Discussion

So where are all the AI apps?

superkuh: On my local computer used only by me because now I don't need a corporation to make them for me.

chistev: On Show HN.

dawnerd: Or the selfhosted subreddit.

CalRobert: So far, as sideloaded APKs on my tablet. Most recently one that makes it easier to learn Dutch and quiz myself based on captions from tv shows

alex1sa: Most useful AI apps I've seen aren't "AI apps" — they're existing workflows with AI quietly embedded. The ones that market themselves as "AI-powered" tend to attract tire-kickers. The ones that just solve a problem and happen to use LLMs under the hood get actual users. The best AI is invisible AI.

the-smug-one: Why did you let an LLM write this comment?

powvans: Quietly adopting the em dash is the move that humans who know, make.

turlockmike: I deleted vscode and replaced with a hyper personal dashboard that combines information from everywhere.I have a news feed, work tab for managing issues/PRs, markdown editor with folders, calendar, AI powered buttons all over the place (I click a button, it does something interesting with Claude code I can't do programmatically).Why don't I share it? Because it's highly personal, others would find it doesn't fit their own workflow.

skyberrys: This sounds chaotic and fun.

darth_aardvark: So many execs and marketing people seem to think customers explicitly "want AI".Most people do not want AI! Only a tiny segment of Middle Managers Looking To Leverage New Technology are actually excited by AI branding.But, lots of people want software that does magically useful things, and LLMs can do that! Just...don't brand it as AI.It's like branding a new computer with more processing power as "Jam Packed with Silicon and Capacitors!" instead of, "It starts up really fast!". Nobody needs to know implementation details if the thing is actually useful.

bluefirebrand: > Most people do not want AI!Personally, I explicitly want "not AI"I'm going to be a curmudgeon that is going out of my way to avoid it as much as I possibly can

dominotw: I am now scared to talk to anyone. Eventually the conversation turns to AI and they want to talk or show their vibecoded app.I am just tired boss. I am not going to look at your app.

Robdel12: We’re in a personal software era. Or disposable software era however you want to look at it. I think most people are building for themselves and no longer needing to lean on community to get a lot of things done now.Self plug, but basically that’s the TL;DR https://robertdelu.ca/2026/02/02/personal-software-era/

skyberrys: Wouldn't the apps go into the Apple store and Android play? I guess looking at python packages is valid, but I don't think it's the first thing someone thinks to target with vibe coding. And many apps go to be websites, a website never tells me much about how it is made as a user of the site.

Sharlin: The reason why the release cadence of apps about AI has increased presumably reflects the simple facts thata) there are probably many more active, eager contributors all of a sudden, andb) there's suddenly a huge amount of new papers published every week about algorithms and techniques that said contributors then eagerly implement (usually of dubious benefit).More cynically, one might also hypothesize thatc) code quality has dropped so that more frequent releases are required to fix broken programs.

notjes: All apps you are using are made with AI.

tbeseda: Sorry, I'm not sure how this relates to the content of the article. Sounds like an interesting experience, but this is an analysis of the Python ecosystem pre+post ChatGPT.

brontosaurusrex: Intel AI denoiser in Blender.

vjvjvjvjghv: [delayed]

shermantanktop: I’ve pointed this out to my VPs. Consumer sentiment shows a strong negative sentiment about AI, especially in unexpected places. Why are we convinced they will like an AI-forward feature?There was no real answer but I got definite you’re-being-the-turd-in-the-punchbowl vibes.

jayd16: Can you name one? Why so coy?

severak_cz: My guess - these are not not on PyPI because of libraries. AI generating is good when you don't care about how your app works, when implementation details does not matter.When you are developing library it's exact opposite - you really care about how it works and which interface it provides so you end up writing it mostly by hand.

camdenreslink: Technical people (which is by far the minority of people out there) building personal apps to scratch an itch is one thing.But based on the hype (100x productivity!), there should be a deluge of high quality mobile apps, Saas offerings, etc. There is a huge profit incentive to create quality software at a low price.Yet, the majority of new apps and services that I see are all AI ecosystem stuff. Wrappers around LLMs, or tools to use LLMs to create software. But I’m not really seeing the output of this process (net new software).

oro44: Well it’s mostly explained by the fact that most people lack imagination and can’t hold enough concepts about a particular experience to think about how to re-imagine it, to begin with.Oh and sadly, llm’s are useless for the imaginative part too. Shucks eh.

