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Comment by deaux | Hacker News Reader

> There are no new and useful apps made with AI - apps that contribute to productivity of the economy as whole.

This is flat-earther level. It's like an environmentalist saying that nothing made with fossil fuels contributes to productivity. But they don't say that because they know it's not true.

There are so many valid gripes to have with LLMs, pick literally any of them. The idea that a single line of generated code can't possibly be productivity net positive is nonsensical. And if one line can, then so can many lines.

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> This is flat-earther level

Ok, so do you have a counterexample?

Can you give me any new (i.e. released in 2026) app that does something useful? There's just not many good app ideas left after all..

That has some strong "Everything that can be invented has been invented" vibes.

If that would be true then all these AIs are useless. Who needs them to built something that already exists?

"Everything that can be invented has been invented"

Ah my favorite, entirely made up quote.

Apocraphyly attributed to the U.S. Patent Office Commissioner in 1899.

I wrote my own note sharing app using free Claude. It's self-hosted, allows for non-simultaneous editing by multiple users (uses locks), it has no passwords on users, it shows all notes in a list. Very simple app, over all. It's one Go file and one HTML file. I like it, it's exactly what I want for sharing notes like shopping and todo lists with my partner.

The AI wouldn't have been able to do it by itself, but I wouldn't have been arsed to do it alone either.

Current, a brand-new handcoded RSS reader for i(Pad)OS/macOS is one of the best apps I've ever used. Seriously. I gladly purchased it and use it every day now (with Feedbin as the backend).

Here's mine. It's not big or important (at all!) but I think it is a perfectly valid app that might be useful to some people. It's entirely vibe-coded including code, art and sounds. Only the idea was mine.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/kaien/id6759458971

This is horrible. Children of that age should not be glued to a computer screen. If handing your kids over to the care of a bot is your idea of parenthood, I'm sure glad I'm not your kid.

The exact point of the app is to be as un-sticky as possible. I deliberately used calm colours, slow transitions, and a simple gameplay routine with a limited shelflife, after seeing how other apps for kids were designed like fruit machines.

If you simply think that children should never be exposed to screens, then I can sympathise with that point of view, but I think it's better to introduce them in a thoughtful and limited way.

Your last sentence is unnecessarily overblown and inflammatory, and adds nothing useful to the discussion.

Yes and no [0]. There's no chance I'm the only one. And no, it's not a chatbot or automation tool or anything else that's "selling shovels", it's an end product. I've had multiple people reach out to me organically with how much it has helped them, reviews are very good and so on.

But really, you don't even need this counterexample because it's trivial. It's like a C fanatic saying "No useful software can be made using Python", and then asking for a counterexample. Take all useful small applications created. Here's one, Maccy [1]. There's zero reason every line of its code has to have been written by hand rather than prompted. Maybe some of it in fact was. It's a nifty little app, does its job well.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47477440

[1] https://maccy.app/

Are you saying Maccy was vibe-coded or that it was written in Python? I don't think either are true. I've definitely been using it (you're right, it's great!) since before vibe-coding was a thing. And looking at the GitHub it seems to be 100% in Swift.

> It's like a C fanatic saying "No useful software can be made using Python", and then asking for a counterexample

At which point you could provide them many, many counterexamples?

I like AI coding assistants as much as the next red-blooded SWE and find them incredibly useful and a genuine productivity booster, but I think the claims of 10/100/1000x productivity boosts are unsupported by evidence AFAICT. And I certainly know I'm not 10x as productive nor do any of my teammates who have embraced AI seem to be 10x more productive.

Just shown me a new killer app from the app store that is coded by AI and isn’t an AI app itself.

Seems like the rest of the whole AI business, the only things going to the top are the AI tools themselves but not the things they are supposed to built.

> Just shown me a new killer app from the app store that is coded by AI and isn’t an AI app itself.

Goalposts. Show me a new killer app in general. If you look at the App Store rankings it's led by the likes of TikTok. Don't think that's what you're looking for. The rest of it is dominated by marketing.

I swear Android user versions of people like you would correctly judge F-Droid apps as being great for productivity, great apps, yet they're the opposite of "going to the top".

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