In September of last year, a “middle-aged programming nerd” and “early adopter of AI coding” wrote a viral blog post asking, amid waves of public enthusiasm for AI-assisted coding, a simple question: If everyone’s productivity is shooting through the roof, where is all the software to show for it? There should be a flood of “shovelware,” he argued, and yet he was unable to detect one:

We should be seeing apps of all shapes and sizes, video games, new websites, mobile apps, software-as-a-service apps — we should be drowning in choice. We should be in the middle of an indie software revolution. We should be seeing 10,000 Tetris clones on Steam. 

We should be seeing apps of all shapes and sizes, video games, new websites, mobile apps, software-as-a-service apps — we should be drowning in choice. We should be in the middle of an indie software revolution. We should be seeing 10,000 Tetris clones on Steam. 

“With all you know about AI-assisted coding and its wide adoption,” he asked, “if I showed you charts and graphs of new software releases across the world, what shape of that graph would you expect?” Instead of “exponential growth up-and-to-the-right,” he argued, relevant indicators were all flat or typical. This applied to iOS and Android app releases, domain registrations, new software repositories, and Steam games. “Nobody,” he said, “is shipping more than before.” The post got traction on social media and forums like Hacker News, tapping into ambient skepticism around prevailing stories about AI. He was correct that, as of last September, AI-coding tools really weren’t as good as some boosters were claiming.

By the end of the year, underlying conditions had changed.........

© Daily Intelligencer