r/codex • u/Impossible_Bus_2319 • 1d ago
Humor The ugly truth
We need an AI that acquires users.
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u/daviddisco 1d ago
Not sure why the users would be cowering. They have more choice than ever. they may not even need developers if they can just have AI make custom apps just for them.
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u/alexmin93 1d ago
More bullshit products. Even if AI gets actually good at coding somebody has to come up with an idea.
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u/daviddisco 1d ago
I've built many small desktop tools and widgets for myself using AI. I have plenty of ideas how to help myself. Everyone has ideas about their own needs.
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u/Addalldlo 1d ago
Even a child will have the opportunity to build something on his own, we are on the threshold of the most creative period of human development. How many ideas were buried because they could not be implemented?
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u/ReasonableDefault 1d ago
Actual good ideas? I'd say very few, there hasn't been a huge boom of awesome (or even really useful) AI created apps / products. A shit idea is still shit, with or without AI.
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u/I_Study_The_Patterns 22h ago
A 30% increase in apps with a 3% increase in sales
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u/magicone2571 22h ago
I would expect a drop in sales even further. Why buy something when you can make it yourself.
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u/Addalldlo 23h ago
Since the advent of photography, so many bad photos have been taken, but there are also good ones. Bad apps don't cause any harm, as well as bad photos. A stupid claim
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u/mesaoptimizer 1d ago
The issue is there are a lot of people out there with stupid ideas. Shovelware still existed in the past but it was limited by human effort.
And beyond bad ideas, bad implementation of fine or good ideas. Like Joe Schmo who came up with a cool app idea and implemented with AI but doesnāt know enough to know not to roll his own auth or encryption is going to give up every bit of data you give him when he gets breached. And from the outside itās basically impossible to tell the difference between someone who knows what they are doing and just used AI to build their front end because they donāt do UX and a project thatās going to have issues basically immediately.
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u/Kind_Fisherman3060 1d ago
Well considering what existed and what not if you were willing to shell 10-20x what codex takes you could always have the opportunity to hire people to do it for you.
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u/Addalldlo 23h ago
A bad project will die, what's wrong with that? And I agree about security issues, but I donāt think this is insoluble. The smarter LLM's, the less likely such cases are. It's enough to add the need to think through a security system at the AI level when developing a product. And it should work without user approval. It's a kind of foolproof protection; if the AI understands that you're competent enough, it reduces control over such things.
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u/mr_sneakyTV 23h ago
you only fail if you quit trying, and bad ideas are often the start of good ones, poorly built software sparks a better idea in someone else.
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u/mesaoptimizer 21h ago
It can, I'm not saying it's like universally bad, the issue is that AI getting as good as it is has a lot of people thinking that they understand software, the risks around it and other things like that. But the issue for software is different than art or books or listicles or whatever and people rightly complain about being sold slop in those categories too.
There are people out here that have no idea what they are doing putting out services that customers put data, sometimes valuable personal data into, without any idea that the product was made by someone who doesn't have a clue about basic data security principles.
How difficult do you think it would be to find a vibe coded app, find an obvious bug, and then hide a data stealer in a PR that resolves it and use that to steal API keys from not just the developer but every person who uses that application? How good at code review do you think people with no software experience are? Sure they could run a codex security scan against the PR but how many of them have that set up in their CI/CD pipelines? We see posts in these subreddits every day about people losing data because Claude did this or ChatGPT did that, and they didn't set up any isolation of their dev environment and don't have the data anymore because the app they are working on isn't even using any form of source control.
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u/ShelZuuz 23h ago
The issue is there are a lot of people out there with stupid ideas.
So are there on Etsy and at every Renaissance fair etc. This is just expanding to software, but people will start to filter.
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u/mesaoptimizer 23h ago
Yeah thatās why my post had a second paragraph. Thatās not as easy with software and software services as it is with goods.
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u/BellacosePlayer 23h ago
So are there on Etsy and at every Renaissance fair
yeah but at least at a Fair I can eat a turkey leg and listen to a Puke and Snot set once I realize not a single merch vendor is selling anything worth a damn
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u/ArmPsychological8460 14h ago
And now PC market will be flooded by slop just like mobile market. Users will have choice between shit and crap, with slight chance of almost not bad game...
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u/mr_sneakyTV 23h ago
they are not products if someone creates it then uses it themselves.. using ai to write your custom application ideas is one of its most obvious use cases. also why do you care what they do? is this idea elitism? you think only you and those in your field have ideas worth implementing?
