The big #AI companies told everyone that they could build a whole app using an #LLM.
The real software developers like myself quickly found out that it was absolutely not true, unless it’s a simple little app/website. AI is definitely useful, but it still requires you to know programming if you want to build something awesome.
Because of this, much of the hype has died off. There’s still hype, but people are getting much more realistic about what current LLMs are capable of.
I think a lot people has gotten an app idea at some point - not only developers, but also completely normal people.
The normal people were told that they could use LLMs to build their app ideas. Then they tried, and quickly figured out that it’s actually way harder and the AI still requires a lot of guidance. You can’t just write a prompt and expect the AI to give you a perfectly usable and functional app. If you don’t know how to program, you can’t read and understand the code that the AI writes, which makes it impossible to guide it in a precise way.
I suppose this is the reason for why tools like Lovable are getting less Google searches. A lot of these LLM tools were made for people who couldn’t code and now those people seem to be using AI a lot less for trying to build their app ideas. Basically, they gave up, which means many AI tools are experiencing less growth and perhaps even a decline.
https://youtu.be/tKPtZtsLgUA
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If you write one good AGENTS.md you can then build dozens of working apps off it without touching any code, so I think this is a midbrained take. Proof: https://soapbox.pub/showcase/
You can absolutely build apps with purely AI, but as I wrote, if it’s something complex, you’re gonna have a hard time. Not impossible, but dealing with LLM’s shenanigans will not be fun.
The majority of the apps shown on the website you linked are what I would consider fairly basic.
I mean, many of them pull some data and show it to the user and that’s it.
Isn't that most sites? What's complex?
There's a limit for sure, just trying to convince you the limit is farther than you think if you cater to a specific setup.
Sure, most sites have some kind of REST implementation, but that’s not really what I’m thinking. Of course, AI is good at something incredibly well documented, like REST, WebSockets, or whatever networking protocol it might be. This is the sort of stuff that AI really excels at.
Maybe you only use AI for basic web development.
I’m thinking more in terms of logic-based programming. Building a Markdown parser and using it with a live preview engine similar to Obsidian where it only displays the Markdown syntax on selection. It’s something I’ve been working on recently. AI (Sonnet 4.5 to be more specific) gives a pretty solid foundation, but getting it working with pure AI seems more or less impossible.
This is what I mean when I say that a non-programmer cannot build a complex app using just AI. You need to understand the code, otherwise you’re not getting anywhere, unless it’s a simple website with some fetching of data.