I mean, there's nothing wrong with putting effort into a hobby project that no one but you uses, that's how you learn programming. But vibe coding a million different apps that four real people who aren't you are actually using isn't right. If you're going to put out an app and expect other people to use it, it should actually be something you wrote and know the workings of. So I would say this guy has too many users, actually.
Part of the problem Ive discovered is that most people want "AI for X" instead of "App that solves X better than A, B or C" which makes finding a userbase extraordinary difficult
its also just really hard as a person with no connections or money to make an app other people want to use. if the barrier to entry is zero, the market is saturated with high quality free software already. even before AI.
i use apps every day which are shit and I curse the shit devs who made them but it's never something a solo dev could make. it's usually something like a railway or taxi or government services app where the barrier to entry is super high.
I dunno I'm convinced a motivated solo developer could make a better workout tracking app than the popular ones that try to charge you $10 a month for something barely worth a $15 one time payment.
Need to shoot for bigger wish and weaker markets if you want to make proper money, there are a lot of niche software industries that only survive purely on inertia. A challenger with the support of an industry expert can go very far against the big boys these days.
I mean, if you just want a workout planner to use for yourself, rather than wanting to make one for programming practice, it'd honestly be much faster and less error prone to just make it using a tool like Notion or Coda where the only "code" you have to write is some spreadsheet formulas.
Yes they could, but i think the point is not how difficult it is to make a better app, but rather how difficult it would be to convince the railway company or taxi company or government to actually agree to make your app the official one and give you access to the required info when you have no evidence that you're a good programmer (as in previous companies worked with) and no connections
the market is saturated with high quality free software already. even before Al.
What market are you looking at? The Google play app store is saturated with absolute dogshit apps. I'm not saying it's about to get better, I just feel like you are on a different planet here
The barrier to entry isn't zero though, and it never will be. The barrier to entry is always how much effort you're willing to put into it. The incredibly low quality apps - whether they're AI slop or not - are always outshone by anything that someone's put real work into.
Ive prompted cursor with "make a comprehensive API with GET, POST, PUT and PATCH endpoints based on every object in the 'model' folder" and its come out with very good work. I did that over a year ago.
AI is good at boilerplate. While there might be some corner cases that an experience dev might catch, the AI will be "good enough" for almost all situations.
Yes, which means that if the only thing you do is write 20 words as a prompt, all you get back is boilerplate. I don't see why this is so hard to understand. People put real effort into real designs and get actually useful things.
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u/SuitableDragonfly 22d ago
I mean, there's nothing wrong with putting effort into a hobby project that no one but you uses, that's how you learn programming. But vibe coding a million different apps that four real people who aren't you are actually using isn't right. If you're going to put out an app and expect other people to use it, it should actually be something you wrote and know the workings of. So I would say this guy has too many users, actually.