Where is all the new, good software?(natemeyvis.com) |
Where is all the new, good software?(natemeyvis.com) |
Thanks to AI, I was able to finish my bookkeeping and accounting app I had been working on years ago. https://financica.app
It’s not just “vibe coded”, it’s really damn good. Because thanks to AI, whenever I spot an issue, a quality of life increase etc I can just immediately implement it rather than have it seat in a perpetually growing backlog of “maybe one day”.
And there’s SO MANY standards to comply with especially in Europe and I just … implemented all of them. It’s more full featured than any of its competitors.
It runs the bookkeeping and accounting for all of my own companies plus plenty of customers. And the funny thing is for me, this is pretty much a side project. I just have people helping on sales, but all the development is me.
Human coders usually ask this question in a malicious way to imply that this technology doesn't just have to be faster than humans (which it is), it also has to produce better code (which it usually does) as cohesive product (so fixing features or refactoring in projects/products do not count) in record time (this is the trap because these models are not even a year old in their current advanced format). It's hopeless.
If the leadership (C-suite) is afraid to take the full responsibility over AI output, then the only rational choice for developers is to "pace the frontier" themselves.
If there are skills, design MCPs, automatic testing and evaluation, feature bug monitoring, security monitoring, crash handling and automatic fixes, then we could see the productivity in teams. But now it is still our responsibility and not responsibility of the system.
Move fast and don't break things.
And then the C-suite fires them and replaces with ones who are not pacing it. It must come from the high level.
..
> Again, some of these are speculative and some should be given little weight.
You can drop this right off the top of HN when the OP blatantly acknowledges that their entire post is BS.
“Oh, you can’t critique me, I said these were just speculative…”
> Software teams are capturing a lot of the speedup in the form of more leisure or quasi-leisure time. (To greatly simplify: software teams are offering 2x speedups to their companies. They're then using tools that allow them to work 10x as efficiently, and taking nice long coffee breaks.)
That is just an insult. With AI we are working more than ever, either because of "you should be faster now" or because half the people are getting layed-off ...
We've lost 75% of the team over the last year.
We write code faster. It's not getting merged faster because we usually find something janky.
Decisions aren't made faster.
Understanding doesn't come faster.
Code doesn't have value. A well working system has value, the bottleneck is now between having code and having a working system, rather than producing the code.
With AI you can write a new Harry Potter novel in under an hour. But if I ask you about the story you can only answer “It involves wizards”.
In pre-AI era you could solve a bug in one week. But you would end up having a detailed mental picture of the system, which requires time to be created. That mental investment helps you make better decisions on the system or solve related problems instantly.
Clear your glasses. For example - https://getartcraft.com/apps Thanks to those people we may soon have great alternatives to monopolies.
Adobe is cheap compared to that miserable experience.
As it stands right now, it proofs little more than it can replicate the post-boot screen of the original products.
Just because every tech news outlet was dumb enough to report it without trying it doesn't mean you have to join the echo chamber.
---
There are definitely examples out there that do use a similar relentlessly agentic development style that have produced great results. e.g. xberg[0] (formerly kreuzberg), is a great document content extractor, and in a relatively short amount of time has become one of the most robust and performant. I've reported about a dozen edge cases of documents of various types that were unextractable, and the maintainer (or their agents) were able to add a fix in maximum a day turnaround every time.
Moral compass/integrity stuff. Can't explain why, it just feels like absolutely the wrong direction to be heading in.
All of them cost money. They are ripping off Adobe to create the new Adobe.
The worst thing is that there are genuine legit open source projects that already offered an alternative but they did not need AI or ripping off Adobe as a marketing gimmick.
Vibecoded should not be an endorsement in 2026, it should be a warning.
Writing code is not the bottleneck anymore, making decisions is. Making the right decisions needs context and thinking. A coffee break might actually help productivity. Driving a Ferrari full speed in a crowded city - only because you can - doesn't make the outcome better.
