stevex
Joined 13 years ago
Joined 13 years ago
They're producing a fantastic quantity of software, and the quality seems higher than you'd expect for the velocity they're building at.
Mid-2026, we have very large context windows, and much smarter models than we did in 2024 when this was built. If I were to tackle this today I'd ask a current frontier model to work through the source data and design a hierarchy that would give it the ability to sift through the content itself by drilling down as it sees fit, and I expect it would nail that.
Replacing a mature app with an incredibly wide audience and a million use cases may or may not be possible, but what's actually happening is that people are making an app that does exactly what they want, and using it to solve their own needs.
Previously you might use Excel to take raw data from various places and analyze it, create charts, reports, extract findings. Now you can have AI write a script to produce the exactly report you want from the original data. No Excel required.
Photoshop is a good example for that, actually. How many people are just using ChatGPT or Gemini to get the image edits they want instead of reaching for Photoshop? I don't know if this is showing up in Adobe's subscription numbers, yet, but I expect it will eventually.
Jan 2025 was Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Gemini 1.5 Pro and OpenAI had GPT-4o.
As someone who used all those models, as well as today's frontier models - today's models are a significant step up from those.
You can get a working site with the usual featuers (admin panel, logins, forgot reset/password flow, etc) with minimal code thanks to the richness of the ecosystem, and because of the minimal code it's relatively easy for the AI to keep iterating on it since it's small enough to be understandable in context.
Waymo's driving people around with an injuries-per-mile rate that's lower than having humans do it. I don't see how that reconciles with "obviously made no sense".
It took a few prompts but I know enough about FFS (the Amiga filesystem) to guide it, and it created exactly the tool I wanted.
"force multiplier of your own skills" is a great description.
Search for any popular app name and you'll see the other apps trying to ride off the same search terms. Apple seems to be fine with that.
Where Apple will get involved is if you send them a properly worded legal request based on an actual trademark or intellectual property violation. They will act if they are compelled to, but only then.
There's a lot of depth in these tools, but the process seems to be working. Look at the issues, PRs, commit history and release notes. It's moving faster than a project with an "all code must be reviewed by a human who is responsible for it" policy would. Will be interesting to see if there's an upper quality bound.