Where is all the new, good software?

It's all being built to try and capture the value of creating the new, good software. Aka a cambrian explosion of developer tools - primarily used to create developer tools and twitter attention - so people use your developer tool to create developer tools. And wikis - thanks to Karpathy, we now measure Obsidian clones by the gross.

In my professional life however, we are NOT producing more software ($bigco). We are on the edge of it maybe. My experience is we've been on the razors edge - just enough staff to meet the business needs - and so every AI iteration sped up some process, which exposed some limit in a dependent process, which we tried to free up with a reorg, which cut capacity somewhere else, and the snake eats its tail. We've had enough iterations to get to a place where an increase in developer output probably won't cause the whole thing to fall over. I hope.

But anyway, I spend a lot of time exploring new dev tools, it's sort of a hobby of mine; I like to understand the state of "what's out there" and this has helped me professionally. This has recently become impossible do the sheer mass of llm productivity, while at the same time more fun than ever; the amount of crazy interesting and seemingly mature brand-new things (in the dev space) has astounded me. I found Swamp Club recently, like wtf where did this come from? It's like five dudes with LLMs.

Marketing new software is impossibly hard.

I have multiple open-source projects and 2 commercial offerings (see: https://race-term.com, https://inboxctl.com and https://github.com/exlee).

With RACE (which is great I use it daily) I have maybe 30 users. With Inboxctl there are (I think) 2 except me.

Recently I figured that there's no reason to work on open source because it's going to be a vaporware even if I set up the whole architecture. With paid software I might (at least) get paid for my time.

But long story short: there are no channels to share/market/show people. HN is hit or miss (most often miss).

Is it good software? Yes. I'm in this industry for more than 2 decades and it ticks all the boxes for "good software". But all the channels where you could meet it are dead waters.

It’s running locally on my machine. It’s the stuff that only I wanted for my particular needs. It’s the stuff that wouldn’t have been built otherwise because it wouldn’t have been worth the effort. I’m guessing this is true for a lot of people.

1. A frontend to MacOS Quicklook that gives me many additional playback controls.

2. A daemon that listens for messages on my LAN to add scheduled notifications to my preferred app launcher without cluttering my reminders.

3. An improved version of a tool I built to watch for specific streamers and capture the content compared to the one I created years ago. I wouldn’t have enhanced it beyond the version I had that was good enough.

4. A metadata inspector that I can invoke in the GUI with a hotkey focusing only on the stuff I’m interested in seeing.

5. A hotkey terminal launcher based on the color themes I have configured on my device so I can arrow through and choose in the moment.

etc, etc, etc…

> 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.)

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.

The quality of software we are creating at my day job has risen. Tests where there were never tests before, all new code has tests, it's all more rigorously reviewed, and we find prod bugs faster with the help of agents.

My own company has shipped a slew of features that were going to die in the backlog, tracked down almost every bug that comes through Sentry, and given me time to focus on bigger things (it's a 1-person company).

For myself, home automations that I was never going to spend the time getting "just right", I've replaced MyFitnessPal with an app I built, I've got more self-hosted projects running than ever before, and I've built websites and apps to scratch mine or my families needs that were never going to get built in the past.

When I run into an annoyance on my computer(s) now I don't just put up with it, I send an agent after it to figure out why it happened, how we can stop it from happening again, and/or if we can write some custom software to make the problem better or go away. It feels magical.

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-project-of-software... there's no (non-ai) software left to make.

I personally made a bunch of net new, really good software that I use myself and that is much better than alternatives. You will not see that software though, because:

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.

> We are in fact seeing software improvement, in the form of fewer bugs and better performance.

> 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.

Well we're starting to see game mashups and photoshop clones. So, the effects are becoming more outwardly visible.

I built myself a full walkabe 3D plan of my house for my renovation project over the weekend, complete with path tracing renderer, different drawing styles, furniture arrangements and accurate models of different windows styles that I consider ordering, all based on actual blueprints and materials. I looked for usable software for that before but everything was either commercial garbage that wanted you to pony up a lot of money beforehand or hard to use manually. With AI I can build stuff like that over a weekend and I can tell it to place stuff and design things in text and using photos and 3D scans, it takes care of actual implementation. That's much better than spending days or weeks with locked down software trying to make it do what I want.

