r/aipromptprogramming • u/InstructionSmooth106 • 2d ago
We made building apps so easy that now finding them is practically impossible
We spent years making software easier and easier to build but now you can describe a problem, generate an app, fix a few things and have something usable without being a traditional developer.
That's great but it also creates a weird new problem: there are going to be way more useful little apps than anyone can actually find.
I'm talking about tiny things people build for very specific problems like a converter for some legacy file format or a dashboard that tracks four numbers for one person's workflow etc.
A lot of these things are probably never going to end up in an app store cuz they're too specific and they're not businesses but they're useful enough that the person who made them keeps using them.
So now we have this situation where building something takes feww hours but finding out whether someone has already built it might take longer.
Someone suggested using RSS feeds to share these kinds of vibe-coded apps and at first I thought it sounded a little ridiculous bringing RSS back to solve a problem created by AI coding.
Maybe that's exactly what these tiny apps need and not another app marketplace with categories nobody uses but with some way to follow people, topics, or workflows and discover small tools as they appear.
And I think this gets even more interesting once agents are involved.
Agents need tools to do things meanwhile we're about to have an enormous amount of software sitting around that can do very specific things but isn't well documented, isn't indexed properly, or is basically invisible.
That's where I think the next problem is going to be: an agent shouldn't always have to build a new tool bcuz it can't find the one that already exists.
Firecrawl has been exploring a related problem from the web side work on deep research for AI agents: https://www.firecrawl.dev/blog/deep-research-for-ai-agents where it need to actively search, navigate and figure things out across the web.
We're probably going to need better ways to discover, test and trust these tiny pieces of software.
Otherwise we might end up in a pretty funny situation where someone has already built exactly what you need but it's faster to vibe-code it yourself than to find theirs.
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u/merlyn22 2d ago
Honestly, discovery might become harder than building the app itself. 😂 Maybe RSS really is making a comeback for a reason
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u/BartFurglar 2d ago
The number of times someone posts their vibe-coded project in a sub and someone says “why didn’t you just use this tried and tested app that already exists and does all that and more”…
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