Maybe the top 15,000 PyPi packages isn't the best way to measure this?

Apparently new iOS app submissions jumped by 24% last year:

> According to Appfigures Explorer, Apple's App Store saw 557K new app submissions in 2025, a whopping 24% increase from 2024, and the first meaningful increase since 2016's all-time high of 1M apps.

The chart shows stagnant new iOS app submissions until AI.

Here's a month by month bar chart from 2019 to Feb 2026: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1020964/apple-app-store-...

Also, if you hang out in places with borderline technical people, they might do things like vibe-code a waybar app and proudly post it to r/omarchy which was the first time they ever installed linux in their life.

Though I'd be super surprised if average activity didn't pick up big on Github in general. And if it hasn't, it's only because we overestimate how fast people develop new workflows. Just by going by my own increase in software output and the projects I've taken on over the last couple months.

Finally, December 2025 (Opus 4.5 and that new Codex one) was a big inflection point where AI was suddenly good enough to do all sorts of things for me without hand-holding.

▲ contravariant 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I can't really think of a polite way to phrase this, but I'm not surprised throwaway mobile apps do benefit, while relatively mature python packages do not. That matches my estimation of how much programming skill you can reasonable extract from the current LLMs.

Really the one thing that conclusively has changed is that the 'ask it on stackoverflow' has become 'ask it an LLM'. Around 95% of the stackoverflow questions can be answered by an LLM with access to the documentation, not sure what will happen to the other 5%. I don't think stackoverflow will survive a 20-fold reduction in size, if only because their stance on not allowing repeat questions means that exponential growth was the main thing preventing them from becoming stale.

	▲	hombre_fatal 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> I'm not surprised throwaway mobile apps do benefit, while relatively mature python packages do not. Right. I don't think you even need cynicism or whatever you felt you were having impolite thoughts about: I'd expect the top mature libraries to be the most resistant to AI tool use for various reasons. They already have established processes, they don't accept drive-by PR spam, the developers working on them might be the least likely to be early adopters, and -- perhaps most importantly -- the todo list of those projects might need the most human comms, like directional planning rather than the sort of yolo feature impl you can do in a one-man greenfield. All to further bury signals you might find elsewhere in broader ecosystems.

▲ pipnonsense 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

i was curious, but I need a statista account to see it

▲ deaux 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

https://cdn.statcdn.com/Statistic/1020000/1020964-blank-754....

	▲	hombre_fatal 7 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Seems they use old data unless you craft a request with origin/referrer: `curl 'https://cdn.statcdn.com/Statistic/1020000/1020964-blank-754.png' \ -H 'Origin: https://www.statista.com' \ -H 'Referer: https://www.statista.com/' \ --output chart.png` Assuming it's a real chart, that will give you the image with the uptick in the last year.
	▲	7 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[deleted]

▲ philipphutterer 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

https://archive.md/tM9Kg

▲ hombre_fatal 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Heh, I got a solid five seconds with the chart until the paywall popped up.

	▲	klibertp 7 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		But there's no labels on the X axis - and removing the popover with dev tools shows a chart that doesn't really support what OP says. So we might be looking at some sample chart instead of a real one.
	▲	robot-wrangler 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> Heh, I got a solid five seconds with the chart until the paywall popped up. Relevant! If the maximalist interpretation of AI capabilities were close to real, and if people tend to point their new super powers at their biggest pain points.. wouldn't it be a big blow for all things advertising / attention economy? "Create a driver or wrapper app that skips all ads on Youtube/Spotify" or "Make a browser plugin that de-emphasizes and unlinks all attention-grabbing references to pay-walled content". If we're supposed to be in awe of how AI can do anything, and we notice repeatedly that nope, it isn't really empowering users yet, then we may need to reconsider the premise.

▲ bigbadfeline 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Apparently new iOS app submissions jumped by 24% last year:

The amount of useless slop in the app store doesn't matter. There are no new and useful apps made with AI - apps that contribute to productivity of the economy as whole. The trade and fiscal deficits are both high and growing as is corporate indebtedness - these are the true measures for economic failure and they all agree on it.

AI is a debt and energy guzzling endeavor which sucks the capital juice out of the economy in return for meager benefits.

I can't think of a reason for the present unjustified AI rush and hype other than war, but any success towards that goal is a total loss for the economy and environment - that's the relation between economics and deadly destruction in a connected world, reality is the proof.

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GorbachevyChase 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Is the AI in the room with us now?

I get that people are upset that making a cool six figures off of stitching together React components is maybe not a viable long-term career path anymore. For those of us on the user side, the value is tremendous. I’m starting to replace what were paid enterprise software and plug-ins and tailoring them to my own taste. Our subject matter experts are translating their knowledge and work flows, which usually aren’t that complicated, into working products on their own. They didn’t have to spend six months or a year negotiating an agreement to build the software or have to beg our existing software vendors, who could not possibly care less, for the functionality to be added to software we are, for some reason, expected to pay for every single year, despite the absence of any operating cost to justify this practice.

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deaux 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> There are no new and useful apps made with AI - apps that contribute to productivity of the economy as whole.

This is flat-earther level. It's like an environmentalist saying that nothing made with fossil fuels contributes to productivity. But they don't say that because they know it's not true.

There are so many valid gripes to have with LLMs, pick literally any of them. The idea that a single line of generated code can't possibly be productivity net positive is nonsensical. And if one line can, then so can many lines.

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thinkharderdev 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> This is flat-earther level

Ok, so do you have a counterexample?

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dash2 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Here's mine. It's not big or important (at all!) but I think it is a perfectly valid app that might be useful to some people. It's entirely vibe-coded including code, art and sounds. Only the idea was mine.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/kaien/id6759458971

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planb 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Can you give me any new (i.e. released in 2026) app that does something useful? There's just not many good app ideas left after all..

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my-next-account 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I wrote my own note sharing app using free Claude. It's self-hosted, allows for non-simultaneous editing by multiple users (uses locks), it has no passwords on users, it shows all notes in a list. Very simple app, over all. It's one Go file and one HTML file. I like it, it's exactly what I want for sharing notes like shopping and todo lists with my partner.

The AI wouldn't have been able to do it by itself, but I wouldn't have been arsed to do it alone either.

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croes 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That has some strong "Everything that can be invented has been invented" vibes.

If that would be true then all these AIs are useless. Who needs them to built something that already exists?

	▲	appletrotter 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		"Everything that can be invented has been invented" Ah my favorite, entirely made up quote. Apocraphyly attributed to the U.S. Patent Office Commissioner in 1899.

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croes 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Just shown me a new killer app from the app store that is coded by AI and isn’t an AI app itself.

Seems like the rest of the whole AI business, the only things going to the top are the AI tools themselves but not the things they are supposed to built.