My friend went to an indie hacker meetup this week and said this:

"i went to indie hacker meetup

so what’s really interesting is that almost everyone is super focused on development.

they build these whole spaceships that generate code, review it, make all kinds of reports, analytics, and so on.

one guy built an entire factory: he has a list of ideas, and agents generate the landing page, the saas, the analytics, and pull everything into one dashboard. straight-up sci-fi.

and they focused optimize all of it like crazy.

and you can really see how comfortable that is for them.

but the most interesting part is that almost none of them have money or traffic.

and nobody knows where to get either one.

you often hear something like, yeah, i should probably do on marketing, but first i’ll finish my super system and then i’ll start.

or in best i would need to make agent that will post to instaram automatically

before, the classic programmer would spend a year writing code, tests, preparing for scale in the basement, and not show anything to anyone.

now it’s even worse: the amount of useless aislop nobody needs has grown massively."

Logically how this ends is you will have 3 groups being successful in startups:

1) VC funded startups with money can still get distribution by ads/UGC and all their money will go there (because building is cheap with AI)

2) influencers will become more important, which is why you see famous people being investors in startups now, they get free equity in startups in return for pushing it to their audience

3) you still get a few creative geniuses who can hack going viral with super original ideas and execution, or ideas that tap really well into the zeitgeist (like that Indo girl with her app she started cause of a TikTok trend), the issue here is everyone thinks they're original and they're not, and also that everyone thinks they understand the zeitgeist and they usually don't, the more you're a normie the less you'll be able to do this, normie is opposite of zeitgeist

this is one of the first very very early glimpses of ai’s impact on the supply side of the economy.

the entirety of the western capitalist apparatus relied on allocation of scarce resources towards production of goods & services, but as the inputs required continue to go to ~zero for both bits & atoms (this will take longer), it’s likely the idea of pricing power will fade away over time (esp if there is real self replication).

& if pricing power fades at scale, capitalism as we know it is roughly over. or on the flip side, in certain areas there might be one entity who has all of the pricing power due to some glitch (exclusive access to a single input, etc). either way you might get edge outcomes over the long horizon where most things become near free but few things become insanely expensive.

Good chart, but I'd read it more carefully before calling it failure.

Releases are a leading indicator. Usage and reviews lag by months, through discovery, ranking, and word of mouth.

The usage line is also an aggregate. A flat total is fully consistent with new AI-built apps gaining users while older apps decay. It can't tell you whether the same apps are winning or new ones are quietly replacing them.

App Store traction is the wrong scoreboard for a lot of this anyway. Most AI-built software is internal tools, B2B, utilities, personal projects. The payoff is cost and capability for the builder, not a chart position. This is a productivity study, and the productivity gain holds even when the output never trends.

Fair point stands: supply has outrun demand so far. But that is a long way from saying the apps don't matter.

Or a point in support can be that founders now realize how difficult it is to sell!!