alt Hacker News> It will become very easy to build most software
We keep hearing this, but where is the Photoshop killer written by a gas station attendant? Where is the PayPal alternative written by a retired nurse?
Over and over we're told that software is now trivial to write, and Claude is evidently writing some billions of lines of code a day, but where are the results? Where is the vibe coded app toppling the legacy hand-coded monster product from 20 years ago?
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There are multiple "photoshop killers" already available, even for free like photopea. I would bet that you can ask AI to make a clone of it. People just haven't done it because there's no need to waste tokens on that.
Why ask such extreme stuff? Why not ask about the solo entrepreneur who creates a convincing iOS app without a programming background? Advantage the problem on the side of ML and look for winning scenarios today.
Every time I see people say this I think: show me the money?
If its so good why aren't you rich?
In the "iceberg" of boring company systems I see working day to day I actually think delivery of production software has been slowed down. The cost of "writing" code went down a bit, while validation costs positively exploded.
There are definitely more apps developed these days but I haven't seen anything much vibe coded which actually seems to have staying power. Everything is prototype quality.
the future is already here, its just not evenly distributed
See this is the big issue I've been seeing. The only vibe coded product I can think of off the top of my head that's succeeding at all is Bun, and maybe I'm behind the times but it feels like Bun's success is mostly being pushed by Anthropic; I've yet to see much other than Claude Code use it.
My non technical wife asked ai to brush up the photo for her cv.
Ai did that with whatever cli tools were available and what it would write itself.
Ai is not a faster horse. It is a phase shift.
We won't see a gas station clerk write photoshop because we won't need a photoshop.