Like a lot of folks, I'm trying to understand the AI reality vs. the hype cycle. I have my own experiences both using it and seeing it rolled out with a “do more AI” mandate at a huge tech company. Even looking here at discussions we have the full spectrum from engineers who say they don’t code anymore, they just manage agents, to engineers who say they find it basically useless because of how stupid it is. I’ve been looking for clues (I wanted to use the word “signals" there but I can’t because I don’t want you all to think Claude wrote this) in the market that we can all see, so we don’t have to accept “trust me bro, AI solved coding”.
Here’s my question:
Where is all of the AI coded software?
If coding is a nearly solved problem, if AI is making it so easy to make anything, why aren't we seeing the market flood with cheap alternatives to software that we all use daily and hate?
Microsoft office, anything from Adobe, Jira
Make your own list. Every designer I’ve ever met hates Adobe and their subscription model. My company spends a hojillion dollars a year on office365 and everyone hates it. Why aren’t we seeing alternatives popping up?
Should we be expecting this as a part of the whole “democratization” promise of AI?
As an addendum: I picked office and adobe just because they are two things we always whine about in tech, I realize they are platforms/ecosystems now, maybe it would be better to say Word and Photoshop, etc. but substitute in any commercial software you want. If AI coding can take over the internet application space can’t it also take over the software application space?
Where have you looked? ShowHN is filled with projects, some really great ones are sadly marked dead instantly. Just because there's not marketing budget to shove every office clone down your throat with advertisements everywhere you look, doesn't mean they're not being built! It means you don't understand advertising/marketing spend, and how that shapes the world that's presented to you.
If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? If someone makes a program for themselves, but doesn't publish it to GitHub and doesn't spend $10,000 on Google and Facebook ads to shove it in your face that it exists so you hear about it, does it even exist? If you're looking for something, go find it! Or are you incapable of doing your own research?
Microsoft Office and Adobe products had FOSS alternatives before AI ever existed. Between Libreoffice and Google Docs, I haven't touched MS365 products in almost a decade now.
The problem is usually a licensing/compliance/support one. Everyone hates Photoshop and Lightroom, but it's what all of the professional plugins support. Nobody likes paying for Microsoft Word, but it supports Active Directory and the weird document signing formats that some businesses use. There may never be a FOSS replacement for these workflows, regardless of AI coding.
Search Github for anything with a code assistant as a contributor?
If coding is a nearly solved problem, if AI is making it so easy to make anything, why aren't we seeing the market flood with cheap alternatives to software that we all use daily and hate?
Because that is a business problem, not an LLM and software problem. Perhaps coding isn't the solution for those problems, but companies that can potentially become profitable enough to be competitors to more expensive alternatives. Is a company an alternative to Terraform and Vault? Or OpenTofu and OpenBao, for example. Microsoft Teams won because Microsoft bundles it for free, even though it's garbage. You use it because that's what a CFO or CIO picked.
Code doesn't build systems (for profits and non profits) to continually operate and improve software; people do. Everyone else has mentioned how non-AI alternatives exist. You should ask "Why aren't they used?" and "What would it take for cheaper and/or better alternatives to be used?" LLMs might, but might not be, a tool to change the outcome.
1. AI produces a lot of code but very few releases. There have been a lot of articles about how AI has increased code output, but the number of releases on Github for example hasn't increased with the higher coding output. That is because the human review process and shipping is still a bottleneck, and more code doesn't always necessarily mean better software.
2. Which brings me to the next point: AI might have made (arguably) the coding skill more available, but design skills are harder to teach, harder to emulate, and impossible for the AI. Even with all the best AI out there, if you're a poor designer, you won't make a good system. Bad systems don't get hyped up, and as such you won't hear about them.
3. Finally, marketing. Microsoft is a big as it is because it spends billions every year on marketing. Smaller teams guiding AI to make software on the cheap will never be able to compete. You won't hear about them because your company's team in charge of purchasing software is flooded with Microsoft adverts. If not Microsoft, then it'll be the next largest competitor. And so on and so forth. We're not seeing alternatives popping up largely because the people involved in purchasing software are usually not too concerned with finding out the best, they'll take the path of least resistance and buy whatever is cheaper and easier to find. Also there's a question of support, Microsoft Office may be horrible, but if you have a problem with it, you can look at official microsoft documentation or call Microsoft yourself for help. Smaller teams likely won't have the customer support teams to enable large enterprises to use the software effectively.
There's more to big moated software than just code.
It's full of the results of millions of meetings, decisions, and feedback from users over the course of many years. A.I. can't just one shot all of that in an afternoon.
I'm working on software that's highly driven by A.I. development right now, and while we're going faster than we would if we were developing it by hand, there's still tons of discussion happening between us and the client, disagreements, decisions to be made about UI and layouts and architecture and other things going on, gaps that don't necessarily be caught by A.I. in the moment, etc. It's still taking 6+ months to put together just Phase 1 for a new corporate web application, with a team of 15+ people.
