[thisisit]

So the future is - Everyone has their own apps built specifically for their own use case and spending tokens just for the satisfaction to have created something themselves? That sounds like a tool for hobbyists.

I have no clue about wine connoisseur apps but I have to assume that someone some where has build apps to manage the obvious data and now integrating AI into it so that it can do photo to text and reports and summaries etc.

If there are no other apps then commercializing the app might be a better win and use case.

If there are others apps then I can't imagine the nightmare where everyone has their own Supabase/Firebase/AWS etc instances and run their private apps because it does things exactly as what they want to do along with satisfaction of spending 6 months on it. Instead of paying for an app which might be used across the industry and helped them save those 6 months.

[asielen]

Yeah, I think I agree with your assessment.

Everyone creating their own bespoke apps sounds great until all these people realize what they were paying software companies for, maintenance, security and inoperability.

I'm seeing this in my ops role currently. Everyone from development to marketing vibe coding things that look good and function on a surface level but are creating more maintenance headaches for me to support since once they get their pretty front end, they think they did the hard work and now it is on ops to support.

A couple weeks ago, I had accounting come to me to show me their cool app they vibe coded and asking for help "just finishing it up." They spent 6 hours making the front end to a form.

A form that I could have spun up in 10 minutes if they came to me first using tools we already had. But now because they "made it" they feel ownership of it and don't like the idea of me rebuilding it in a more standard way.

Marketing last week showed me another "app" they spent all week on. It again was just a form. They didn't like the jira form interface so they decided to make a prettier way to submit tickets. However it doesn't actually do anything, it is just a front end. But of course they showed leadership and got kudos for it because it looks so nice, and now I have to figure out how to wire it up and maintain it.

And don't get me started on an engineer who decided to make their own BI tool that is half baked and not even connected to anything (they give it a csv every day and hit run). When we literally have a live dashboard with the same data.

These things are killing efficiency. You have teams "building things" instead of dieing their job. And leadership loving it because sexy UI must mean productivity.

[bradley13]

I think you are too cynical. His app works. It needs no maintenance, unless the underlying OS changes something fundamental. It doesn't use AWS or any other cloud service.

Look, as an IT professional, I build dry stone walls. Could a professional do it better? Probably. So what? I have the satisfaction of having built them myself, exactly how I want.

AI had enabled something new, and us only going to get better.

[thisisit]

You are basically repeating what you said above. It works. There is satisfaction of building the app yourself. Its your baby and it works - AI enables that and it will get better.

Replace what you said with many hobbyist examples from over the years. Lets say hydroponic farming. "You can grow your own vegetables without needing soil and it works even if you live in the city. Farmers can do better but so what you grow the vegetables yourself. Hydroponic farming has created magic".