acessoproibido: I think its a very specific tech/HN bias.I observe the complete opposite with some of my non-tech friends.While we are sharing anecdotes and personal opinion:I think most people don't care too much if its "AI" or not, they just want their problems solved...

camdenreslink: Most of my nontechnical friends are either AI neutral, or have a negative AI sentiment. I don’t actually know anybody nontechnical that is enthusiastic about AI.

ramesh31: No one needs another SaaS. Games are the real killer app for AI. Hear me out.I've wanted to make video games forever. It's fun, and scratches an itch that no other kind of programming does. But making a game is a mountain of work that is almost completely unassailable for an individual in their free time. The sheer volume of assets to be created stops anything from ever being more than a silly little demo. Now, with Gemini 3.1, I can build an asset pipeline that generates an entire game's worth of graphics in minutes, and actually be able to build a game. And the assets are good. With the right prompting and pipeline, Gemini can now easily generate extremely high quality 2d assets with consistent art direction and perfect prompt adherence. It's not about asking AI to make a game for you, it's about enabling an individual to finally be able to realize their vision without having to resort to generic premade asset libraries.

dawnerd: Except all of the ai created games posted to the various subreddits are awful. No one likes them, no one plays them. The ones that make it to steam end up getting abandoned when the devs hit a performance wall.Game development just isn’t something AI can do well. Good games are not just recreations of existing titles.

ramesh31: >Except all of the ai created games posted to the various subreddits are awful. No one likes them, no one plays them.As with anything else, 90% of it will always be crap. Taste is now the great differentiator.

Chris2048: Wdym by "it does something interesting with Claude code I can't do programmatically"?

bena: It means he has a girlfriend. And she goes to a different school. In Canada. You've never heard of it.

graeber_28927: I'm guessing it's not a hard coded function, the button invokes. Instead it spawns a claude code session with perhaps some oredefined prompts, maybe attaches logs, and let's claude code "go wild". In that sense the button's effect wouldn't be programmatical, it would be nondeterministic.Not OP, just guessing.

erythro: Not all of us get addicted to the rat race and wake up at 3am to run more Ralph loops. Some are perfectly content getting the same amount of work done as before, just with less investment of time and effort.

enraged_camel: This article is very poorly researched and reasoned, but it's in the "AI hater" category so I guess it's no surprise it's on the front page.Number of iOS apps has exploded since ChatGPT came out, according to Sensor Tower: https://i.imgur.com/TOlazzk.pngFurthermore, most productivity gains will be in private repos, either in a work setting or individuals' personal projects.

paxys: It is incredibly easy now to get an idea to the prototype stage, but making it production-ready still needs boring old software engineering skills. I know countless people who followed the "I'll vibe code my own business" trend, and a few of them did get pretty far, but ultimately not a single one actually launched. Anyone who has been doing this professionally will tell you that the "last step" is what takes the majority of time and effort.

dominotw: all they did is annoy their friends and family by sharing their vibeslop app and asking for "feedback".I really dont know how to respond to these requests. I am going to hide out and not talk to anyone till this fad passes.Reminds of the trend where everyone was dj wanting you to listen their mixtrack they made on abbleton live

101008: "I think it's great, you should deploy it! Let me know when it's in production"

saidnooneever: maybe some developers are more productive while the rest of em is laid off.. keeping the same release cadence but with fewer devs?i know maybe this is not to your analysis as its about open source stuff, but this is the sentiment i see with some companies. rather than have 10x output which their clients dont need, they produce things cheaper and earn more money from what they produce. (and later lose that revenue to a breach :p)

andrewflnr: By "apps" this author apparently means "PyPi packages". This is a bafflingly myopic perspective in a world of myopic perspectives. Do we really expect people vibecoding "apps" to put anything on PyPi as a result? They're consumers of packagers, not creators.I don't blame people for responding to the title instead of the article, because the article itself doesn't bother to answer its own question.

zabil: I am learning music. I used codex to create a native metronome app, a circle of fifths app, a practice journal app. I try to build a native app alternatives.I have no plans of publishing them or making the open source, so it will not be a part of this metric. I believe others are doing this too.

raw_anon_1111: There is no money in mobile apps. It came out in the Epic Trial that 90% of App Store revenue comes from in app purchases for pay to win games. Most of the other money companies are making from mobile are front end for services.If someone did make a mobile app, how would it get up take? Coding has never been the hard part about a successful software product.

