Where were those apps even before AI came along? Every piece of software I use in my day across Windows and iOS is a slow, laggy, piece of resource hogging garbage, and that was true long before AI came along. I'm not convinced that AI makes this worse, it might make it much better.
At times it feels literally magical. But more and more I feel like my brain has slumped onto the couch, lazily barking at a butler to do my bidding. Like a weird kind of professional brainrot.
One metaphor could be a car. You have to motivate yourself to get out and walk now, since a car can take you almost everywhere.
Like the people who circle the parking lot trying to get the parking space closest to the store entrance, you can live your life around the "convenience" and not see the problems with what you're doing. Or you can be the person who intentionally parks far away from the entrance so you get a few more steps in. Or the person who cycles to the store. Many metaphors murdered malignantly.
But since this is mental rather than physical, we might end up being couch potatoes like you said, flipping through channels rather than reading, or doing a hobby. (is "doing" a hobby correct? It sounds like "doing a business")
I think this is an interesting hypothesis and want to see what happens. I'm not really willing to go all the way to vibecoding, because I want to understand the system design. But I do have bots writing all the new code.
Most of that is also written via AI these days... Even the Linux kernel got that bug.