The fact that we aren't seeing an app explosion (I think) is evidence that building applications people will pay for is significantly more complex than just prompting claude/codex/etc
I talked with a friend last week, who has never coded before in his life, who built an absolutely incredible fit-for-purpose app for his own job. He gave me a demo and it blew my mind. It will never go beyond his walls, and he will never buy SaaS that only kinda fits what he needs.
I see things like this happening. The proliferation isn't public because why sell it? Just build the thing to make your domain job easier and save thousands per month cancelling SaaS subs.
The ROI of AI is starting to show, but it isn't in terms of growth or selling new things - it's reducing spend across the board on software and tools.
I also have repeatedly experienced the phenomenon of nontechnical people having built custom software to run their businesses. A lawyer friend was first, sending me a link to his GitHub(!), where he has built a custom client intake/practice-management application to work as the firm works. He's not the only non-technical lawyer I know who has shared vibe coded apps with me.
I personally build many, many single-use apps than I ever would have before. Gnarly debugging sessions can be greatly simplified by inserting a custom piece of disposable tooling/etc. I am not a Mac programmer, but I now have custom Mac apps to solve problems that only I want solved. Do these count?
Honestly, I would be a little surprised if anyone posting on HN did not have some personal exposure to the explosion of apps.
I personally have been building a bunch of little personal apps for my home that aren't worth the effort of sharing - like a customized dashboard of the Trimet buses closest to my house. The cost to build the initial good-enough version was literally 5 minutes plus another 10 to test and deploy.
And like Excel, software people are gonna end up complaining about the quality and having to maintain these applications.
- lobby the IT department for at least a quarter, then wait at least one quarter, and at the end you get a buggy implementation of your idea that doesn't quite work
- or: spend a weekend hacking together a quick and ugly, buggy spreadsheet prototype of your idea that doesn't quite work.
I mean, based on my own experience with AI tools, this feels like the standard output.
Nowadays people (allegedly) buy a Mac Mini to run 'claw'. Back in the day, they bought a mac to run a spreadsheet.
Some of them have half baked financial models, but nobody will invest dollars backing a SaaS offering that could easily be replicated, or that could be made redundant tomorrow.
Matt Levine wrote in his newsletter Money Stuff of some investment fund that has their employees vibecode replacements for software of potential investment targets. I guess the theory is exactly what you say: if the internal employees can replace the target's software in a few hours, that's a big signal on whether to invest or not.
(I wouldn't quite say you shouldn't invest at all; but you have to argue that the moat is in eg the sales process or the existing customer base or network effects etc. Even before AI, people famously build Twitter clones over the weekend for fun.)
The trash I ask Claude to whip up for my weird edge cases is certainly increasing in reliability lately though.
A good friend of mine helped his mom keep track of Meals On Wheels (or a similar volunteer org) orders, deliveries, cancellations, etc. They were managing all of this via paper before.
I compiled a list of online recipes. Then I had an LLM typeset them for me into a printable PDF and build a companion website with links to the original recipes and complete ingredient lists for shipping. had the LLM encode links for the companion site into QR codes so the printed copy of the cookbook would bring me immediately to a shopping list, making trying a new recipe soooo much less daunting.
There are so many little things like this that you can make that just take too much effort to justify otherwise. I have other ideas for personal projects that I'll probably get to some day.
The distinction is that the games being made are garbage, and I mean worse than shovelware garbage. It's actively made things much harder as someone that fancies himself an indie game curator because you gotta dig through more and more games to find stuff with actual people behind it.
There's a crapload of new repos and Github and similar things. And a lot of it is "hobby utility" stuff like you'd find everywhere pre-mobile/pre-app-store but kinda dried up a bit with the browserfication+phone-ificiation of everything. Everything had to turn into an app + an online service.
Now, like OSS, freeware, and even most shareware in the 90s, most of these new projects have no path to VC-level interest.
The whole "basic business or business-process BUT ON THE INTERNET with a dash of social/web-2.0/personalization/crypto/fad-of-the-year" that recent VC firms have been pushing for the last 15+ years may be numbered.
But it's also unlikely that growing companies with big ambitions will want to base their business on vibe-coded free software for too long. It opens up too many unknowns/risks ("oh no, the disgruntled employee leveraged a misconfiguration in our in-house accounts payable system!") There will be a new middle ground model to be found.
I agree _iff_ vibecoding stayed roughly at today's level of competence.
If the models keep improving, perhaps you'll just tell them 'eh, and make sure to close all the security holes' and they'll do so.
On a commercial support forum I moderate we had to ban software announcements there were so many.
Hypothetical. Assume you can in fact point agents at a tool and say "replicate it. Make no mistakes". You then have software being instantly copy-able.
Assume these agents can then be pointed to a customer feedback board in perpetuity and they autonomously upgrade the software over time. They analyze usage patterns and behave like PMs figuring out what to prune and what to build. Then the maintenance part of the stack also goes to zero.
Over time, the highest margin competitiveness will go to the distributor of the tokens. Aka the AI model makers.
In a world like that (which the frontier labs claim is within a year or two of happening) it feels like it's only a matter of time before they opt to own the entire stack down to the consumer apps. Kind of like Amazon deciding they want to knock off products doing well and then favour their own product over the original seller.
My guess is that if the capability arrives the only reason the frontier labs don't move to own the entire stack immediately is because of optics. Boil the frog instead.
Also, what another commenter said that most of new apps are in-house, fully agree with that.
IMO this is one of the endgame for big ai LABS, they will allow and subsidize users to test and validate on their behalf and once there is a PMF they will step in.