Citing AI software as the only examples of how AI benefits developing software, has a bit of a touch of self-help books describing how to attain success and fulfillment by taking the example of writing self-help books.

I don’t disagree that these are useful tools, by the way. I just haven’t seen any discernible uptick in general software quality and utility either, nor any economic uptick that should presumably follow from being able to develop software more efficiently.

It doesn’t matter what you think. Where’s all the data proving that AI is actually valuable? All we have are anecdotes and promises.

ChatGPT is... a chat with some "augmentation" feature aka outputting rich html responses, nothing new except the generative side. Cursor is a VSCode fork with a custom model and a very good autocomplete integration. Again where are the products? Where the heck is Windows without the bloat that works reliably before becoming totally agentic? And therefore idiotic since it doesn't work reliably

I agree with everyone else, where is the Microsoft Office competitor created by 2 geeks in a garage with Claude Code? Where is the Exchange replacement created by a company of 20 people?

There are many really lucrative markets that need a fresh approach, and AI doesn't seem to have caused a huge explosion of new software created by upstarts.

Or am I missing something? Where are the consumer facing software apps developed primarily with AI by smaller companies? I'm excluding big companies because in their case it's impossible to prove the productivity, the could be throwing more bodies at the problem and we'd never know.