The test is simple: have we seen great new products or improvements in the products we use over the past 12,24,36 months?

The only great new product I’ve used is my LLM of choice, and those labs seem to be hiring more humans than ever.

Maybe it’s true that Claude only just got good enough and that 12 months from now our day to day lives will be way better thanks to LLM-driven product improvements/breakthroughs.

My bet is that 12 months from now we will still have no great improvements and the claim will be “LLMs only got good enough in Feb 2027 so you can’t judge anything yet!”

I have a similar one. Is Claude Code (web and/or VS Code) still a buggy mess? Pretty much every single agent loop bugs out and requires a hard refresh, which sometimes still doesn’t help. And they have an effectively infinite LLM budget and unreleased models to fix the issues.

I am launching projects at about the same rate, but the projects are much more polished and feature full than before AI tools.

Historically, the mindset was to get happy path working launch and see what works, but now you can ship a much more polished products with things like cancellation and account export, private policies, a entire mobile and web app without much effort.

Disclaimer: I am not an LLM maximalist, I like to use LLMs, but in a highly controlled way.

One exciting development that LLMs have recently started is automated vulnerability discovery. For instance, Chrome solved more bugs in June than over the past two years:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49120097

Similarly, the latest Apple security update and the June Android Security Bulletin fixes an insane number of vulnerabilities.

Of course, many of these vulnerabilities are caused by using unsafe languages (C/C++). But LLMs also help porting such code to Rust or other safe languages, because it is the type of transformation that LLMs are pretty good at (clearly defined problem, not many opportunities to go wild).

> have we seen great new products or improvements in the products we use over the past 12,24,36 months

This sentiment drives me nuts.

I'm on a handful of software dev subreddits and the amount of new products popping up has tripled since these tools became available.

I also don't understand how you'd expect to measure this. Is there some single list of all software that's been released that annotates whether AI was used? Do you have some feed of every project that hits GitHub that you're meticulously tracking? The idea that you personally should have seen these improvements or they didn't happen is wild to me.

I work in healthcare. Where the # of products has skyrocketed due to these tools. Some are bad, some are good. But to say that nothing has come out of it is just objectively not true.

> The test is simple: have we seen great new products or improvements in the products we use over the past 12,24,36 months?

I'd say it only became viable end of last year but yes, recently there's a surge of hobbist software which is very visible.

How well they will be maintained, that's another story

I can think few great tools like t3code (a software that does a lot) that have been mostly coded by LLMs and yet have a solid architectural foundation and implementation. The software is genuinely gargantuan in its features and capability, you really cannot appreciate it from quickly skimming the readme.

At work, LLMs helped a lot in doing the kind of work you were always tired or had no budget to do, and the codebases have never been healthier, more tested and better documented.

In any case, it's always about the effort and capabilities of the people using it. If you want to vibecode, then you're still stuck in prototype land and I think that even better models won't help, in fact they may have negative value.

The naivety of your post is in any case appalling, you seem to be missing the forest for the tree.

It's the opposite: people like you will be telling people using these tools successfully, "but where are all great new products???", which, of course, is almost immeasurable.

The Internet is a better fax machine and all that.