I think one counterpoint is that sometimes something tailored to you might outweigh something that is thoughtfully designed, but designed for everyone.

I do think people quickly vibe coding apps that they expect to get any real amount of market penetration is a flash in the pan that will fizzle out pretty quickly - after all, if it took you a few prompts to write it would take me the same to do that, so why exactly am I paying for your version?

But I've built a lot of apps with LLMs that I intend to use just for me - I don't think I'd fool anyone into thinking they're not coded almost entirely with an agent, but I don't really care - they match all of the quirks and ideosyncracies that I personally have for apps, so it feels much better than something that's one-size fits all, even if that one-size fits all thing had a lot of effort put into it.

I have a bunch of little utilities like that that work the way I want to work - a pomodoro timer, a task management app, a password manager - I'm sure 1password, or Todoist, or some time management app with a bunch of bells and whistles is better for the average user, but the stuff I vibe code is better for me, since I can tailor it to exactly what I want.

Right now, it's mostly tech people who are doing stuff like this, but I don't actually think these hyper personal apps require all that much technical skill to make, especially when they just run locally, so I could imagine a world where all sorts of people make things for themselves using prompts.

The real question was never the utility of LLMs.

Is the explosion of this little personal utility apps worth the multi-trillion dollar investment?

Anthropic's published accounts will tell the story. I find the current implementation of agents on top of LLMs pretty fantastic as software tooling. I really hope they're here to stay. But that's not the story sustaining all this trillion dollar companies building, running, renting GPUs and "frontier model" development. The real question is: will this technology transform the economy (or at least the economics of software?).

So far I'm tending to see it as a continuation of the cloud play: incentivize ever more inefficient use of ever more expensive compute. Just look at the valuation of public "tech companies" over the past 10-15 years.

I'm excited to see how it all turns out, but I don't see another decade and a half of exponential growth in profits and stock prices. Feels like a historic peak right now.

>> I have a bunch of little utilities like that that work the way I want to work - a pomodoro timer, a task management app, a password manager. Right now, it's mostly tech people who are doing stuff like this, but I don't actually think these hyper personal apps require all that much technical skill to make, especially when they just run locally, so I could imagine a world where all sorts of people make things for themselves using prompts.

I'm baffled at the utter stupidity of people making such extrapolations. Sure, everyone and their cat will start to vibe code themselves pomodoro timers and task managers. The hobos living under bridges are in desperate need of pomodoro timers and custom vibe coded apps to manage their tasks.

Pomodoro timers and task managers are sure worth a trillion quadrillion dollars because everyone needs, wants, and will AI-vibecode them.