Halide is such a great example of how to make a business serving a niche audience with a high-quality product. They very obviously care deeply, and that's reflected in the product, and that makes it a genuinely unique hard to replicate app. They'll never be the most used camera app out there, but they'll always have a market, and they'll always get to explore their passion while doing it.

I think this is what a lot of people react to with LLMs - often times, the point is the passion, and the point is to truly dig in at 100% on something, and the output of that shows when you experience the product. A lot of our economy right now is built on "cheaper, faster, and good enough," and I think a great many of us have found that to be both a disappointing experience and very hard to avoid. I know I personally have been trying to focus on carefully selecting fewer higher-quality items/services/stores/etc, and it's part of why none of the sales pitches for LLMs are landing for me - yes, I could get that thing done faster, but that's not actually what I want. I want the passion, I want the care, I want to be able to look at every part of the object and see how it contributes to a harmonious whole.

> A lot of our economy right now is built on "cheaper, faster, and good enough"

And, essentially, price fixing (or, UX fixing, or something?). You make something worse, but not too worse; then, your competitors, seeing it can be tolerated, each become the same worse as well, one by one, until there's nobody left to switch to. Keep doing this, over, and over, and over, and over... People get used to it being the only option, and it becomes tolerated and even expected. You avoid becoming worse enough at once for everyone to switch, but you end up way worse over time, as your entire market slowly trends that way with you. I'm sure there's some sort of enshittification-like term for this, but it seems different than enshittification to me, because you pick on individual tiny things in a free-ish market rather than taking a sharp turn against a captive audience.