I think it's going to remake our relationship with software because it completely alters the economics of creating one-off utilities, whereas software up until this point is generally regarded reuse as one of the highest virtues.
We're not going to see that impact for a while though. It'll take years. App stores will eventually become on-demand software and we'll view the marketplace analogy (where human developers offer their wares) as antiquated. I'm not totally confident in this prediction because requirements gathering is still a challenge, but for anything vaguely common, I think it'll be a workable model.
Mostly just focusing on positives in my life, not particularly bullish on the industry generating 6T/y.
In terms of personal life, I certainly find AI tools pretty useful especially given how awful Google is now, and coding tools are indispensable at work.
I think if there's a $6T market, it will come via integrations with the products and workflows of large companies, which is obviously also happening. Apparently the tech sector as a whole is worth $5 to $10T, so it's actually not inconceivable there's $6T worth of value there (especially since the value will not be constrained to the tech sector).
Which is the point of the post. Niche apps and use cases aren't with 6 trillion annually.
The blog post is here for anyone interested: https://golfcoursewiki.substack.com/p/i-spent-the-last-month...
Things are happening… and quickly, even if we are not quite to the point where VC’s are ready fund prototypes of robots to fold your laundry. Most of what’s happening is nerds finally building the project they’ve always dreamed of outside the traditional funding pathways.
To be fair the chances of the laundry folding robot is quite a bit higher then that of the hyperloop, but my point is that I believe it when I see it. And even when I see it, I will be skeptical that this AI lunacy we are in now is directly responsible for laundry folding robots, that is I think we could have laundry folding robots without those trillions of dollars of datacenter investments and training of LLMs.
But taking those bespoke contraptions to market is not something I want to out effort into. Especially when anyone can just clone it with AI.
The AI revolution might not show up so easily in GDP.
So where is the value? Have you built that one application you always wished existed but it wasn't available?
Yes, more than one and I use them a lot. Not being good at design and not liking front-end, among a few other things, work always stopped from from building them before,
> So you've unlocked tremendous value, but you're not earning any money?
No, I also don't make money from my coffee machine, but it provides value.
Now are there useful applications of these tools (not gods) that might justify a sizeable new tech market? Absolutely yes! Is that market ever be going to be worth trillions a year? LOL hell no.
The articles says "AI needs $6T in annual revenue."
That is definitely adding to the annual revenue figure.
For example I got a smart cat litter box and wanted to pair it to Home Assistant. There's an existing integration for the manufacturer, but it seems that although my box has the same model number, it's a different revision with completely different data point mappings - so the existing integration doesn't work. I pointed AI at it, and it figured it out, and it works.
Could I have done it? Sure, if I'd spent an entire afternoon doing it. I don't care that much about my cat litter box though.
I have yet to see any truly great products made with heavily agentic coding. Correct me if I'm wrong?
Maybe I'm using it wrong, or maybe the tooling around AI hasn't yet caught up to the capability of AI models. It feels somewhat wrong to me that the benefit any individual person gets from AI is derived from their own prompting rather than autonomous systems that run in the background for them. But either way, the massive investment in AI compute seems very disproportionate to the actual benefit the average person, or even a tech savvy person, is seeing day-to-day right now.
One of the things that was promised in 2024 was a "deflationary spiral" for physical goods and the economy in general because of insane efficiencies that AI would supposedly bring. I believed that whole-heartedly and I was a huge AI fanboi even as my artists friends and Lib Arts friends were complaining.
We're in almost October 2026 now and they're nowhere in sight. We have a bunch of unreliable agents that do clerical and design work here and there, but where are all the industrial productivity boosts? If AI were so good, large industries and factories should be adopting them as a never-before-seen scale. Where are they?
Meta Muse, the #1 downloaded iOS app in the world, is only a few weeks old.
Opus 5.5, Sonnet 5.5 and Astra 6 are only a few days or weeks old.
Get new friends. They are holding you back and they will never trust you again anyway because you "betrayed" humanity by being a huge AI fanboi.
> Get new friends. They are holding you back and they will never trust you again anyway because you "betrayed" humanity by being a huge AI fanboi.
Pot, kettle, yada yada.
I bet not a single one of my friends or coworkers, tech savvy or not, have downloaded muse.
aw come on. no need to be insulting ... and I dunno about "doom", but a lot of the hate from artists is actually kind of justified, that didn't go away.
and tbh if you call yourself a "fanboy" unironically, kindly go easy on calling other people's behaviour a "cult".
https://www.stripeeconomics.com/p/the-saaspocalypse-was-more...
Like I said earlier with my tool metaphor, AI isn't a magical tool that can just be sprinkled anywhere for efficiency gains. Human systems are still a huge hurdle to efficient workplaces. That problem has to be solved first, and no one has figured out how to solve that in an enterprise setting.
Half a year is not a lot of time when it comes to meaningful change in directions that matter.
But go and talk to small companies. What they are able to pull off is just incredible. More features in shorter time. Improved UX and client satisfaction.