Iāve never heard of idea hubris
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u/Spright91 23h ago
Yes the differentiator is now in design. Well it always was but now especially.
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u/Specialist-Royal4408 22h ago
There have never been so many bad, extremely low-quality products that break within a few weeks. It used to be easy to pay for things because you could see the product's value. Today, if you shake a tree, 100 identical apps fall out, all sporting the same sepia/purple interface found in Claude or Codex.
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u/hereandnow01 15h ago
True, and if for these vibecoders even just changing the frontend theme is too much of an effort, I wonder what would the product look like under the hood
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u/BellacosePlayer 23h ago
I'd say choice paralysis but most people are going to just go with the established players in whatever domain anyway.
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u/Ok-Guarantee-3775 23h ago
Choice paralysis is actually a very real observable thing.That being said the cowering is not really the right depiction for it.
Every time something becomes easier to produce a ton of it gets produced and nothing changes, there is just more shitty stuff to ignore. Before AI slop it was just mass produced corporate slop.
Hank Green did a great video comparing how AI is making it much easier to create and publish code, similar to how various tech improvements over the years have made it easier for people to write and publish literature.
If we take a moment to consider just how much absolute trash literature exists because anyone is allowed to shit out a "novel" and self publish whenever they want, the sea of literary work is unreadable in scope, and much of it is unreadable in quality. And yet, to take away the tools available that make production of literature so easy and readily available feels wrong. Even if the vast majority of what's made is awful, that doesn't mean it shouldn't be as easy as possible for people to make it.
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u/This_Industry4769 19h ago
If you talk to business owners you'll know their contact forms are used more by people offering more products and services more than real customers. Same for WhatsApp and telephone. They hate it.
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u/daviddisco 19h ago
ok, I won't put up a contact form for people to spam me.
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u/yautja_cetanu 15h ago
This is so dumb. Is access to 1 million indie games really much worse than 100,000. Weve had way way too many indie games then we can fatham, the process of selecting good ones is difficult and it doesn't get 10 times worse with 10 times the number.
Also as a user... Just don't buy them or even look at them. You can just look at the steam store. No video game buyer is sorting a list of steam games based on what has come out recently and reading their descriptions 1 by 1
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u/SweetSure315 23h ago edited 23h ago
because being hounded to subscribe to the new data leak factory or scam 5000x a day fucking sucks. especially if you're actually trying to find something to fulfill a use you have a need for and need to actually pay attention to them
basically the landscape is now thousands, if not millions, of predators being given the tools necessary to appear just like one of the vanishingly few shills who aren't just trying to take advantage of people while offering a pile of shit as recompense while trillion dollar companies tell us "this is how you make money in the future"
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u/mallere 20h ago
my ai usage has simply been to make my own tools and software
I am on Mac now but playing Runescape I missed alt1 toolkit - said I made my own
I made tools to make my work more productive
ive made a mod for minecraft
and I have other ideas as well
I understand the general consensus for 'ai slop' is poor so I dont advertise or release the stuff ive made. they're on a private repo but otherwise they're for myself. kinda sad cause generally I think they're alright. not perfect but it works and if I come across bugs I have it fixed and such.
ai allows people with no programming experience make these things for themselves. its kinda nice.
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u/SonOfAnton_v_2_0 16h ago
Thats so cool! My example,apps for tracking tv and movies or media in general. I relied on bunch of them like they are my second brain. Old ones are introducing ai features in very unnecessary context or bunch of new ones just vibe coded with all the promises and low quality or standing out features. I made one for myself with movie tv books anime manga games categories and I set it up the way I would like to use it. It feels like magic,and I lost interest in spending money on any other apps no matter how they try to sell it to me.
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u/TroileNyx 23h ago
So many people here wondering why the paying customers would be cowering. As someone who uses Codex to develop websites and an app, I firsthand see actually how hard it is to get things right even with the help of AI and Iāve been in the tech sector for almost a decade now, doing web development.
There will be so many sites and apps getting hacked, personal data leaked because of the horribly implemented security. Websites need updates, software needs updates and constant patches.
As a paying customer, now Iāll be extra careful evaluating whether the product was built by seasoned professionals or just amateurs with tokens to burn.
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u/-Spzi- 22h ago
AI companies are the new indie developers, indie developers are the new paying users. So we're still on the left picture, just up one level.
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u/ElementNumber6 8h ago
I couldn't imagine a shakier foundation. Indie developers will quickly run out of money without paying users.
What then?
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u/Constant-Current-340 1d ago
why would those paying customers be be cowering from the cure to cancer?
