One thing I can't square: if the cost to build an application goes to zero, we should see a proliferation of apps, especially from the AI labs.

The fact that we aren't seeing an app explosion (I think) is evidence that building applications people will pay for is significantly more complex than just prompting claude/codex/etc

I am absolutely seeing an explosion in apps. The reason you might not see them is because the app explosion is entirely custom and in house.

I talked with a friend last week, who has never coded before in his life, who built an absolutely incredible fit-for-purpose app for his own job. He gave me a demo and it blew my mind. It will never go beyond his walls, and he will never buy SaaS that only kinda fits what he needs.

I see things like this happening. The proliferation isn't public because why sell it? Just build the thing to make your domain job easier and save thousands per month cancelling SaaS subs.

The ROI of AI is starting to show, but it isn't in terms of growth or selling new things - it's reducing spend across the board on software and tools.

I made an app for myself and the local MTB community for keeping track of rain and soil moisture for nearby trails so it's easier to decide when a trail will likely be open. Much more reliable than waiting for the official (volunteer led) organization to update the status. I never would have made it without an LLM to speed things along.

A good friend of mine helped his mom keep track of Meals On Wheels (or a similar volunteer org) orders, deliveries, cancellations, etc. They were managing all of this via paper before.

I compiled a list of online recipes. Then I had an LLM typeset them for me into a printable PDF and build a companion website with links to the original recipes and complete ingredient lists for shipping. had the LLM encode links for the companion site into QR codes so the printed copy of the cookbook would bring me immediately to a shopping list, making trying a new recipe soooo much less daunting.

There are so many little things like this that you can make that just take too much effort to justify otherwise. I have other ideas for personal projects that I'll probably get to some day.

Anecdotally, Claude Code has prompted an explosion of open source projects and prototypes from self-starters. A lot of these are just hobby projects, but some of them genuinely fill a niche that was previously too complicated or unviable to develop otherwise.

Some of them have half baked financial models, but nobody will invest dollars backing a SaaS offering that could easily be replicated, or that could be made redundant tomorrow.

For a long time nobody knew how to monetize OSS outside of a few Linux vendors.

There's a crapload of new repos and Github and similar things. And a lot of it is "hobby utility" stuff like you'd find everywhere pre-mobile/pre-app-store but kinda dried up a bit with the browserfication+phone-ificiation of everything. Everything had to turn into an app + an online service.

Now, like OSS, freeware, and even most shareware in the 90s, most of these new projects have no path to VC-level interest.

The whole "basic business or business-process BUT ON THE INTERNET with a dash of social/web-2.0/personalization/crypto/fad-of-the-year" that recent VC firms have been pushing for the last 15+ years may be numbered.

But it's also unlikely that growing companies with big ambitions will want to base their business on vibe-coded free software for too long. It opens up too many unknowns/risks ("oh no, the disgruntled employee leveraged a misconfiguration in our in-house accounts payable system!") There will be a new middle ground model to be found.

There are a lot of specialty/niche apps showing up which are vibe coded --- tons of 3D CAD apps which are a variation/extension of OpenSCAD, a fair number of tools which work with G-code in various ways, &c.

On a commercial support forum I moderate we had to ban software announcements there were so many.

I think we actually are seeing an app explosion, just not a consumer app explosion.

I think a) the labs are releasing very fast and b) why would they implement the long tail of app features when they can effectively sell tokens to every user to write their own version of the app, which is what is currently happening?

I think there is an explosion of new apps, the problem is still distribution in marketing. If I develop a new vibe coded app, it will still take some time for it to be known. And also get good.

Also, what another commenter said that most of new apps are in-house, fully agree with that.

> especially from the AI labs

IMO this is one of the endgame for big ai LABS, they will allow and subsidize users to test and validate on their behalf and once there is a PMF they will step in.

Speaking from my side of the industry (the gaming industry), we are seeing a massive increase in the number of games people are making. Above the growth that was already there.

The distinction is that the games being made are garbage, and I mean worse than shovelware garbage. It's actively made things much harder as someone that fancies himself an indie game curator because you gotta dig through more and more games to find stuff with actual people behind it.

I’ve seen a ton of new open source slop programs. Every day there’s so many “announcing my cool new app” posts. I don’t remember the rate being this high before.