> Show the receipts. Where are the mobile apps, the photoshop replacements, the video and audio editors, the games and game engines that took a decade to make in the past that have shipped since Claude code came along?

For code in general, the various meanings of "I am {insert number here} times as productive" on Figure 9 page 36: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w35275/w352...

Same document, Figure 12 page 41 shows a significant spike in iOS apps but also the users per app is way down (which you should expect, given this makes it possible for low-user-count apps to be sensible business propositions).

How many people care to spend a year making a replacement for something that took a decade? Photoshop, despite the complaints about price and subscription model, just isn't expensive enough to justify one engineer-year to replace. Unreal and Unity are free for a lot of people using them, and likewise are not worth the cost of replacing for those who do end up paying (because the teams using them know how to use them and don't want to be retrained).

For this reason, you should be looking at things which would have taken a year of human time but now take a month, or faster, so less Photoshop 27.7 (today) and more back when it was still called ImagePro (1988).

For games, I've seen games like the following take a month or more to get good enough to be interesting, and yet the following took me two prompts, the second of which was the single word "continue" (and only needed that because this was on the free tier and I used too many tokens); I didn't bother to look at the code, I don't care about the code, making the app itself was as easy as simply finding an app like this on the Apple App Store even though such an app was in one of the top-10 lists: https://github.com/BenWheatley/Piano-Trainer

Is this game "as good as" the one on the App Store? Who cares. Any random person who wants their own app can now get their own custom version doing the specific things they care about, which doesn't need to simultaneously support all the use cases of all the other people who would buy the app on the App Store.

From what I read on Hacker News comments, the same is happening with video editing, where it's not "Make an iMovie clone" (why would you, iMovie is free), but rather every time you need one specific thing, you ask your LLM of choice for a solution, and it gives you a shell script which calls ffmpeg with the right arguments.