A good chunk of what my company has been doing with AI falls into either burning down our known tech-debt and "easy wins" that no one ever had the bandwidth to approach... And improving / automating our processes. The former is having a direct and meaningful impact on the quality and availability of our services.

Our QA, formerly a fairly frequent blocker of all our releases, are doing more in-depth reviews and catching issues earlier in our release process. They have become unblocked to the point they are actively chasing down work that starts to slip.

We have cleaned up and tuned both our security alerts and operations logs and improved our tenant isolation in our service in a way that makes customer and formal audits SIGNIFICANTLY easier.

We're setting ourselves up for faster human development of the hard-things. Our development environment and infrastructure are faster, cleaner, more auditable processes, and cheaper overall to operate.

These fixes mostly don't show up in our product change logs, and definitely don't fall into "new features". It would largely be invisible to the outside world, but our costs are going down (though to be fair, not offsetting the spend on AI to date), internal productivity has improved, operational incidents are down, and customer satisfaction is up.

Last year people were asking "if AI is so great then where are the new apps?". Then data for 2026 came out and now the IOS app store has a 84% percent year-over-year increase in new app submissions.

For the question where are the alternative OSes? Here is one that I've seen. There's probably more - https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1wfpydl/i_asked_c...

For that other stuff you mentioned like the right click menu. Those huge corporate projects suffer more from layers of institutional dysfunction and will be very very slow to show any improvement. Their dysfunction can't be solved with just faster coding.

Using AI to build more features is easier than using AI to improve existing projects. People will gradually figure out how to do latter too, it'll just take longer.

The follow on question is if it's making us all so much more productive, where is the increased revenue? As far as I can tell, it's mostly the AI labs seeing that, not everyone using them (modulo small founders building new things and doing okay, I think)

The same reason it took many years for corperate america to get a real productivity increase from computers and the internet, all the old ways of doing things had to be redone. I think the largest companies are least equipped to take advantage of AI productivity gains. Agile no longer makes sense, Org charts as no longer make sense, etc...

Why do you assume "we not seen an improvements in products"? Who is "we"? Have you done an exhaustive (or even half-assed) analysis or is this just your "vibe"?

AI doesn’t make a responsive right-click menu a higher business priority. But we are seeing a ton of small custom projects that are as easy to dismiss as they are to abandon.

In my experience everyone is just rebuilding the same wheel over and over.

A lot of people may be more empowered to create things now with less up front effort but it doesn’t lead to having better ideas or more actual system architects.

Well you mention Android, iPhone, Nintendo, and Microsoft. Those are the biggest companies, and many of them don't even use the best coding tools. So they are not going to be the ones improving.

On the other hand, look at the YC companies. I think the last batch or two is growing revenue faster than any batches ever before. Those are the companies that are being sped up a huge amount by AI.