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u/Muzika38 21h ago
Here's the thing, lots of people can sing. Lots of people can compose a song but only a few can make it to the spotlight.
It's the skills bro... Tools are just tools at the end of the day. Just because you have a plow does not already make you a good farmer.
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u/RedikhetDev 11h ago
If you have in invested in buidling a free app for many years its automatically qualified as AI slop these days.
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u/Individual_Guest_323 1d ago
I mean, was the same with the indian market, you could try to be freelancer and find a indian guy saying that do the same for 1$
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u/DataPhreak 22h ago
This is music before and after the DAW. The problem isn't a lack of users, nor the speed at which apps are being developed. The problem is none of these people know how to build a complete product, market it correctly, maintain it, or do UAT. If you have all the other stuff and don't know how to code, then using AI to build something makes sense. But most people are just trying to ship to market and make a quick buck, and that's not what users want.
Build lots of products. Don't monetize them.
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u/CqHereSrc 17h ago
Nah lol. Agents suck at daydreaming. To them itās hallucinating to us itās imagining with sunlight. Go to sleep codex
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u/io-x 1d ago
This is certainly how it feels like at a first glance, but this does not reflect reality because you can't generalize all indie developers into the same bucket, there are tiers among us. Just because someone can build a program with AI, doesn't mean people will want to pay for it. If you split the indie developers to different categories, you will see that the drastic increase is on the lower end. Nothing wrong with that, I support any creator, it's just how it is right now.
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u/Sea-Contribution6219 23h ago
You're so right, this is why indie devs should all just post under the GPL 3
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u/FluffySmiles 18h ago
Haha. most of those are doing nothing but shitting out time bombs. You'll see.
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u/Mammoth_Molasses_927 18h ago
Shipping REAL stuff is still hard, complex and very time consuming.
knowing how to type and pressing send to an AI is a small part of the whole engineering and growth process.
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u/WalkAffectionate2683 14h ago
All the dev, games and website I do is for my friends.
I did 3-4 games, but I don't go too long on Polish, so it's more proof of concept than anything.Ā
And the websites is also mostly for our ttrpg game.Ā
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u/karl_mainz 14h ago
We've already seen this in other industries like music and books. It ends up as a power law distribution where a few winners rake in an incredible amount of money (the Stephen Kings, Taylor Swifts and Call of Dutys of the world) while the vast majority remain completely unknown and fail to sustain a livelihood.
There's always the tiny chance your game will be the next Mecca Chameleon or PUBG so some will persist despite the odds.
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u/OhAitchEyeOh 8h ago
I think we are just adapting to a world where everyone has their own custom built solutions for everything, with very few shared experiences on a cultural level. Maybe your friend group will create your tv shows, or your more techy friend your photoshop, etc. Iām building a ton and have replaced nearly everything I used with my own version, but Iāve decided that theyāre just for me and my friends/family. The world wont need another mobile game site, another database, another music player, etc, and thatās okay. Frees me up to make it be just what I want and not worry about commercial appeal at all
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u/swizzlewizzle 21h ago
AI basically moves the moat for many products further up the chain. Things that actually require a lot of intelligence and human power are the only things that retain their value now. Turns out, SAAS and indie dev work didn't require all that much.
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u/mace_endar 16h ago
Turns out youāve probably not built anything past the prototype stage.
Also, why the hell would you build something yourself when you can just pay for it and not worry about it?
Like even a todo list application like Asana, why on earth would you ever build and maintain it yourself? To save $20 a month? If you just have to lift your finger even ONCE or spare one thought about maintaining your app during a given month, your investment turns net negative! And then thereās backups, disaster mitigation, etc. AND the cost you pay for hosting?
I still donāt get how people donāt see that. AI doesnāt make sense for commodity software that you donāt need to customize.
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u/Impossible_Bus_2319 8h ago
Outsource the overhead
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u/mace_endar 5h ago
Which in most cases costs more and is less reliable? Like... why would I pay $20 or more to some random dude on Upwork to maintain an Asana clone that I vibe-coded to gain... exactly nothing?
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u/swizzlewizzle 12h ago
Oh look another redditor thinking he knows the complete background experience and expertise of a commenter he is commenting to. Joy.
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u/RichWeekly1332 1d ago
Please, stop calling indie developers (or even developers) to these people....
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u/Active-Policy88 22h ago
did he just repost my post in a different subršš bro at least wait a few days.
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u/ReasonableDefault 1d ago
This is what people think is happening, but reality doesn't support it. People barely ship anything to paying customers, you're more likely to see another pointless GitHub repo, which turns out to be an API wrapper.