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.

Almost all of the trending repos on GitHub are _about_ AI: zillion of harnesses and similar AI orchestration tools. So most of the extra efficiency gained by AI usage seems to be spent on building more AI tools and not software for end users or libraries for AIs and humans to build such software.

AI is a search engine. A good one, better than what was before that. (Which is not saying much, because the search landscape is severely distorted. For example, searching dispropotionately dominates browsing.) It can speed up searching and exploration. This is the natural limit of possible gains.

I think a lot of us are trying really hard here to avoid the simplest and most obvious answer, which is that AI coding software is helpful, but doesn't deliver the kind of productivity gains boosters are talking about.

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.

Coding is only one part of software. There is resourcing, financing, research, planning, design, development, testing, distribution, training and support.

Article didn't really explain where this new, good software is :D

The software I create for myself has improved a lot. I also see a lot of improvements in current software and games and fast iterations. But nothing new that is revolutionary.

This is just speculation with zero facts. Anyone can come up with those explanations; the interesting part would be to either prove or disprove them.

My suspicion is that software is saturated. Everything that people need (and a lot more that people do not need) has been built already.

It's not hard to force even the mid tier Chinese models to build a fast, easy to use, reasonably bug free app.

All you need to do is become a UX designer and complain about every small problem you see. That way any bad patterns leaves the repo fast and your agents will repeat the good ones. Pick frameworks with minimal boilerplate and good performance so you don't get lost in syntax noise or end up with Electron slop.

And always read code before you commit, that's the only thing that separates you from a stupid vibe coder.

> We are in fact seeing software improvement, in the form of fewer bugs and better performance.

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.

> 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.)

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.

An example that’s giving me hope that there is indeed new and quality software: https://maestroscore.app Music notation is hard and I for one am happy there’s a new kid in town, which takes after the now defunct Finale

There's more of the stuff that's well known and understood. Any software with an ecosystem of integrations and connectors added a lot of connectors lately. CRMs, CMS and similar extended their functionality.

What we've seen very little of is fundamentally new ideas, usage paradigms, user experiences or similar.

The "We're making more software instead of making software better" and "Most people don't adopt new software very often" points hits home.

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?

Because you still need human to review all the slops, which puts the cart before the horse.

> 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.)

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.

It's on my computer. It has one user and it was never intended to have more. So basically answer 6 on the list.

You cannot make someone believe something that they choose not to believe.

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.

> We are in fact seeing software improvement, but the "we" is very limited. Most people don't adopt new software very often, so it's not surprising that they aren't finding new great software now.

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.

"Good" is the, pardon the Claudism, load-bearing part of that question. There's a ton more software out there, but haters are just going to call it slop and not very good. So people stopped sharing their software. We're all scratching our own itch, making software for one, and then not announcing it to the world. Maybe a ShowHN that gets auto-killed.

> these are conjectural, candidate answers

Point Jev at them, then!

I'd have preferred 1 good answer to 9 speculative and poorly thought out answers.

I think AI is reshaping the industry but it's still far from the promised benefits. But the Silicon Valley hype machine isn't happy with "reshaping" because that's not enough to attract trillions. It needs to be "redefining the meaning of being a human" and garbage like that.

The reason we're not seeing a lot of good software is because the current AI tech can't (yet?) deliver that by itself as advertised.

> We are in fact seeing software improvement, in the form of fewer bugs and better performance.

I would not say that software on average is getting less buggy and more performant. I think the only big exception is being able to bruteforce-find security vulnerabilities and similar defects, which LLMs are well-suited to. But when you look at the remaining 95%+ of the software market, where everyone is seemingly all in on AI, all I see is software becoming more janky and less stable. Everyone just ignores it because it's faster for now.

> We are in fact seeing software improvement, in the form of more and better features in existing products.

