[maplethorpe]

If there was a website called InfiniteAppStore, which contained every app imaginable, and where you could type in your search and it would return the code for that app, would you find that as satisfying to use as Claude Code?

On the surface this does not sound as satisfying, because it more resembles shopping than coding. But once Claude Code is finally tuned to do its job perfectly, you will essentially be using that infinite app store. You're actually using it right now, every time you use Claude Code — just an imperfect version of it.

If you enjoy using AI because it allows you to "will anything into existence", it's because the process is currently imperfect. Using Claude Code is closer to shopping than coding, but because the process is obfuscated, it feels like you're the one making the products in the shopping catalogue every time you place an order.

[satyrnein]

For folks who are not familiar, this is "The Library of Babel" by Borges. There is no creating, just selecting among characters sequences we already knew were possible.

[em-bee]

the library of babel contain all possible books, but people are unable o find the good ones among the sea of random rubbish.

the LLM equivalent would be to prompt "give me an app", without specifying what that app does and then repeating that until you get the app you are looking for, each time, checking by hand if the app does what you want.

[gpt5]

In that scenario the 'joy of creation' would just shift to the 'joy of discovery'. Both of which are innate to humans.

[the_af]

> In that scenario the 'joy of creation' would just shift to the 'joy of discovery'. Both of which are innate to humans.

They may be innate, but that doesn't mean they are related or that one is a good substitute for the other.

[gpt5]

I agree. Thinking about it a little more, I've realized that people create things today even if unnecessary (e.g. grow their own food), a lot of it for the satisfaction of it.

So we would still build stuff, but it would not be out of necessity.

[leptons]

Trust me, the two are not the same, and are orders of magnitude different in terms of human satisfaction.

When I walk down a street, I get 10 people stopping me to ask "Where did you get that?". When I tell them I made it, their heads explode. I know which side of that interaction is more satisfying.

We also go all-out for Halloween, and at the big Halloween festival there is literally a line down the street of people waiting to take photos with us. We created something amazing.

People aren't going to line up for slop.

[sixtyj]

In media there was a rule 1-9-90. One creates, 9 comment, 90 use or are silent/don’t care.

Richard Branson realized that a company starts to behave differently when it reaches more than stuff of 135 people that coincides with average number of people you can consider as personally known to you.

Context switching is a bitch. You cannot do it for a long time. Abundance brought by AI will somehow consolidate as people cannot digest everything created by it.

There are more than 45,000 models avail at HF (if I remember it right). Choose wisely :)

[maplethorpe]

One potential solution to this is AI summarization. Imagine coming home, and while preparing dinner your AI assistant recounts what happened in all your favourite tv shows that day. Then while you're doing the laundry, it tells you about all the new games it found and tested for you.

These are just thought starters, but something like this could significantly raise the ceiling on what one person is able to consume in a 24 hour period.

[intended]

Nah. These would be pseudo calories.

Adults tend to forget that they gained their powers of reasoning by exercising them.

Getting a summary, the way you described it, will be minus the effort required to think about it. This is great for information that you are already informed.

This is related to the illusion of explanatory depth. Most of us “know” how something works, until we have to actually explain it. Like drawing a bi-cycle, or explaining how a flush works.

People in general are not aware of how their brain works, and how much mental exercise they used get with the way the world is set up.

I suppose we can set up brain gyms, where people can practice using mental skills so that they don’t atrophy?

[leptons]

"AI" is just more evidence that we're headed straight towards the world of Idiocracy.

[devanil]

Do you think that creation only comes with hard work?

[leptons]

Who said it was hard work?

The satisfaction comes from actually doing a thing that improves your own skill, instead of having a thing done for you.

[jondwillis]

If there was an infinite App Store, we wouldn't have scarcity and I'd be doing literally anything else other than selling my time for money. I'd also be killed because there's no point to my owners/the world keeping me around anymore in that scenario, except, maybe for my winning personality/companionship.

[IAmGraydon]

>But once Claude Code is finally tuned to do its job perfectly, you will essentially be using that infinite app store

You really believe that? What has lead you to the conclusion that LLMs will ever be capable of that?

[maplethorpe]

No, I don't. But I hoped that asking the question "what would an AI tool look like once it was functioning perfectly?" might reveal something important about its underlying nature.

For example, if a carpenter was given a perfect hammer, or a painter a perfect paintbrush, would they find their craft any less enjoyable? AI, on the other hand, falls into a different category of tools (if we can call them tools at all) since they would no longer be enjoyable as tools of creation once they reached their "perfect" state.

[Robotbeat]

I dunno, browsing McMaster-Carr feels like both shopping and creating at the same time.

Typing is just choosing from the latent space something special, too. Could just be random words, or, even fewer, random grammatically correct sentences.

[Apocryphon]

To be fair, the shoppers of the InfiniteAppStore can still bikeshed endlessly about the merchandise.