Comment by runako | Hacker News Reader

Comment by runako | Hacker News Reader

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Whether that person is talking their book or not, there absolutely has been an app explosion. Github & the app stores have all reported as much over the last year.

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.

On the Home Assistant and Jellyfin reddits you'll see tons of vibecoded dashboards and plugins people are putting together - and those are just the ones people are sharing.

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.

The closest parallel in history I can think of is the proliferation of spreadsheets in the 1980s.

Yeah, this feels like the right comparison. AI, like Excel makes it much easier for people to build useful tools.

And like Excel, software people are gonna end up complaining about the quality and having to maintain these applications.

Yes. Though with Excel for most business users the choice was between

- 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.

> - 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.

Yes, exactly. And spreadsheets took the world by storm. Deservedly though.

Nowadays people (allegedly) buy a Mac Mini to run 'claw'. Back in the day, they bought a mac to run a spreadsheet.

I assume the new wave of apps are going to be maintained by LLMs. Maybe one day the LLMs are going to complain about the quality of the code written by previous inferior LLMs?

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