Maybe 'features' in terms of measure-turned-target metrics that management at software companies loves to use, but overall I'm not seeing an explosion of features that's inconsistent with the rate of improvement until today. And what new is here is more janky than ever before.

> We are in fact seeing software improvement, but the "we" is very limited.

Surely the people on a tech news website would know about this very useful AI-only software, even if they didn't start using it. It's funny how no one can even give some names.

> Many businesses' software-development processes have subsystems, especially political subsystems, that have not been accelerated with AI.

The entire industry is obsessed with AI, almost everyone is stripping out everything that's not AI and replacing it with AI. Doesn't seem plausible.

> Software teams are capturing a lot of the speedup in the form of more leisure or quasi-leisure time.

How many people did you talk to recently that said they're spending less time working?

> AI improvements in software sometimes push us to use and make software less.

In what ways? AI, by allowing you not to understand the solution, can carry a doomed project much further than a regular programmer would before realizing their mistake. If instructed to, the AI will just build and build and build until the thing implodes under its own weight. It gives you less awareness of what you're doing.

All of these are unconvincing. I think only one of the points has merit:

> We're making more software instead of making software better.

I think people try to avoid acknowledging that AI may be much better at improving the speed side of the equation than the quality side. Look around - all you see is demands for more things faster, even if it's total garbage in the end. They didn't want to bother with quality already, now they found an excuse to try to forget about it altogether. If it's wrong, we'll just regenerate the same garbage 50 more times, they say. Focus on shipping something now, they say.

I vibe coded an ebook reader in Swift for iOS in an evening. I wanted something that stored my books and reads in a private s3 bucket, and gave me a simple interface for reading them. It syncs my books and reads across my devices. It only has the features I want, and I read in it every day.

If I posted it you would call it slop.

I made a cute little ESP32 flight radar for my desk. Two, actually, one for my wife. It shows the planes that fly over my house and has a little web interface I can use to set my position and a few other settings. It runs 24/7 and brings my joy to look at.

If I posted it you would call it slop.

I'm designing my first synthesizer / groovebox. It has 36 hall-effect keys and buttons, 7 rotary encoders, a beautiful monochrome blue OLED, audio and midi in and out, stereo microphones, SD sample streaming, and an audio engine that scales across multiple ESP32-S3 modules. I started the firmware by hand but quickly realized I could get everything I needed much faster with gentle prodding at Claude.

I've been working on it since January and have put hundreds and hundreds of hours into it. I'm finishing up rev 2 of the PCB and I hope to one day sell a few.

When I post it, you will call it slop.

People are learning to keep their projects to themselves, because the Internet is full of assholes. Look at the comments already on this post. A large group of people have decided that AI does not work, whether it works or not.

I don't buy that. We see nothing.

> 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 ...

> AI is replacing more durable, longer-lasting software with more ephemeral forms of software or software use

What I thought all along: the fast-food era of software has come.

If it even exists at all, it gets drowned in the sea of shit anyway.

Here's my simple theory. Increasing the level of quality is not rewarded and often actively discouraged. Almost all software is stuck at the "barely tolerable minimum level of quality". The quality level remains constant (or goes down) regardless of any productivity gain. Any and all productivity gain is spent for expanding scope, chasing more features, etc... Volume of work is increased so that the development team is perpetually understaffed. I have never once seen a team that had what you could remotely call a healthy or appropriate level of staffing. It has always been "the absolute minimum we can possibly get away with and never more". This leaves zero room for any kind of maintenance or quality improvement. Every day is a fight just to keep the lights on. I have seen people queitly sneaking-in maintenance work because that was the only way it could be done.

Okay I’ll bite.

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.

It doesn't really matter if we are making better software now, in the end, we know it will be better. Think of it like this: you have a very sick patient, and you prescribe a drug/protocol known to make them worse before they get better. So the intermediate step is not informative in any meaningful sense.

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.

> 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.)

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.

AI coding is great but the distribution channels have been closed for a while. App stores are effectively closed for new apps and old internet is dead.

> Here are some answers. As usual in this style of post, these are conjectural, candidate answers, and I would give some of them little weight

..

> 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…”

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