On a society level 6 months is nothing. This will take about 10 years to penetrate all organizations I assume.
And I remember times when people got angry at companies for "improving their UX" and breaking the daily routines of their users.
You will have to wait great amount of time for great things just as you did before.
LLMs are not AGI, if so they are not foundational technology, if so we can't really built upon them - we can just use their wrappers as productivity tool, if so we will be bottleneck by what we were bottlenecked before: corporate bureaucracy, slow physical world innovation pipeline, supply chains, just a small number of actual problem solvers/risk takers around, etc.
There will be of course a lot of attach LLM wrapper and improve productivity here / there underwhelming weak fart products, ex: Meta Muse.
AI creates demand for things that didn't exist previously
I'm pretty confident I can release it in October, after some 500 hours of work.
Usually in these discussions I get "so it has zero users then".
One time someone on here told me that for AI to prove its worth for software engineering, my application would need to be in use already for at least ten years.
Not sure what point you're trying to make here.
But hey, you can now close yourself off even more, not interact with anyone or develop a skill to get a dumb bash script for a menial task you wouldn’t miss that much anyway if you didn’t have it. Woopie, totally worth it!
I'm currently using it as a basis for building a systems language with Rust's memory guarantees, but with new features like generators and co-routines, and effects instead of colored functions. The fact that the borrow checker's properties are formally proven means I can trust more of what Claude is doing than you normally would be able to do.
https://github.com/RideControlOrg/RideControl
> Maybe it's just me, but nothing has changed in my life so far.
Manifest whatever you want!
You go to the website, you connect your trainer, you ride your bike and you get healthy.
wtf do you care about a readme for? =)
Since Fedora moves old releases to some mirror it's a nightmare to update old installs.
Now I did it very conveniently. Did I build a space ship with the help of ChatGPT? No. Is it useful to me? Yes.
I'm doing many much cooler things that I haven't released yet but I am launching projects I never dreamed I could do as a solo dev in 2-3 months.
Maybe you are not looking in the right place. Maybe your expectations are not right. Maybe the revolution isn't a super app but a mini app. Not an app with code written so beautifully it could win a Pulitzer but an app that will be used a couple of times and then discarded.
I am trying to offer an alternate viewpoint (I don't necessarily support it but I thought it was needed).
This is almost by definition not revolutionary
Wouldn't have been possible.
At home, Claude has been a god send to make it easy to learn using linux, and all sort of technologies. My personal learning curve has gone steep at an age where people start flattening out (40s).
At work, we use AI to automate 50-75% of our work. Better quality output, more productivity. I work in a bank. But the average plumber or electrician benefits too. In minutes they can become an expert into some tech they never touched before.
I thought crypto was bullshit, web 3.0 [corrected] was bullshit, meta-universe was bullshit. AI is bubbly, not sure how you can justify multi-trillon valuations for companies with 80% operating margin in a competitive market where you can switch to the competitor with a drop down. But the productivity gains will be massive for the economy. I think the economy will ultimately reap the reward, not so much the labs. But I may be wrong.
I expect Open AI or Anthropic to make it through. XAI will go back to being a side hustle for SpaceX. And some open weight model will run on your own hardware or AWS. Copilot will remain a piece of trash and Gemini will be an untrusted 4th option.
Your own personal learning curve has also gone up when, if your thesis is correct, it is useless for it to have gone up because it is a skill that we may not need anyone to use, and we definitely won't need someone who learned it last week to use.
That's more of what people mean by no revenue. I'm actually bullish on some revenue coming in from language learning, because in-ear translation will always have a delay and involves constantly wearing equipment, but Linux learning seems like a big zero if models are supposed to be good enough to essentially replace OS UI.
> But the average plumber or electrician benefits too. In minutes they can become an expert into some tech they never touched before.
They're already fine at learning from the manual. They have a lot of background. The AI will 1) only annoy them with how much it gets wrong, and 2) not give them any practice with the things they have to learn with their hands. They may be helped by AI powered robotics.
No one “becomes an expert in minutes” at anything more complex than tic-tac-toe, that’s just absurd. If you don’t understand the thing without needing a chatbot, you’re not an expert.
Electricians etc want to generate more income. They dont want to start building their own apps - someone else will take care of that.
Its jarring how bad some posts are on here. But then again, that's why most are employees not the employer.
There was a Bank of Korea study that showed AI saved workers about 1.5 hours a week, with with no increase in output. Just because I'm more productive at a task, it doesn't mean the people up or downstream of my work benefit. And my time probably gets sucked into meetings. (In the study, solo entrepreneurs did benefit--probably because they own everything end to end)
In term of cool little projects, there's all sort of things that people are doing to improve their own lives or make interesting things. No shame if you're incurious about those.
I mean, I don't know that there is some sort of AI equivalent of the lifechanging magic of rural electrictrifcation. But I don't know that it was ever likely in the near term anyway.
The idea that the commercial value will all be capitalized is a farce. Qwen3.8 seems to me to have hit the threshold to these things being good enough without every buying a single cloud service.
That should scare cloud AI more than it obviously does.