Ask HN: Where are all the disruptive software that AI promised?

23 points by p-o 42 days ago | 22 comments

It may sound obtuse, but I'm genuinely curious. I understand that AI as an assistant can be empowering, but the way AI was sold to the masses was that it would replace everyone and everything.

It would allow small team to increase their velocity 10-fold. And I can see a glimpse of that here too where so many posts and comments share how much AI transformed one's life.

So my question is, if AI is such a game changing platform, where are the apps? I'm still using the same stuff as I did before, I don't see much disruption in any field. Am I just impatient?

pmaroe 42 days ago |

No, you're not! It's only a matter of attention. Today all eyes are on the LLM itself, but the big change is happening underground. I'm not a developer — I'm just a curious arborist who owns a company that prunes trees in Italy. In 4 months we have totally changed our company with the help of AI. AI, LLMs are just tools. It's the use that changes the output!

OccamsMirror 42 days ago | |

Suspicious emdash, new account, gushingly positive about AI.

Weird.

AstroBen 41 days ago | | |

Strange, even

fideli0 42 days ago | |

That sounds really interesting. Could you elaborate a bit more on how AI has helped you to fundamentally change your company?

codingdave 42 days ago |

> if AI is such a game changing platform

Again, you need to question the premise. Perhaps all the sales and hype you heard simply wasn't true?

In reality, many organizations have already implemented the AI-based improvements to their systems that they need. That work is done, people are enjoying it. The AI vendors want to take it farther. Some coders want to take it farther. Some leaders are pushing it due to FOMO. But "the masses" do not want more. Step outside of the tech silos, and you'll find that most people do not want more AI than we already have.

veunes 42 days ago | |

Makes total sense. Consumer UX relies on pure determinism. When I click "Save", I know exactly what's going to happen. When I type a prompt into an "AI agent", I'm basically playing roulette every single time. Until we figure out how to wrap these probabilistic models inside rigid, predictable UX patterns, the mainstream crowd is going to keep treating AI like an annoying toy instead of an actual tool

Areena_28 38 days ago |

The disruption is 101% happening but it's mostly invisible from the outside. iI think its not new apps replacing old ones rather the same apps doing things that used to require 3x the headcount.

That said there are a few genuine examples

Cursor basically replaced how a lot of developers write code, Eleven Labs made voiceover work that used to cost thousands into a $5 task, and Gamma turned presentations from a half-day job into 10 minutes none of these replaced entire industries overnight but they each quietly made a whole category of work much much cheaper.

RationPhantoms 42 days ago |

The signals are there but the usefulness/blast radius is being limited to "I'm not a software developer but I have this specific issue I need to write software to solve. I've done that and here is a Linkedin post explaining what it is and how I did it."

I think we're looking at the wrong demographic/professional sector and throwing up our hands. You have to look at people who don't have as much professional experience with it because everyone you didn't write software in the 2010's is writing it now.

ManlyBread 40 days ago |

Video games are particularly prominent example of the absence of such apps. You'd think that with the indie market booming we'd be seeing tons of interesting new games as well as game devs sharing their AI workflows and yet there seems to be nothing. I can't recall a single popular game in the past 5 years that would be vibecoded or significantly enhanced by the use of AI.

kingkongjaffa 42 days ago |

- I'm seeing lots of internal apps to help our customer success teams.

- I'm seeing prototypes escape Figma and live as code for a faster/closer demo experience for product managers.

veunes 42 days ago |

Because AI only drove down the cost of writing code, not the cost of finding Product-Market Fit. Sure, you can spin up another Notion or Jira clone over the weekend using Cursor or Claude Code now. But getting users to actually migrate their data, change their workflow habits, and pay for it is just as brutally hard as it was a decade ago. Code is just a cheap commodity now, while distribution and trust have become exponentially more expensive

dysoco 42 days ago | |

For me another Notion or Jira is not "disruptive software" I would expect disruptive software to be so... well, disruptive, as to fit a completely new niche or be so overwhelmingly better than their competitors that it doesn't even need good marketing.

sdevonoes 42 days ago | |

I don’t think that code is that cheap either. Can we vibe code a new Notion? I doubt it. We probably can come up with a decent simulation, but I don’t think we can vibe code a Notion/Confluence/Slack that can handle millions of users in a performant way

chistev 40 days ago | |

> Sure, you can spin up another Notion or Jira clone over the weekend using Cursor or Claude Code now.

You can't.

olegmoca 42 days ago |

Well, in software development is does increase the velocity 10x.

kypro 42 days ago | |

Code monkeys who spent 90%+ of their day typing code are probably 10x faster today because of AI.

I'm not convinced most software developers ever spent the majority of their time coding though... A huge part of the job is taking messy user requirements and converting them into technical requirements, and perhaps you could let AI do that for a while but after some time it will blow up in your face if you don't have any opinion on the technical requirements. Software developers also spend a lot of their time thinking about how to architect solutions, considering different technologies and libraries to use, thinking about how to model data, etc...

If I were to guess before AI I suspect the average software developer spent 50% of their day typing code into an editor, so even if AI made this 10-20x faster, that still wouldn't be a 2x in output unless they're also faster at the other parts of the job too... And maybe they are a bit... So maybe the average developer is 2x, or even 3x more productive today with AI. But 10x is so absurd that unless you were a junior developer building Wordpress themes or something I have no idea how you could be working at anywhere remotely close to 10x velocity you were previously.

I mean spent 4 or my 8 work hours in meetings on a single day last week, that time certainly didn't go 10x faster because of AI... Is my career as a SWE some extreme outlier, or do other people also have meetings and do other things in their day that doesn't involving producing code?

p-o 42 days ago | |

It's undeniable that it has improved the productivity in _some_ areas of development. But my point stand nonetheless, if development is improved, it seems to be difficult to surface that to end user.

The premise, originally, was that AI would empower workers to do more with less. Granted this is anecdotal, but most of the stuff I use today is much the same as it was 5 years ago. It seems the world is improving at the same rate as it did before, generally speaking.

sminchev 39 days ago |

There is a change, slowly moving forwards. The number of mass produced applications, for everything, everywhere is happening. It is like pollution! A lot of people are trying their luck, building something, from their sofa, some of them with high confidence and no experience.

Davidbrcz 41 days ago |

They are all the regular software, but with new bugs in it !

carlosjobim 42 days ago |

AI translation is the answer to your question. It is a big of a deal as the invention of the telephone.

journal 42 days ago |

If before LLMs it took 20 years to build something, with LLMs it might still take 2-5 years, and they've been around of only 5 years. So, you're asking this too early.

stochtinkerer 42 days ago |

AI-native firms will be a game changer I think, the Black Swan event is approaching.