Even in the 90s, the internet and the web dramatically lowered the costs of distribution, and YC itself was built on top of that (ViaWeb).
Then there has been so many frameworks, libraries, tools, services and APIs to pick and choose from that most of the coding work has been about organization, selling an idea and doing a lot of testing. Which are still unsolved problems.
The only new idea here is the idea that Software Developers are disposable.
This was brought by the same people who did RTO and layoffs post-covid, but now with support of non-tech workers who want a piece of that (supposedly) sweet money.
But more importantly, why should the market accept your software? Since plenty of people are "making more software" cause they are trying to "make software better" while creating similar product with the use of AI, its difficult for the market to choose which software actually solves their problem.
On the other hand, many don't accept or adopt new software as they don't see the problem they are facing, or they don't mind the problem itself. So why bother adopting new software that isn't going to pluck the problem by the roots all together with its' use?
There's a bunch of reasons for this, but the obvious one to me is just that I haven't seen any backed up claims that actually break down how a 10x (or similar) speed up would get delivered in practice.
For the sake of an example, let's imagine an engineer who works an 8 hour day split up like this:
- 2 hours: investigating and debugging potential issues
- 1 hour: reviewing code
- 2 hours: in various team meetings, catch ups or otherwise
- 1 hour: designing (including at a level of writing code for prototyping etc)
- 2 hours: actually writing code
I think that's a semi-reasonable day breakdown. Realistically, I think AI helps debug faster, and generate code faster. Possibly design work too, but I think this isn't really the case since AI workflows necessitate a lot more design work in order to make the AI generation deterministic.
So looking at that day, if I was able to fully automate writing code and debugging issues so that it took 0 time at all (which I think is a very optimistic assessment of the actual speed ups AI provides), we're looking at a 2x speed up of an engineers productivity.
If we think AI makes those things twice as fast (so 2 hours, instead of 4) the engineer is now at a 1.25x speed up. That's great, but it's hardly revolutionary. It'll change your output something like the way going from a team of 4 to a team of 5 might do.
This is obviously complete conjecture and I'm sure the average time engineers spend on things is different, but I think there's an obvious take away. If you want to make claims about the performance impact of code, you need to know where the code spends its time, and what impact you're making on those sections of code.
Similarly, if you want to know what performance gains are being made, you need to know what engineers spend their time doing and what impact AI is having of those tasks.
I've seen very little attempt to actually make realistic claims on that basis, and a lot of vibes-based "wooah, AI makes me so much faster" type claims. Those claims are obviously not nothing, but I wouldn't trust people's gut reactions to make serious claims about the overall productivity changes in our entire industry.
So maybe the big revolution is that we won't have "big software" that tries to cater to all kinds of users but "small software" that is tailored perfectly to the needs of a single user.
1. Marketing (and distribution) of said software is a chore, and doesn't really give me any benefits 2. It's tailored to me rather than to average Joe.
This might be the biggest factor in my opinion. Corporate incentives usually don't reward someone delivering 2x-10x, so an employee who suddenly found a way to multiply their productivity might be keeping that method to themselves and freeing up some time instead.
Its so weird I spend every day AI coding, thinking I'm building software, and at the end of the day, strangely, nothing was built at all.
The next day the same thing happens.
Here's the part nobody tells you: I think this guy is right - AI is building nothing at all.
BUT if you want to see what people are building, visit https://www.reddit.com/r/SideProject/ where there is roughly 355 project announcements per day.
I am yet to see the advancements in AI manifest in more leisure-time. It is simply that the amount of work we're expected to be able to pump out has increased, and the actual programming work is no longer what slows us down.
> We are in fact seeing software improvement, in the form of more and better features in existing products.
After reading these two points, I had to scroll down to see if it was the opening of some elaborate joke, because I'm seeing more bugs, worse performance, and less and worse features.
This is just plain wrong. I don't think the people asking for new software are in any way averse to adopting new software. I for one am actively waiting for new software to be released so I can adopt it, the Rad debugger for example. The first Linux beta-builds have been shipped and I can't wait for it to be in a more usable state.
