tanelpoderSo where are all the AI apps?
https://www.answer.ai/posts/2026-03-12-so-where-are-all-the-ai-apps.html
I deleted vscode and replaced with a hyper personal dashboard that combines information from everywhere.
I have a news feed, work tab for managing issues/PRs, markdown editor with folders, calendar, AI powered buttons all over the place (I click a button, it does something interesting with Claude code I can't do programmatically).
Why don't I share it? Because it's highly personal, others would find it doesn't fit their own workflow.
This is probably my favorite gain from AI assisted coding: the bar for "who cares about this app" has dropped to a minimum of 1 to make sense. I recently built an app for grocery shopping that is specific to how and where I shop, would be useless to anyone other than my wife. Took me 20 minutes. This is the next frontier: I have a random manual process I do every week, I'll write an app that does it for me.
What exactly were you bale to build in 20 minutes?
Me, and photo editor tool to semi-automate a task of digitizing a few dozen badly scanned old physical photos for a family photo book. Needed something that could auto-straighen and auto-crop the photos with ability to quickly make manual adjustments, Gemini single-shotted me a working app that, after few minutes of back-and-forth as I used it and complained about the process, gained full four-point cropping (arbitrary lines) with snapping to lines detected in image content for minute adjustments.
Before that, it single-shot an app for me where I can copy-paste a table (or a subsection of it) from Excel and print it out perfectly aligned on label sticker paper; it does instantly what used to take me an hour each time, when I had to fight Microsoft Word (mail merge) and my Canon printer's settings to get the text properly aligned on labels, and not cut off because something along the way decided to scale content or add margins or such.
Neither of these tools is immediately usable for others. They're not meant to, and that's fine.
I built a small app to emit a 15 kHz beep (that most adults can't hear) every ten minutes, so I can keep time when I'm getting a massage. It took ten minutes, really, but I guess it's in the spirit of the question.
For 20 minutes of time, I had a simple TTS/STT app that allows me to have a voice conversation with my AI assistant.
More than that. Building a throwaway-transient-single-use web app for a single annoying use kind of makes sense now, sometimes.
I had to create a bunch of GitHub and Linear apps. Without me even asking Codex whipped up a web page and a local server to set them up, collecting the OAuth credentials, and forward them to the actual app.
Took two minutes, I used it to set up the apps in three clicks each, and then just deleted the thing.
Code as transient disposable artifacts.
I posted it recently, but now this works differently https://xkcd.com/1205/
You can get a throw away app in 5 mins, before I wouldn't even bother.
That's fine and all, but how much are you ready to pay to Anthropic and OpenAI to be able to do this? Like, is it worth 100 bucks a month for you to have your own shopping app?
That is an excellent question. For me the answer is yes, but I'm unusual.
Haha great. I guess my wider point is that most people won't be ready to pay for it, and in the end there will be only two ways to monetize for OpenAI et al: Ads or B2B. And B2B will only work if they invest a lot into sales or if the business owners see real productivity gains one the hype has died one.
It's not worth 100 bucks a month for me to have my own shopping app, but maybe it's worth 100 bucks a month to have ready access to a software garden hose that I can use if I want to spew out whatever stupid app comes to my mind this morning.
I'd rather not pay monthly for something (like water) that I'm turning on and off and may not even need for weeks. But paying per-liter is currently more expensive so that's what we currently do.
I think the future is going to be local models running on powerful GPUs that you have on-prem or in your homelab, so you don't need your wallet perpetually tethered to a company just to turn the hose on for a few minutes.
It's easily worth the <$1 in tokens from a Chinese model. You don't need frontier reasoning capabilities to make a personalized grocery list app.