And we also have to be somewhat careful how many AI tokens we are using because it's not cheap (but we're still using a lot).
Here’s my question:
Where is all of the AI coded software?
If coding is a nearly solved problem, if AI is making it so easy to make anything, why aren't we seeing the market flood with cheap alternatives to software that we all use daily and hate?
Microsoft office, anything from Adobe, Jira
Make your own list. Every designer I’ve ever met hates Adobe and their subscription model. My company spends a hojillion dollars a year on office365 and everyone hates it. Why aren’t we seeing alternatives popping up?
Should we be expecting this as a part of the whole “democratization” promise of AI?
As an addendum: I picked office and adobe just because they are two things we always whine about in tech, I realize they are platforms/ecosystems now, maybe it would be better to say Word and Photoshop, etc. but substitute in any commercial software you want. If AI coding can take over the internet application space can’t it also take over the software application space?
This stuff is popping up everywhere.
It takes years for new software brands to be common names. This just started.
There are countless competitors to Photoshop. It's not a lack of software. It's not a lack of "cheap competitors."
Where have you looked? ShowHN is filled with projects, some really great ones are sadly marked dead instantly. Just because there's not marketing budget to shove every office clone down your throat with advertisements everywhere you look, doesn't mean they're not being built! It means you don't understand advertising/marketing spend, and how that shapes the world that's presented to you.
If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? If someone makes a program for themselves, but doesn't publish it to GitHub and doesn't spend $10,000 on Google and Facebook ads to shove it in your face that it exists so you hear about it, does it even exist? If you're looking for something, go find it! Or are you incapable of doing your own research?
Microsoft Office and Adobe products had FOSS alternatives before AI ever existed. Between Libreoffice and Google Docs, I haven't touched MS365 products in almost a decade now.
The problem is usually a licensing/compliance/support one. Everyone hates Photoshop and Lightroom, but it's what all of the professional plugins support. Nobody likes paying for Microsoft Word, but it supports Active Directory and the weird document signing formats that some businesses use. There may never be a FOSS replacement for these workflows, regardless of AI coding.
Search Github for anything with a code assistant as a contributor?
Because that is a business problem, not an LLM and software problem. Perhaps coding isn't the solution for those problems, but companies that can potentially become profitable enough to be competitors to more expensive alternatives. Is a company an alternative to Terraform and Vault? Or OpenTofu and OpenBao, for example. Microsoft Teams won because Microsoft bundles it for free, even though it's garbage. You use it because that's what a CFO or CIO picked.
Code doesn't build systems (for profits and non profits) to continually operate and improve software; people do. Everyone else has mentioned how non-AI alternatives exist. You should ask "Why aren't they used?" and "What would it take for cheaper and/or better alternatives to be used?" LLMs might, but might not be, a tool to change the outcome.
https://xkcd.com/2347/
I can think of a few answers for this.
1. AI produces a lot of code but very few releases. There have been a lot of articles about how AI has increased code output, but the number of releases on Github for example hasn't increased with the higher coding output. That is because the human review process and shipping is still a bottleneck, and more code doesn't always necessarily mean better software.
2. Which brings me to the next point: AI might have made (arguably) the coding skill more available, but design skills are harder to teach, harder to emulate, and impossible for the AI. Even with all the best AI out there, if you're a poor designer, you won't make a good system. Bad systems don't get hyped up, and as such you won't hear about them.
3. Finally, marketing. Microsoft is a big as it is because it spends billions every year on marketing. Smaller teams guiding AI to make software on the cheap will never be able to compete. You won't hear about them because your company's team in charge of purchasing software is flooded with Microsoft adverts. If not Microsoft, then it'll be the next largest competitor. And so on and so forth. We're not seeing alternatives popping up largely because the people involved in purchasing software are usually not too concerned with finding out the best, they'll take the path of least resistance and buy whatever is cheaper and easier to find. Also there's a question of support, Microsoft Office may be horrible, but if you have a problem with it, you can look at official microsoft documentation or call Microsoft yourself for help. Smaller teams likely won't have the customer support teams to enable large enterprises to use the software effectively.
There's more to big moated software than just code.
It's full of the results of millions of meetings, decisions, and feedback from users over the course of many years. A.I. can't just one shot all of that in an afternoon.
I'm working on software that's highly driven by A.I. development right now, and while we're going faster than we would if we were developing it by hand, there's still tons of discussion happening between us and the client, disagreements, decisions to be made about UI and layouts and architecture and other things going on, gaps that don't necessarily be caught by A.I. in the moment, etc. It's still taking 6+ months to put together just Phase 1 for a new corporate web application, with a team of 15+ people.
And we also have to be somewhat careful how many AI tokens we are using because it's not cheap (but we're still using a lot).