One of my first professional coding jobs was in 2007 when Facebook first introduced 'Facebook Apps'. I worked for a startup making a facebook app, and EVERY SINGLE app company had the same monetization strategy: Selling ads for other facebook apps.

So the lifecycle of an app would be:

1) Create your game/quiz/whatever app.

2) Pay a successful app $x per install, and get a bunch of app installs.

3) Put all sorts of scammy "get extra in game perks if you refer your friends" to try to become viral.

4) Hope to become big enough that people start finding you without having to pay for ads.

5) Sell ads to other facebook app startups to generate installs for them.

It was a completely circular economy. There was not product or income source other than the next layer of the pyramid.

It didn't last long.

That is the problem with software developers with expertise in software, but no deep domain knowledge outside the CS world.

I’ve been a year deep into my first job out of tech. There is a never ending slew of problems where being able to code, specially now with AI, means you have wizard-like powers to help your coworkers.

My codebase is full of one-offs that slowly but surely converge towards cohesive/well-defined/reusable capabilities based on ‘real’ needs.

I’m now starting to pitch consulting to a niche to see what sticks. If the dynamic from the office holds (as I help them, capabilities compound) then I’ll eventually find something to call ‘a product’.

I am in the same boat but I recently found I could also use these tool so reverse engineer stuff as well. For example I purchased this label printer from china and was unsatisfied with the printing quality under Linux. So I "coded" a go script to print via BLE instead of CUPS [1]. To do this I de-compiled the android app that comes with the printer and instead of spending hours going through it I just told an Agentic AI to do this for me.

I am now so deep into the rabbit hole that I have made a version that runs entirely in the browser and an ESP32 version. I have now also taken the printer apart to find that the built in BLE is an external module and I could interface directly with the printer by replacing it with my own custom PCB...

[1] https://sschueller.github.io/posts/making-a-label-printer-wo...

In macroeconomic, you have an aggregate production functions that represents output for a country or something. In many of these function you'll have a parameter for technology, it acts as a multiplier over inputs, so the greater the measure of technology the greater the output. Quite a few of these also exhibt a characteristic where output drops if technology increases too fast. To illustrate this, imagine a scenario in real life that kind of looks like a rapid evolution of some kind of technology of home phones, to cell phones, to smart phones at a rate faster than people know how to make use of them, while also spending money adoption making the intermediary adoptions quite wasteful.

I think we see an aspect of this here, a lot of things we took for granted are changing, shared assumptions are being challenged and it's a period we're all relearning new things. To some extent spending too much time diving on the current iteration of AI tooling might be for nothing if gets invalidated by another sudden jump.

With all these new tools people are building, I can't help but feel they are building foundations on moving soil.

Talk to people.

There are an infinite amount of problems to solve.

Deciding whether they’re worth solving is the hard part.

I’m really enjoying these LLMs for making ad-hoc tooling / apps for myself. Things that I only need for a day or a week, that don’t need to work perfectly (I can work around bugs).

It’s really liberating. Instead of saying “gosh I wish there was an app that…” I just make the app and use it and move on.

Shovel market

https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/6...

Maybe have it build some toy apps just for fun! My wife and I were talking once about typing speed and challenged each other to a typing competition. the existing ones I found weren't very good and were riddled with ads, so I had Claude build one for us to use.

Or maybe ask yourself what do you like to do outside of work? maybe build an app or claude skill to help with that.

If you like to cook, maybe try building a recipe manager for yourself. I set up a repo to store all of my recipes in cooklang (similar to markdown), and set up claude skills to find/create/evaluate new recipes.

Building the toy apps might help you come up with ideas for larger things too.

Everybody wants to build infra. Automate something which is known and well understood. Hoping someone else will use it to solve end user's problem which is hard to understand, messy and often highly contextual.

To summarize: Everyone wants to automate stuff. Most people do not want to touch boring, large problems.

I find myself building fun tools for myself and things that help with quality of life slightly, but I don’t need all this extra enterprise stuff for that. I actually find myself more likely to use something I built because I am proud of it, even if there is already something on the market that addresses my need.

I feel the same, it's like there's more offer than demand somehow

When there’s a gold rush, sell shovels.

Nailed it!

This is not even AI - it's pre-AI, and everyone has continued to try to create things that other people can use as a dependency, just on a much higher pace.

I've found writing simulations that my childhood brain would have LOVED to see run fun and fulfilling.

build us a way out

Someone on HN pointed out how all the LLM companies are basically going “we made this thing, can y'all please find the billion dollar application for it?” and that really made a lot of things - namely why I’m frequently raising an eyebrow at these tools and the vague promises/demand that we use them - click into place.

Don’t get me wrong, I have found uses for various AI tools. But nothing consistent and daily yet, aside from AI audio repair tools and that’s not really the same thing.

building is the easy bit, more than ever.

selling it is the hard part, nothing new there

Sell the shovels!!

Another option is to bring your coding skills to a industry not particularly known for using tech.

Steve Jobs used to say every product needs a killer feature

AI is a product in search of a killer feature

First AGI was anyday going to come. Gpt5 had showed intelligence apparently

Then got started adult chat with paying customers

If infirmation arbitrage is the game then it's now a race to distribution channels and trust.

Also what does society need? Smart workers and people who believe in the system... so where does that leave us? We need to make something that would better enable children to want to grow up in the world and participate. Otherwise were doing nothing of value and in a death spiral

Ask an LLM for suggestions on what to build

There are companies making a lot of money directly from software largely written by LLMs especially since Claude Code was released, but they aren't mentioning LLMs or AI in any marketing, client communications, or public releases. I'm at least very aware that we need to be able to retire before LLMs swamp or obsolete our niche, and don't want to invite competition.

Outside of tech companies, I think this is extremely common.

This type of software is mainly created to gain brand recognition, influence, or valuation, not to solve problems for humans. Its value is indirect and speculative.

These are the pets.com of the current bubble, and we'll be flooded by them before the damn thing finally pops.

Speak for yourself. I’ve been using Claude Code to build lots of customer facing things.

I’m on the other hand, I have a million ideas and AI has allowed me to implement so many of them.