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"Heck, why isn't there a cornucopia of new apps, even trivial ones?"

There is. We had to basically create a new category for them on /r/golang because there was a quite distinct step change near the beginning of this year where suddenly over half the posts to the subreddit were "I asked my AI to put something together, here's a repo with 4 commits, 3000 lines of code, and an AI-generated README.md. It compiles and I may have even used it once or twice." It toned down a bit but it's still half-a-dozen posts a day like that on average.

Some of them are at least useful in principle. Some of them are the same sorts of things you'd see twice a month, only now we can see them twice a week if not twice a day. The problem wasn't necessarily the utility or the lack thereof, it was simply the flood of them. It completely disturbed the balance of the subreddit.

To the extent that you haven't heard about these, I'd observe that the world already had more apps than you could possibly have ever heard about and the bottleneck was already marketing rather than production. AIs have presumably not successfully done much about helping people market their creations.

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Well, the LLM industry is not completely without results. We do have ever increasing frequency of outages in major Internet services...Somehow correlates with the AI mandates major tech corps seem to pushing now internally.
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Disclaimer: I am not promoting llms.

There was a GitHub PR on the ocaml project where someone crafted a long feature (mac silicon debugging support). The pr was rejected because nobody wanted to read it for it was too long. Seems to me that society is not ready for the width of output generated this way. Which may explain the lack of big visible change so far. But I already see people deploying tiny apps made by Claude in a day.

It's gonna be weird...

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As another example, the MacApps Reddit has been flooded with new apps recently.
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The effect of these tools is people losing their software jobs (down 35% since 2020). Unemployed devs aren’t clamoring to go use AI on OSS.
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Wasn't most of that caused by that one change in 2022 to how R&D expenses are depreciated, thus making R&D expenses (like retaining dev staff) less financially attractive?

Context: This news story https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44180533

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Yes! Even though it's only a tax rule for USA, it somehow applied for the whole world! Thats how mighty the US is!

Or could it be, after the growth and build, we are in maintenance mode and we need less people?

Just food for thought

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Probably also end of ZIRP and some “AI washing” to give the illusion of progress
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Same thing happened to farmers during the industrial revolution, same thing happened to horse drawn carriage drivers, same thing happened to accountants when Excel came along, mathmaticins, and on and on the list goes. Just part of human peogress.
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I keep asking chatgpt when will LLM reach 95% software creation automation, answer is ten years.
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I don't think that long, but yeah, I give it five years.

Two years and 3/4 will be not needed anymore

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I don't have all the variables in (financials of openai debt etc) but a few articles mention that they leverage part of their work to {claude,gemini,chatgpt} code agents internally with good results. it's a first step in a singularity like ramp up.

People think they'll have jobs maintaining AI output but i don't see how maintaining is that harder than creating for a llm able to digest requirements and codebase and iterate until a working source runs.

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I don't think either, people forget that agents are also developing.

Back then, we put all the source code into AI to create things, then we manually put files into context, now it looks for needed files on their own. I think we can do even better by letting AI create a file and API documentation and only read the file when really needed. And select the API and documentation it needs and I bet there is more possible, including skills and MCP on top.

So, not only LLMs are getting better, but also the software using it.

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