Technical people (which is by far the minority of people out there) building personal apps to scratch an itch is one thing.

But based on the hype (100x productivity!), there should be a deluge of high quality mobile apps, Saas offerings, etc. There is a huge profit incentive to create quality software at a low price.

Yet, the majority of new apps and services that I see are all AI ecosystem stuff. Wrappers around LLMs, or tools to use LLMs to create software. But I’m not really seeing the output of this process (net new software).

I worked in an industry for five years and I could feasibly build a competitor product that I think would solve a lot of the problems we had before, and which it would be difficult to pivot the existing ones into. But ultimately, I could have done that before, it just brings the time to build down, and it does nothing for the difficult part which is convincing customers to take a chance on you, sales and marketing, etc. - it takes a certain type of person to go and start a business.

There is no money in mobile apps. It came out in the Epic Trial that 90% of App Store revenue comes from in app purchases for pay to win games. Most of the other money companies are making from mobile are front end for services.

If someone did make a mobile app, how would it get up take? Coding has never been the hard part about a successful software product.

Why on earth would you publish and monetize software anybody can reproduce with a $20 subscription and an hour of prompting? Why would you ever publish something you vibe coded to PyPI? Code itself isn’t scarce anymore. If there is not some proprietary, secret data or profound insight behind it, I just don’t think there is a good reason to treat it like something valuable.

> But based on the hype (100x productivity!), there should be a deluge of high quality mobile apps, Saas offerings, etc. There is a huge profit incentive to create quality software at a low price.

1. People aren't creating new apps, but enhancing existing ones

2. Companies are less likely to pay for new offerings when the barrier to entry is lowered due to AI. They'll just vibe code what they need.

> Wrappers around LLMs, or tools to use LLMs to create software. But I’m not really seeing the output of this process

Because it's better to sell shovels than to pan for gold.

In the current state of LLMs, the average no-experience, non-techy person was never going to make production software with it, let alone actually launch something profitable. Coding was never the hard part in the first place, sales, marketing & growth is.

LLMs are basically just another devtool at this point. In the 90s, IDEs/Rapid App Development was a gold rush. LLMs are today's version of that. Both made developer's life's better, but neither resulted in a huge rush of new, cheap software from the masses.

Before LLMs, there were code sweatshops in India, Vietnam, Latin America, etc. and they've been pumping out apps and SaaS products for decades now.

I think this is the great conundrum with AI. I find it's most useful when I build my own tools from models. It's great for solving last-mile-problem types of situations around my workflow. But I'm not interested in trying to productize my custom workflow. And I've yet to encounter an AI feature on an existing app that felt right.

Problem is that all these companies trying to push AI experiences know that giving users unfettered access to their data to build further customization is corporate suicide.

Profit is not everyone's goal.

Me, I'm not just chasing markets; I want to build things that create joy.

Well it’s mostly explained by the fact that most people lack imagination and can’t hold enough concepts about a particular experience to think about how to re-imagine it, to begin with.

Oh and sadly, llm’s are useless for the imaginative part too. Shucks eh.

There really isn't much profit incentive actually, as everyone has access to the same capabilities now. It'd be like trying to sell ice to Eskimos.