than last year. Only that the time to think through how the app should work and iterate on it is still significant in the way that it was last year if you were given the worlds best team of software engineers and they’d code to your product requirements. You’d only take this path for apps where the time tradeoff is worth it vs “off the shelf” apps.

The issue is that off the shelf apps were made at a time when it was too expensive to make apps. Everyone uses 2% of Word, Photoshop, etc, it's just a different 2% for each.

You only need to reimplement that 2% for yourself for it to be worth it, not the entire app.

How would you address user requests? Tailor-make a custom app for every user?

Cars are here and you're wondering how someone could possibly make a faster horse. You wouldn't address user requests. You aren't a business. The users all make their own apps for themselves.

Cars are here and we're all choking on our own atmospheric excrement, so...

Assuming AI lives up to the marketing: Why would someone use an app instead of promoting their agent to figure out how to get something done?

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