The Gorman Paradox: Where Are All the AI-Generated Apps?

Strongly agreeing with this comment…

I realized early on in my enterprise software job that if I produce code faster than average for my team, it will just get stuck in the rest of our review and QA processes; it doesn’t get released any faster.

It feels like LLM code gen can exacerbate and generalize this effect (especially when people send mediocre LLM code gen for review which then makes the reviews become painful).

The Goal was written 40 years ago and talks about, among other things, the paradox/illusion of local optima. This isn't new, AI coding assistants are at some level just another NCX-10. This isn't a book recommendation thread, but I highly recommend that book to anyone, even if you've read its IT equivalent, The Phoenix Project.

One alternative explanation to the lack of shovelware, people are deploying software at an individual level. Perhaps millions of new people are using vibe code tools to build tools that personalized and aren’t interested in trying to sell software (the hardest part of many generic saas tool is marketing/etc)

Perhaps looking at iOS, steam, and android release is simply not a great measure of where software is headed. Disappointing that the article didn’t think go a little more outside the box.

> And the industry might finally be waking up to the fact that writing code is a small part of producing software.

Typing code and navigating syntax is the smallest part. We're a solid 30 years into industrialized software development. Better late than never?

What about this data https://innovationgraph.github.com/global-metrics/git-pushes

> If the goal is to increase the rate of software production, there isn't much evidence that AI has moved the needle.

There is only one thing that triggers growth and it is demand. When there's a will, there's a way. But if there's no additional will, new ways won't bring any growth.

Basically AI will show up on the first future spike of demand for software but not before.

My software output increased by manyfold. But none of the software AI wrote for me shows up on the internet. Those are all internal tools, often one off, written for specific task, then discarded.

In my experience of using AI for development, the development speed is exactly the same as before. What you gain in letting AI writing some simple rote tasks, you lose by increased debugging and wasting time with sycophantic enthusiastic suggestions that turn out to be totally wrong two hours later. It's kind of infuriating because AI is so useful when it works, yet wastes your time in the worst way when it doesn't.

I've heard AI coding described as "It makes the first 80% fast, and the last 20% impossible."

...which makes it a great fit for executives that live by the 80/20 rule and just choose not to do the last 20%.

No, it cant handle those perfectly - but it can help you to develop the required code to do that correctly much faster :-)

Right but now you're talking about 5 or 20 or 100 or 1000 companies building CRM software. They're basically doing the mostly the same work over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and (I would like you to know that I typed every single one of these "and over"s with my very own fingers) and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and I think only the AI companies really benefit from that.

I feel silly explaining this as if it's a new thing, but there's a concept in social organization called "specialization" in which societies advance because some people decide to focus on growing food while some people focus on defending against threats and other people focus on building better tools, etc. A society which has a rich social contract which facilitates a high degree of specialization is usually more virile than a subsistence economy in which every individual has all the responsibilities: food gathering, defense, toolmaking, and more.

I wonder if people are forgetting this when they herald the arrival of a new era in which everyone is the maker of their own tools...

This is not really the same level of argument. The post is arguing against the idea that software is incredibly cheap to make through AI right now, not that AI cannot ever make complete software products from scratch in the future.

It's asking "If digital is so good, why aren't there more photos?"

But what?

Give some concrete examples of why current LLM/AI is disruptive technology like digital cameras.

That’s the whole point of the article. Show the obvious gains.

It is an aside, but: I am not sure I encountered any professional photographers saying that in 2005, FWIW; only non-serious photographers were still prattling on about e.g. the mystical and conveniently malleable "theoretical" resolution of film being something that would prevent them ever switching.

There were still valid practical and technical objections for many (indeed, there still is at least one technical objection against digital), the philosophical objections are still as valid as they were (and if you ask me digital has not come close to delivering on its promise to be less environmentally harmful).

But every working press photographer knew they would switch when there were full-frame sensors that were in range of budget planning that shot without quality compromise at the ISO speed they needed or when the organisations they worked for completed their own digital transition. Every working fashion photographer knew that viable cameras already existed.

ETA: Did it disrupt the wider industry? Obviously. Devastatingly. For photographers? It lowered the barrier to entry and the amount they could charge. But any working photographer had encountered that at least once (autofocus SLRs did the same thing, minilabs did the same thing, E6 did it, etc. etc.) and in many ways it was a simple enabling technology because their workflows were also shifting towards digital so it was just the arrival of a DDD workflow at some level.

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Putting aside that aside, I am really not convinced your comparison isn't a category error, but it is definitely an interesting one for a couple of reasons I need to think about for a lot longer.

Not least that digital photography triggered a wave of early retirements and career switches, that I think the same thing is coming in the IT industry, and that I think those retirements will be much more damaging. AI has so radically toxified the industry that it is beginning to drive people with experience and a decade or more of working life away. I consider my own tech retirement to have already happened (I am a freelancer and I am still working, but I have psychologically retired, and very early; I plan to live out my working life somewhere else, and help people resisting AI to continue to resist it)

It’s actually comical watching the AI shills trot out the same points in every argument about the utility of LLMs. Now you’re supposed to say that after 10 years of digital, the only people sticking with film were the “curmudgeons”.

I for one hail the curmudgeons. Uphold curmudgeon thought.

It’s much more like dot.com than crypto. Like dot.com there is a “there” there, but nobody knows what to do yet and there’s a ton of speculative fluff. Crypto was more pure fluff, possibly the most vacuous bubble we’ve had in recent memory.

The best AI companies will be founded a year after the crash.

This is my experience.

I don’t trust the process enough to commit to it for user facing services, but I regularly find toy use cases and itches to scratch where the capability to crank out something useful in 20 minutes has been a godsend.

>Beginning to think of the vibe-coded apps akin to spreadsheets with lots of macros.

This resonates.

> Beginning to think of the vibe-coded apps akin to spreadsheets with lots of macros.

These things normally die a sigmoidal death after the creator changes jobs.

I think the blogpost also hints at the reason why "walled garden" (loosely speaking) approach of Replit won't work. Give people the lego pieces and the freedom to assemble them as they deem fit. Give developers fluid water + cement mix with which they can fill their puddle and solve their problems.