Anyhow, I expect this trend of shortening product lifespan to continue even further down. Or maybe, at some point people will realised that there are no users for their products as every user can "build" their own and custom product. Leaving us with a dozen huge platforms that host and help you build those apps. Until then - it's a crazy gold rush and a lot of makers are abandoning their empty buckets.
Instead, I'm stripping back to basics, building small tools to solve specific problems, and find myself vastly preferring established software with a track record of keeping feature-bloat down and the problem-space focused.
Nothing about this statistic supports this claim. Maybe, actually, features aren't free, and even with a glamorous HN marketing blitz, nobody wants to use the dogshit software LLMs produce. Everyone can build "features" for free, if "features" is an alias for "a pile of 100 bugs with some makeup on it to make it look like a feature if you squint at it from a distance".
Maybe the technical stuff is more accessible then it was beforehand but the thousands of hours of the other stuff that leads to good software is still thousands of hours.
Quality has become less work, but only by a little.
But this doesn't mean people value the craftsmanship because they never did before...
It's always been simply a popularity contest and now it's that more than ever.
However I think there will be a price to pay building software without the "trough of sorrow" phase stressing over the product and market fit and limping away with lessons learned - the way you build software and the problems you solve are basically confined to a safe space, a bubble of yourself + your AI agents and a brief moment of suspense submitting to reddit or whatever, and you risk learning nothing at all to improve your next projects and higher-volume won't help that.
I have no idea how correct the code is or what I'd do with this, and I have no plans to publish it for those reasons.
Frankly AI is making people even lazier than before, which means that anyone willing to stick around and be consistent is probably the winner.
One vibe-coded app is no better than other, or if it's better - not for long. So why would anyone invest in product that is going to be superseded in a few months/weeks/days?
software has always been a popularity contest
That doesn't track at all.
When the movie and music industries were pumping out their biggest hits, the production cost was high. Profit may be higher now in the modern era while costs are lower, but would you honestly (seriously honestly please) call most of the remake/homage slop we've had since the late 2000s "hits"? This simply isn't survivorship bias either. Just look at what music stands the test of time on youtube and spotify or gets people at least smiling in real life. Look at the variety of genres too. Look at when we had the highest density of solid audience ratings for even run-of-the-mill or cult movies.
You can say all you want that these industries "always did this" and insist that when you look at your own list of favorites it's just because you're getting old, but that's more obviously denial as the years of this bullshit have racked up. Even the artists agree even when they're finding success at this game, and they have the same resentment. Younger people don't even care about movies and music anymore while older people desperately pay and hope for new stuff like it's another pull of the increasingly rigged slot machine. It's not even that younger people are more interested in social media. That excuse is just as clearly false when you see how hard they go on retro styles and what they also have saved on playlists.