alt Hacker NewsIt's been almost half a year since we got powerful enough models, and I'm wondering, where are all those great things that were created with them? Maybe it's just me, but nothing has changed in my life so far. No improvements, but definitely, I need to be more careful when reading, listening, watching, and using things, as bad quality slowly creeps everywhere.
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Do you build things for yourself? I’ve unlocked tremendous value just by scratching my own itches so to speak.
But taking those bespoke contraptions to market is not something I want to out effort into. Especially when anyone can just clone it with AI.
The AI revolution might not show up so easily in GDP.
I wrote a golf simulator that helps visualize golf architecture with help from Gemini. When I published my first piece, I got an email from Tom Doak and the head of data science at Arccos. An absolutely insane response for my dumb blog. I was invited to the Renaissance Cup this year, almost certainly because of that post; golf nerds can tell you what a huge deal that is.
The blog post is here for anyone interested: https://golfcoursewiki.substack.com/p/i-spent-the-last-month...
Things are happening… and quickly, even if we are not quite to the point where VC’s are ready fund prototypes of robots to fold your laundry. Most of what’s happening is nerds finally building the project they’ve always dreamed of outside the traditional funding pathways.
I'm de-FAANG-ing my life. One AI subscription can do the lift of a lot of other subscriptions when it comes to putting OSS tools on my homelab, and I truly don't need _everything_ when I'm on the go.
Exactly. Software seems to be getting worse. The internet is getting filled with more and more bloat and falsehoods.
I have yet to see any truly great products made with heavily agentic coding. Correct me if I'm wrong?
I remember making a comment here on HN a couple weeks ago.[0]
One of the things that was promised in 2024 was a "deflationary spiral" for physical goods and the economy in general because of insane efficiencies that AI would supposedly bring. I believed that whole-heartedly and I was a huge AI fanboi even as my artists friends and Lib Arts friends were complaining.
We're in almost October 2026 now and they're nowhere in sight. We have a bunch of unreliable agents that do clerical and design work here and there, but where are all the industrial productivity boosts? If AI were so good, large industries and factories should be adopting them as a never-before-seen scale. Where are they?
computer scientists/software engineers and their completely messed up sense of how long it takes for things to actually take a hold in real life is always a bit amusing to me.
Half a year is not a lot of time when it comes to meaningful change in directions that matter.
Most big companies are performance theaters see token maxxing as one prominent example.
But go and talk to small companies. What they are able to pull off is just incredible. More features in shorter time. Improved UX and client satisfaction.
On a society level 6 months is nothing. This will take about 10 years to penetrate all organizations I assume.
It's actually is an interesting point. On personal level I've built a few products but I did spend a ton of time exploring things I was really curious about that will never amount to anything practical beyond satisfying my curiosity.
are you under the impression 6 months is a long amount of time?
I just invented a simple upgrade script for my father's ancient Fedora install. I've gone from version 33 to the latest(44) with a simple utility I one shot in 5 minutes.
Since Fedora moves old releases to some mirror it's a nightmare to update old installs.
Now I did it very conveniently. Did I build a space ship with the help of ChatGPT? No. Is it useful to me? Yes.
I'm doing many much cooler things that I haven't released yet but I am launching projects I never dreamed I could do as a solo dev in 2-3 months.
We have replaced multiple 100k contracts from SaaS vendors with fully AI created alternatives. AI is a tool. In the hands of talented and efficient workplaces, it is like any tool. But, if you give the latest DeWalt OMT to a person who doesn't know or is scared of it, and put them in an organization that is full of politics and bureaucracy, then that tool is going to be useless.
I think it's more, let's layoff 20% of the people, give the rest some of the money saved in tokens, deliver features a lot faster (or at least expect them to). Jury's out how long this can continue before the "nobody understands the code anymore" chickens come home to roost.
But I bet you’re making restaurant reservations so much faster than before!
Strongly disagree, and I am one of those who believe this is a bubble.
At home, Claude has been a god send to make it easy to learn using linux, and all sort of technologies. My personal learning curve has gone steep at an age where people start flattening out (40s).
