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points by p2detar 2 days ago | 0 comments

That and there would be a kind of service by Apple itself that builds apps for you on the fly.

I don't think we are anywhere near it yet but perhaps in the future the App Store is a single app that conjures up whatever you ask of it. It could be called "The Last One".

[–] aurareturn 2 days ago

This is where I believe Apple is making a mistake by not going all in on AI.

People think it's some kind of genius move or very Apple-like move to not join the AI race.

But who is actually going to build apps on the fly better, faster for you? Siri or Opus 9? Siri or GPT 10 Astra?

When many tasks are done better on a single AI app, the iPhone moat will be greatly diminished which will open up competitors to iOS and Android.

[–] pocksuppet 2 days ago

Are there any real examples of apps built on the fly better and faster?

[–] aurareturn 2 days ago

Many requests on ChatGPT used to be able handled by some app before.

I paste a screenshot and ChatGPT automatically knows to extract the text for me. Needed an expensive/inconsistent app before.

[–] ben_w 14 hours ago

Sure, though right now this is due to all the mainstream apps that run on (e.g.) my phone being bloated by ads and tracking from a thousand random analytics firms, plus all the ad-boosted results in the App Store.

There's really no good reason I should have found it easier to ask Claude to make me a general purpose card game engine with a bunch of game rules baked in than to be able to actually find the first non-enshittified app, but thanks to all of that nonsense it was in fact both faster and better to ask Claude. And this without even needing a paid Claude account.

I wouldn't necessarily trust it with e.g. a vibe-coded Duolingo yet, but there's some other, smaller, language apps it can certainly produce at this point, I know because I did some of them last year. Same for turning my Raspberry Pi into a webcam: I'm sure there was already software for it, but asking the AI to do it a year ago was faster and easier than finding it.

And the way things keep speeding up, today's "over a month of iteration and corrective feedback" is next year's "on the fly".

[–] TeMPOraL 2 days ago

Technically, any case where LLM casually writes and runs a nontrivial piece of code to fulfill your random request would qualify.

[–] pocksuppet 1 day ago

One of the qualifiers was "better"