The best argument I've yet heard against the effectiveness of AI tools for SW dev is the absence of an explosion of shovelware over the past 1-2 years.
Basically, if the tools are even half as good as some proponents claim, wouldn't you expect at least a significant increase in simple games on Steam or apps in app stores over that time frame? But we're not seeing that.
Interesting approach. I can think of one more explanation the author didn't consider: what if software development time wasn't the bottleneck to what he analyzed? The chart for Google Play app submissions, for example, goes down because Google made it much more difficult to publish apps on their store in ways unrelated to software quality. In that case, it wouldn't matter whether AI tools could write a billion production-ready apps, because the limiting factor is Google's submission requirements.
There are other charts besides Google play. Particularly insightful id the steam chart as steam is already full of shovelware and, in my experience, many developers wish they were making games but the pay is bad.
GitHub repos is pretty interesting too but it could be that people just aren't committing this stuff. Showing zero increase is unexpected though.
I've had this same thought for some time. There should have been an explosion in startups, new product from established companies, new apps by the dozen every day. If LLMs can now reliably turn an idea into an application, where are they?
The argument against this is that shovelware has a distinctly different distribution model now.
App stores have quality hurdles that didn’t exist in the diskette days. The types of people making low quality software now can self publish (and in fact do, often), but they get drowned out by established big dogs or the ever-shifting firehose of our social zeitgeist if you are not where they are.
Anyone who has been on Reddit this year in any software adjacent sub has seen hundreds (at minimum) of posts about “feedback on my app” or slop posts doing a god awful job of digging for market insights on pain points.
The core problem with this guy’s argument is that he’s looking in the wrong places - where a SWE would distribute their stuff, not a normie - and then drawing the wrong conclusions. And I am telling you, normies are out there, right now, upchucking some of the sloppiest of slop software you could ever imagine with wanton abandon.
https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware...
Basically, if the tools are even half as good as some proponents claim, wouldn't you expect at least a significant increase in simple games on Steam or apps in app stores over that time frame? But we're not seeing that.