arjie: I won't make any claims as to the Python ecosystem and why there is no effect seen here (and I suppose no effect seen of the Internet on productivity) but one thing that is entirely normal for me now is that I never see the need to open-source anything. I also don't use many new open-source projects. I can usually command Claude Code to build a highly idiosyncratic thing of greater utility. The README.md is a good source of feature inspiration but there are many packages I simply don't bother using any more.Besides, it's working for me. If it isn't working for others I don't want to convince them of anything. I do want to hear from other people for whom it's working, though, so I'm happy to share when things work for me.

kylecazar: ... how did that replace vscode?Do you never open a code editor?

headcanon: Kind of. I'm finding that my terminal window in VSCode went from being at the bottom 1/3rd of my screen to filling the whole screen a lot of the time, replacing the code editor window. If AI is writing all of your code for you based on your chat session, a lot of editing capabilities aren't needed as much. While I wouldn't want to get rid of it entirely, I'd say an AI-native IDE would deemphasize code editing in favor of higher-level controls.

tiborsaas: I fail to see why the author thinks Python packages are a good proxy for AI driven/built code. I've built a number of projects with AI, but I haven't created any new packages.It's like looking at tire sales to wonder about where the EV cars are.

stronglikedan: Nitpick, but tire sales are a good proxy for determining where EVs are, since the owners are usually suckered into buying special "EV" tires.

skydhash: > I deleted vscode and replaced with a hyper personal dashboard that combines information from everywhere.Emacs with Hyperbole[0]?[0]: https://www.gnu.org/software/hyperbole/

Igrom: You can't mention Hyperbole and not say how you use it. I did not get past the "include the occasional action button in org-mode" phase.

neonnoodle: actually the rules say that no one can ever explain what Hyperbole is for

sputknick: This is probably my favorite gain from AI assisted coding: the bar for "who cares about this app" has dropped to a minimum of 1 to make sense. I recently built an app for grocery shopping that is specific to how and where I shop, would be useless to anyone other than my wife. Took me 20 minutes. This is the next frontier: I have a random manual process I do every week, I'll write an app that does it for me.

shafyy: That's fine and all, but how much are you ready to pay to Anthropic and OpenAI to be able to do this? Like, is it worth 100 bucks a month for you to have your own shopping app?

Cthulhu_: Exactly, there have been loads of tools over time to make software development easier - like Dreamweaver and Frontpage to build websites without coding, or low/no-code platforms to click and drag software together, or all frameworks ever, or libraries that solve issues that often take time - and I'm sure they've had a cumulative effect in developer productivity and / or software quality.But there's not one tool there that triggered a major boost in output or number of apps / libraries / products created - unless I missed something.Sure, total output has increased, especially since the early 2010's thanks to both Github becoming the social network of software development, and (arguably) Node / JS becoming one of the most popular languages/runtimes out there attracting a lot of developers to publish a lot of tools. But that's not down to productivity or output boosting developments.

raw_anon_1111: I absolutely hate web development with a passion and haven’t done a new from the ground up web app in 25 years and even since then it was mostly a quick copy and paste to add a feature.But since late last year even when it’s not part of the requirements leading app dev + cloud consulting projects, I’ll throw in a feature complete internal web admin site to manage everything for a project with a UI that looks like something I would have done 25 years ago with a decent UX.It’s completely vibe coded, authenticated with Amazon Cognito and the only things I verify are that unauthenticated users can’t access endpoints, the permissions of the lambda hosting environment (IAM role) and the database user it’s using permissions.Only at most 5 people will ever use the website at a time - but yeah I get scalability for free (not that it matters) because it’s hosted on Lambda. (yes with IAC)The website would not exist at all if it weren’t for AI.

thewebguyd: > Wrappers around LLMs, or tools to use LLMs to create software. But I’m not really seeing the output of this processBecause it's better to sell shovels than to pan for gold.In the current state of LLMs, the average no-experience, non-techy person was never going to make production software with it, let alone actually launch something profitable. Coding was never the hard part in the first place, sales, marketing & growth is.LLMs are basically just another devtool at this point. In the 90s, IDEs/Rapid App Development was a gold rush. LLMs are today's version of that. Both made developer's life's better, but neither resulted in a huge rush of new, cheap software from the masses.

