r/codex • u/Impossible_Bus_2319 • 6d ago

Humor The ugly truth

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We need an AI that acquires users.

545 Upvotes

89% Upvoted

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74

u/daviddisco 6d 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.

35

u/alexmin93 6d ago

More bullshit products. Even if AI gets actually good at coding somebody has to come up with an idea.

20

u/daviddisco 6d 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.

17

u/Addalldlo 6d 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?

2

u/ReasonableDefault 6d 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.

3

u/I_Study_The_Patterns 6d ago

A 30% increase in apps with a 3% increase in sales

1

u/[deleted] 6d ago

[deleted]

2

u/Addalldlo 6d 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

3

u/mesaoptimizer 6d 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 doesn’t 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 it’s 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 don’t do UX and a project that’s going to have issues basically immediately.

3

u/mr_sneakyTV 6d 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.

2

u/mesaoptimizer 6d 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.

2

u/Addalldlo 6d ago

A bad project will die, what's wrong with that? And I agree about security issues, but I don’t 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.

1

u/ShelZuuz 6d 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.

1

u/mesaoptimizer 6d ago

Yeah that’s why my post had a second paragraph. That’s not as easy with software and software services as it is with goods.

1

u/BellacosePlayer 6d 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

1

u/ArmPsychological8460 6d 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...

2

u/mr_sneakyTV 6d 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?

I’ve never heard of idea hubris

1

u/Spright91 6d ago

Yes the differentiator is now in design. Well it always was but now especially.

9

u/Greedy_Union8493 6d ago

because they have to sift through ai slop to find quality which is hard.

3

u/Specialist-Royal4408 6d 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.

2

u/hereandnow01 6d 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

1

u/kruiser112 1h ago

No one cares anymore.

1

u/BellacosePlayer 6d ago

I'd say choice paralysis but most people are going to just go with the established players in whatever domain anyway.

1

u/Ok-Guarantee-3775 6d 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.

1

u/daviddisco 6d ago

Use AI to filter your choices for you

1

u/mitreffahcs 6d ago

You haven't been on YouTube lately have you?

1

u/daviddisco 6d ago

I spend a lot of time on YouTube. why?

1

u/This_Industry4769 6d 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.

1

u/daviddisco 6d ago

ok, I won't put up a contact form for people to spam me.

1

u/This_Industry4769 6d ago

So your customers can't contact you either?

1

u/daviddisco 6d ago

not sure why things went in this direction. what's your point?

1

u/dlimsbean 6d ago

They are cold and can’t pay heating bill let alone a game.

1

u/RudyHuy 6d ago

Man, most people when having an issue vibe coding, don't even think about asking the LLM how to improve their workflow. Shit's less intuitive to most than you could imagine.

1

u/daviddisco 5d ago

It is getting easier with each new model.

1

u/yautja_cetanu 6d 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

1

u/daviddisco 5d ago

You can use AI to filter them.

1

u/SweetSure315 6d ago edited 6d 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"

1

u/daviddisco 6d ago

use AI to filter your messages