Except for maybe an "Excel killer", all those things you listed are not things people are willing to pay for. Also agents are bad at that kind of work (most devs are bad at that stuff, it's why it was something people whined about even before agents).

And funnily enough there are products and tools that are essentially less bloated slack/discord. Have you heard of https://stoat.chat/ (aka revolt) or https://pumble.com/ or https://meet.jit.si/? If not I would guess it's for one of two reasons: not caring enough about these problems to even go looking for them yourself, or their lack of "bloatedness" resulting in them not being a mature/fully featured enough product to be worth marketing or adopting.

If you'd like to see a product mostly made with agents/for agents you can check out mine at https://statue.dev/ - we're making a static site generator with a templating and component system paired with user-story driven "agentic workflows" (~blueprints/playbooks for common user actions like "I need to add a new page and list it on the navbar" or "create a site from the developer portfolio template personalized for my github").

I would guess most other projects are probably in a similar situation as we are: agentic developer tools have only really been good enough to heavily use/build products around for a few months, so it's a typical few-month-old project. But agents definitely made it easier to build.

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hollowturtle 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Not willing to pay for? How can you be sure? For example explain then why many gamers are ditching Windows for Linux and buying hardware from Valve... There must be a reason. Every person I talked to that uses Excel hate how slow it is, same for teams and many other products. Finally, were the mentioned products built with vibe coding?

	▲	weitendorf 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Generally if something is fast enough/efficient enough that a paying customer can use it without having to worry or actively think about performance and un-bloatedness, that's enough for them. The only people who might complain still are developers who are bothered by the inefficiency and are technically literate enough to notice it, and maybe the users with less powerful/capable devices than the ones the big paying customers use. Generally these groups of people are not the actual customers of these products. The people who actually pay for slack and discord (eg enterprises that need workplace chat app and decided to go with the "gold standard", consumers with discord servers and such) need the features/tradeoffs choosing featuers over efficiency causing that bloat. They just don't all need the exact same set of those features as the other customers. So because customers are willing to pay for all these features the product tries to ship all of them and becomes bloated. > Every person I talked to that uses Excel hate how slow it is But do they make the purchasing decisions behind using Excel? To be clear I am not really arguing that bloat/overly enterprisey products are good. What I mean that you don't see the world exploding with more elegant products now with agents for the same reason you didn't see the world exploding with them before agents either: the people who pay for those products and build them for a living are not incentivized or necessarily even rewarded for choosing to make them more efficient or elegant when there are other things that customers are asking for with more $$$ behind them.

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PaulHoule 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I did a lot of analysis and biz dev work on the "Excel killer" and came to the conclusion that it would be hard to get people to pay for.

For one thing most enterprises and many individuals have an Office 365 subscription to access Office programs which are less offensive than Excel so they aren't going to save any money by dropping Excel.

On top of it the "killer" would probably not be one product aimed at one market but maybe a few different things. Some people could use "visual pandas" for instance, something that today would be LLM-infused. Other people could use a no-code builder for calculations. The kind of person who is doing muddled and confused work with Excel wouldn't know which "killer" they needed or understand why decimal math would mean they always cut checks in the right amount.

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hollowturtle 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Wrt statue.dev good luck for sure with the project but I personally don't need yet another static site generator, nextjs like but with unpopular svelte, bloated with tons of node modules creating another black hole impossible to escape from. If agents works this well why would I need to use your library? I just tell an agent to maintain my static site who cares which tech stack