jmarchello: Looking at Python packages, or any developer-facing form of software, is not a good indicator of AI-based production. The key benefit of AI development is that our focus moves up a few layers of abstraction, allowing us to focus on real-world solutions. Instead of measuring Github, you need to measure feature releases, internal tools created, single-user applications built for a single niche use case.Measuring python packages to indicate AI-based production is like measuring saw production to measure the effectiveness of the steam engine. You need to look at houses and communities being built, not the tools.

prhn: Even beyond the engineering there are 100 other things to do.I launched a vibe coded product a few months ago. I spent the majority of my time- making sure the copy / presentation was effective on product website- getting signing certificates (this part SUCKS and is expensive)- managing release version binaries without a CDN (stupid)- setting up LLC, website, domain, email, google search indexing, etc, etc

physicsguy: I worked in an industry for five years and I could feasibly build a competitor product that I think would solve a lot of the problems we had before, and which it would be difficult to pivot the existing ones into. But ultimately, I could have done that before, it just brings the time to build down, and it does nothing for the difficult part which is convincing customers to take a chance on you, sales and marketing, etc. - it takes a certain type of person to go and start a business.

amrocha: Nobody’s talking about starting businesses. The article is specifically about pypi packages, which don’t require any sales and marketing. And there’s still no noticeable uptick in package creation or updates.

danans: > Anyone who has been doing this professionally will tell you that the "last step" is what takes the majority of time and effort.That's true, but even the "last step" is being accelerated. The 10% that takes 90% of the time has itself been cut in half.An example is turning debug logs and bug reports into bugfixes, and performance stats into infrastructure migrations.The time required to analyze, implement, and deploy those has been reduced by a large amount.It still needs to be coupled with software engineering skills - to decide between multiple solutions generated by an LLM, but the acceleration is significant.

yoyohello13: I’ll ask another question. Why isn’t software getting better? Seems like software is buggier than ever. Can’t we just have an LLM running in a loop fixing bugs? Apparently not. Is this the future? Just getting drowned in garbage software faster and faster?

npilk: I believe EVs also wear tires out faster (because they are heavier), so they need more frequent replacement.

causal: AI makes the first 90% of writing an app super easy and the last 10% way harder because you have all the subtle issues of a big codebase but none of the familiarity. Most people give up there.

esafak: So the way is to read every line of code along the way.

noemit: Theres tons of ai apps. They're all general use chatbots or coding agents. Manus, Cursor, ChatGPT. Almost every app that has a robust search uses a reranker llm. AI is everywhere.As far as totally new products - I built one (Habit.am - wordless journaling for mental health) and new products require new habits, people trying new things, its not that easy to change people's behavior. It would be much easier for me to sell my little app if it was a literal plain old journal.

joshmarinacci: That is an excellent question. For me the answer is yes, but I'm unusual.

CrzyLngPwd: The first 80% is the easy part, and good ol' Visual Basic was fabulous at it, but the last 80% is the time suck.Same with vibe-coded stuff.

MeetingsBrowser: What exactly were you bale to build in 20 minutes?

stavros: I built a small app to emit a 15 kHz beep (that most adults can't hear) every ten minutes, so I can keep time when I'm getting a massage. It took ten minutes, really, but I guess it's in the spirit of the question.For 20 minutes of time, I had a simple TTS/STT app that allows me to have a voice conversation with my AI assistant.

zdc1: Even if you have the app, you get to start the fun adventure of marketing it and actually trying to grow the damn thing

TeMPOraL: Right. Which is something you neither need nor want if you just wanted to have an app.

furyofantares: I have a number of small apps and libraries I've prompted into existence and have never considered publishing. They work great for me, but are slop for someone else. All the cases I haven't used them for are likely incomplete or buggy or weird, the code quality is poor, and documentation is poor (worse than not existing in many cases.)Plus you all have LLMs at home. I have my version that takes care of exactly my needs and you can have yours.

ballenf: The thesis has it backwards. We will see fewer published/downloaded apps/packages as people rely on others less. I'm not sure we're quite there yet but I'm increasingly likely to spend a few minutes giving an LLM a chance to make a tool I need instead of sifting through sketchy and dodgy websites for some slightly obscure functionality. I use fewer ad-heavy sites that for converting a one text file format to another.Personally, I see the paid or adware software market shrinking, not growing, as a testament to the success of LLMs in coding.

bsima: It's silly to think that 'AI apps' must look like the enterprise, centrally-managed SaaS that we are used to. My AI apps are all bespoke, tailored to my exact needs, accessed only via my VPN. They would not be useful to anyone else, so why would I make them public?