At work, we use AI to automate 50-75% of our work. Better quality output, more productivity. I work in a bank. But the average plumber or electrician benefits too. In minutes they can become an expert into some tech they never touched before.
I thought crypto was bullshit, web 3.0 [corrected] was bullshit, meta-universe was bullshit. AI is bubbly, not sure how you can justify multi-trillon valuations for companies with 80% operating margin in a competitive market where you can switch to the competitor with a drop down. But the productivity gains will be massive for the economy. I think the economy will ultimately reap the reward, not so much the labs. But I may be wrong.
What we've seen in the past with generally applicable technologies generally take 20 years to show up as productivity.
There was a Bank of Korea study that showed AI saved workers about 1.5 hours a week, with with no increase in output. Just because I'm more productive at a task, it doesn't mean the people up or downstream of my work benefit. And my time probably gets sucked into meetings. (In the study, solo entrepreneurs did benefit--probably because they own everything end to end)
In term of cool little projects, there's all sort of things that people are doing to improve their own lives or make interesting things. No shame if you're incurious about those.
I mean, I don't know that there is some sort of AI equivalent of the lifechanging magic of rural electrictrifcation. But I don't know that it was ever likely in the near term anyway.
In early May, I broke my leg. Doctor eventually said get on a bike trainer and recover. So, I bought a trainer, didn't like the software that came with it, "wrote" my own with AI. Since it is just written with AI, I made it open source and free for everyone. I'm now months ahead of scheduled recovery. I'd call that a success.
https://github.com/RideControlOrg/RideControl
> Maybe it's just me, but nothing has changed in my life so far.
Manifest whatever you want!
I run my own custom version of BlueBubbles and a locally run clone of Wispr Flow. In addition, I've vibe-coded lots of nonsense throwaway apps that helped me with a one time boring task.
Wouldn't have been possible.
thing is, I'm creating great things for our internal operations _from_ local models.
The idea that the commercial value will all be capitalized is a farce. Qwen3.8 seems to me to have hit the threshold to these things being good enough without every buying a single cloud service.
That should scare cloud AI more than it obviously does.
Among a few things ive boticed one notable is devops has been less of a blocker / faster to address issues. Most of the time the asks are trivial but incompetent Devops couldn't figure it out. Now they can ask ai and through their elevated permissions quickly solve the problem.
Faster Linux screensavers
> I'm wondering, where are all those great things that were created with them
Maybe you are not looking in the right place. Maybe your expectations are not right. Maybe the revolution isn't a super app but a mini app. Not an app with code written so beautifully it could win a Pulitzer but an app that will be used a couple of times and then discarded.
I am trying to offer an alternate viewpoint (I don't necessarily support it but I thought it was needed).
The responses you’re getting are quite telling. LLMs have unlocked a whirlwind of shit where we can no longer trust most things, communities are suffering with noise, lack of water, increased energy prices, mass surveillance is rapidly increasing, private information is being leaked and sold…
But hey, you can now close yourself off even more, not interact with anyone or develop a skill to get a dumb bash script for a menial task you wouldn’t miss that much anyway if you didn’t have it. Woopie, totally worth it!
I formally proved an important 2025 CS paper (which I did not write) in Lean last month, it took like 2 or 3 weeks of intermittently poking at claude to keep going. AFAIK, it is the first rust-like borrow checker completely formally proven in Lean.
I'm currently using it as a basis for building a systems language with Rust's memory guarantees, but with new features like generators and co-routines, and effects instead of colored functions. The fact that the borrow checker's properties are formally proven means I can trust more of what Claude is doing than you normally would be able to do.
I heard they've been great for the advertising industry, who can now shove personalized slop down all our throats without having to pay animators
You don't think enabling a mass surveillance state as a great thing?
I'm seeing a ton of niche apps being built that otherwise wouldn't have been. As an example, NegPy is an app that gives you much more precise control when working with film negatives, and has been built largely w/ AI tools. There are a small couple of other photography related niche apps I've seen taking off, for example, for managing your Fuji recipes. I'm working on a Lightroom replacement myself, which I never would've taken on before AI tools.
In terms of personal life, I certainly find AI tools pretty useful especially given how awful Google is now, and coding tools are indispensable at work.