Ask HN: Where are all the disruptive software that AI promised?

Well, in software development is does increase the velocity 10x.

No, you're not! It's only a matter of attention. Today all eyes are on the LLM itself, but the big change is happening underground. I'm not a developer — I'm just a curious arborist who owns a company that prunes trees in Italy. In 4 months we have totally changed our company with the help of AI. AI, LLMs are just tools. It's the use that changes the output!

The signals are there but the usefulness/blast radius is being limited to "I'm not a software developer but I have this specific issue I need to write software to solve. I've done that and here is a Linkedin post explaining what it is and how I did it."

I think we're looking at the wrong demographic/professional sector and throwing up our hands. You have to look at people who don't have as much professional experience with it because everyone you didn't write software in the 2010's is writing it now.

AI-native firms will be a game changer I think, the Black Swan event is approaching.

- I'm seeing lots of internal apps to help our customer success teams.

- I'm seeing prototypes escape Figma and live as code for a faster/closer demo experience for product managers.

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> if AI is such a game changing platform

Again, you need to question the premise. Perhaps all the sales and hype you heard simply wasn't true?

In reality, many organizations have already implemented the AI-based improvements to their systems that they need. That work is done, people are enjoying it. The AI vendors want to take it farther. Some coders want to take it farther. Some leaders are pushing it due to FOMO. But "the masses" do not want more. Step outside of the tech silos, and you'll find that most people do not want more AI than we already have.

If before LLMs it took 20 years to build something, with LLMs it might still take 2-5 years, and they've been around of only 5 years. So, you're asking this too early.

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Because AI only drove down the cost of writing code, not the cost of finding Product-Market Fit. Sure, you can spin up another Notion or Jira clone over the weekend using Cursor or Claude Code now. But getting users to actually migrate their data, change their workflow habits, and pay for it is just as brutally hard as it was a decade ago. Code is just a cheap commodity now, while distribution and trust have become exponentially more expensive

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AI translation is the answer to your question. It is a big of a deal as the invention of the telephone.

They are all the regular software, but with new bugs in it !

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Video games are particularly prominent example of the absence of such apps. You'd think that with the indie market booming we'd be seeing tons of interesting new games as well as game devs sharing their AI workflows and yet there seems to be nothing. I can't recall a single popular game in the past 5 years that would be vibecoded or significantly enhanced by the use of AI.

There is a change, slowly moving forwards. The number of mass produced applications, for everything, everywhere is happening. It is like pollution! A lot of people are trying their luck, building something, from their sofa, some of them with high confidence and no experience.

The disruption is 101% happening but it's mostly invisible from the outside. iI think its not new apps replacing old ones rather the same apps doing things that used to require 3x the headcount.

That said there are a few genuine examples

Cursor basically replaced how a lot of developers write code, Eleven Labs made voiceover work that used to cost thousands into a $5 task, and Gamma turned presentations from a half-day job into 10 minutes none of these replaced entire industries overnight but they each quietly made a whole category of work much much cheaper.