I try new software all the time, not to mention I usually try the same software multiple times before reaching a final verdict. In the text-editor space I've been around Vim, Neovim, Doom Emacs, Spacemacs, Zed, Vs Code, Helix, Kakuone, all of them several times over before settling on Neovim.
I would love for more actual CAD-alternatives, more Photoshop alternatives, more video editors (shoutout to Blick) that all cover some niche. They don't even need to be full replacements!
But no. AI has not helped on this front in the slightest. If anything the bleeding edge (if you wish to call vibe-coded, half-assed clones that) is in its most broken state ever.
Point Jev at them, then!
Anecdotally, completely disagree. Maybe this is nostalgia, but I perceive a distinct and massive drop in software quality over the past few years.
Worst offenders for me are the poster children for LLM-based development. I run into bugs and performance issues with both Claude and Codex literally every day. I don't think I'm an outlier here, either.
- more bugs becoming visible that were hidden within the software we use daily
- more bugs (in absolute terms) as more people create more software in a very short amount of time (regardless of their professional training)
- less bugs in existing software as the developers and dev orgs of existing projects is capable of automating bug hunting, test case creation, ... in essence: They get a multiplying effect out of AI regarding their capabilities.
In short: Actual developers with actual experience (the more, the merrier) can do better work while the barrier to enter "the market" for untrained individuals is a lot lower resulting in a huge amount of new software whose "success" is to be determined.
I'm not convinced there are more than a handful of orgs in the world who are disciplined enough to achieve this. Or organisationally willing to increase their QA Eng headcount sufficiently to achieve it.
What we've seen very little of is fundamentally new ideas, usage paradigms, user experiences or similar.
I would like to see some of this software improvement in the form of fewer bugs. If anything it's adding more bugs.
I'll give an example from a game I like called ARC Raiders. For the first ~9 months they did not fix any of the bugs in the main menu. The damn main menu! The first thing you see when you load the game! They also failed to fix, in that time, the bug where simply pressing the Xbox button on the controller would break in-game voice chat.
They only just solved that, as of a few days ago. The main menu bugs still exist.
Just because you can throw tens of thousands of dollars at frontier LLMs doesn't mean what they write would be good, you still need to have some oversight for their work.
I'm seeing people vibe-code inference engines for custom hardware/models too. Are they good? That remains to be seen, but I didn't used to see this at all.
It does feel like something has changed to me lately. I expect it's only going to accelerate, and the quality only going to increase.
[1] https://itbranschen.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/the-hidde...
AI firm code are likely a different category though.
It works relatively well in native mode as a standalone app (tho not being an actual photoshop expert, i dont know if the features compete properly, i simply hear that those trying it are impressed).
The excel clone works well enough for me to do taxes on, even tho the look and feel is a bit janky. I would stick with google sheets, but it's a usable replacement if i didnt already have sheets.
AI written software doing the exact thing it was supposed to but breaking apart on any further improvements or changes matches what I've seen from AI generated output. The code is often bloated and fragile.
What it really shows is ego, arrogance and disdain for the users while running an AI cargo cult.
Sounds exactly like every Adobe product ever. I guess they went too far on feature parity.
And that is because they've had 30 years of effort thrown into them. It's not the big picture that's the issue, it's the thousands of small things. Stuff hidden in the menus that millions of people use. The corpus of educational material out there to help you get stuff done. And the flexibility which is really difficult to match. A good example is the ability for Lightroom to pull reasonable detail out of shadows from RAW images. No other product can touch that, not DxO/affinity/Photomator/Darktable/RAWtherapy.
LightCraft's exposure slider doesn't even work well. Blows everything out. No interpolation curve. It's just BAM!
I don't like the Creative Cloud suite that much (FWIW I prefer Affinity, A.R.T., DxO PhotoLab, CaptureOne, any real alternative).
But Adobe's apps are pretty solidly reliable, if uninspiring in places (Affinity's layer model is better for example).