raw_anon_1111: Software engineering is not “coding” though.Before AI for the last 8 or so years now first at a startup then working in consulting mostly with companies new to AWS or they wanted a new implementation, it’s been:1. Gather requirements2. Do the design3. Present the design and get approval and make sure I didn’t miss anything4. Do the infrastructure as code to create the architecture and the deployment pipeline5. Design the schema and write the code6. Take it through UAT and often go back to #4 or #57. Move it into production8. Monitoring and maintenance.#4 and #5 can be done easily with AI for most run of the mill enterprise SaaS implementations especially if you have the luxury of starting from the ground up “post AI”. This is something you could farm off to mid level ticket takers

lordmathis: I also experienced this with my personal projects. It was really easy to just workshop a new feature. I'd talk to claude and get a nice looking implementation spec. Then I'd pass it on to a coding agent which would get 80% there but the last 20% would actually take lot more time. In the meantime I'd workshop more and more features leading to an evergrowing backlog and an anxiety that an agent should be doing something otherwise I'm wasting time. I brought this completely on myself. I'm not building a business, nothing would happen if I just didn't implement another feature.

skeledrew: There really isn't much profit incentive actually, as everyone has access to the same capabilities now. It'd be like trying to sell ice to Eskimos.

freedomben: Ha! I do this too and have also recently noticed. When scope creep is relatively cheap, it also gets unending and I'm never satisfied. I've had a couple of projects that I would otherwise open source that I've had to be realistic about and just accept it's only going to be useful for myself. Once I open it I feel a responsiblity for maintenance and stability that just adds a lot of extra work. I need to save those for the projects that might actually, realistically, be used.

shevy-java: I am still waiting for them.

hombre_fatal: Maybe the top 15,000 PyPi packages isn't the best way to measure this?Apparently new iOS app submissions jumped by 24% last year:> According to Appfigures Explorer, Apple's App Store saw 557K new app submissions in 2025, a whopping 24% increase from 2024, and the first meaningful increase since 2016's all-time high of 1M apps.The chart shows stagnant new iOS app submissions until AI.Here's a month by month bar chart from 2019 to Feb 2026: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1020964/apple-app-store-...Also, if you hang out in places with borderline technical people, they might do things like vibe-code a waybar app and proudly post it to r/omarchy which was the first time they ever installed linux in their life.Though I'd be super surprised if average activity didn't pick up big on Github in general. And if it hasn't, it's only because we overestimate how fast people develop new workflows. Just by going by my own increase in software output and the projects I've taken on over the last couple months.Finally, December 2025 (Opus 4.5 and that new Codex one) was a big inflection point where AI was suddenly good enough to do all sorts of things for me without hand-holding.

pipnonsense: i was curious, but I need a statista account to see it

deaux: https://cdn.statcdn.com/Statistic/1020000/1020964-blank-754....

socalgal2: Comprehension Debthttps://addyosmani.com/blog/comprehension-debt/

ryanbuening: Agreed. However, I just recently "launched" a side project and Cloudflare made a lot of the stuff you mentioned easier. I also found that using AI helped with setting up my LLC when I had questions.

j2kun: Classic HN comment: ignore the article and respond directly to its title

CalRobert: Well I read the article discussing pypi packages but I think for a lot of people it’s more single use tools. My little apks are ugly and buggy but work for me

kartikarti: i think it's hard to measure this, it's kinda like measuring productivity through number of commits / PRs

EastLondonCoder: I’ve done a event ticket system that’s in production. Stripe integration, resend for mailing and a scan app to scan tickets. It’s for my own club but it’s been working quite well. Took about 80 hours from inception to live with a focus on testing.I’ve done some experiments with reading gedcom files, and I think I’m quite close to a demoable version of a genealogy app.Biggest thing is a tool for remotely working musicians. It’s about 10000 lines of well written rust, it is a demoable state and I wish I could work more on it but I just started a new job.But yeah, this wouldn’t have been possible if I hadn’t been a very experienced dev who knows how to get things live. Also I’ve found a way to work with LLMs that works for me, I can quickly steer the process in the right way and I understand the code thats written, again it’s possible that a lot of real experience is needed for this.

edent: Could you not have downloaded one of the hundreds of Open Source event systems and configured it in less time?

EastLondonCoder: Possibly, but probably not in less time and the point was partly learn to use agentic coding and also having it do exactly what I wanted.