Yes, but I'm asking about new non-AI products. I agree that lots of people are integrating AI into products, which makes products that wouldn't have existed otherwise. But if the answer to "where's the explosive changes and development of new products?" is 100% composed of integrating AI into their products, that means current AI isn't actually helping people write software, much. It's just giving them more software to write.

That doesn't entail that current AI is useless! Or even non-revolutionary! But it's a different kind of software development revolution than what I thought you were claiming. You seem to be saying that the relationship of AI to software development is similar to the relationship of the Japanese language, or raytracing, or early microcomputers to software development. And I thought you were saying that the relationship of AI to software development was similar to the relationship of compilers, or open source, or interactive development environments to software development.

It also doesn't entail that six months from now AI will still be only that revolutionary.

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mmargenot 4 days ago | parent [-]

For better or for worse, AI enables more, faster software development. A lot of that is garbage, but quantity has a quality all its own.

If you look at, e.g. this clearly vibe-coded app about vibe coding [https://www.viberank.app/], ~280 people generated 444.8B tokens within the block of time where people were paying attention to it. If 1000 tokens is 100 lines of code, that's ~444M lines of code that would not exist otherwise. Maybe those lines of code are new products, maybe they're not, maybe those people would have written a bunch of code otherwise, maybe not. I'd call that an explosion either way.

	▲	kragen 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Plausibly most of those lines of code don't exist now either, if people threw them away. And the others might not be any good. Or they might be things that already did exist—either because the AI generate them previously or because it memorized part of its training set. I spent a lot of the morning talking to GPT-5o Mini about desiccants, passive solar collectors, and candidate approaches to 3-D printing of glass and ceramics, and it generated many pages of text, but most of those pages of text will get deleted without anyone else reading them; large parts of them are just wrong, and I'll need to check the non-wrong parts against the research literature and rewrite them from my own perspective so they don't sound like an impatient sales pitch. It did give me some pretty good ideas, though: - Nitrates (of magnesium, calcium, yttrium, lanthanum, etc.) are good precursors for metal oxides for bonding ceramics, and have special virtues for SHS. - Zirconyl chloride is the usual water-soluble precursor for zirconia for this purpose. - Titanium oxysulfate is the usual water-soluble precursor for titania for this purpose. - Advection of supercritical steam through a crucible with salt may be a viable way to salt-glaze ceramics if you can mitigate the HCl problem. - Acidification of an object molded from zirconia-filled waterglass may be able to leach out the alkali, making it possible to sinter the shape into a continuous zircon object. - When acid-leaching iron out of a heap of crushed terra cotta, sulfuric acid has the problem that it can clog the heap with gypsum particles, if calcium is present. - You can electrodeposit iron at an acidic pH as well as a basic pH. Like, none of these are novel, right? But they were new to me, and they turn out to be correct.
	▲	dgfitz 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> For better or for worse, AI enables more, faster software development. So, AI is to software what muscle cars were to air emissions quality? A whole lot of useless, unabated toxic garbage?