Why aren’t you using AI to get rich?

The article Where’s the Shovelware? Why AI Coding Claims Don’t Add Up by Mike Judge is an interesting read that makes the following argument, more or less,

“If so many developers are so extraordinarily productive using these tools, where is the flood of shovelware? We should be seeing apps of all shapes and sizes, video games, new websites, mobile apps, software-as-a-service apps — we should be drowning in choice. We should be in the middle of an indie software revolution. We should be seeing 10,000 Tetris clones on Steam.”

As bad as the world of existing non-LLM-generated slop already is, the author’s point is that it’s not gotten measurably worse.

If AI allowed pretty much anyone to build an app—the proposal buoying the AI bubble—then we’d be flooded with a tsunami of crapware rather than just drowning in a ocean of it.

“[…] billions of dollars have been invested in these tools. Billions of dollars will continue to be invested in these tools. The problem is that they’re being sold and decisions are being made about them — which affect real people’s lives — as if they work today. Don’t parrot that nonsense to me that it’s a work in progress. It’s September 2025, and we’ve had these tools for years now, and they still suck. Someday, maybe they won’t suck, but we’d better see objective proof of them having an impact on actually shipping things on the large.”

From the comments on Reddit:

“Today (actually not joking) a manager told me”

“AI should make you 10x more productive, what takes you 10 days should take you 1.”

“Which I figured was bullshit because Tuesday he asked”

“Can we compile OpenSSL v3.6 for RHEL-5? Docker makes this easy right?”

“IDK how AI makes me 10x more productive when I spent 4 hours in meetings to realize we actually needed to update our LuaJIT (on RHEL-10) not compile a version of OpenSSL (???)”

Streetlight effectThis is a much better point to consider. People are searching for their keys on the sidewalk under the streetlamp when they lost them in the bushes. Getting people to address inefficiencies in priority order would be a much bigger lever than letting them take the easy way out by bike-shedding with AI or by trying to force people to USE AI DAMMIT to run in the wrong direction.

What’s the point of doing something faster when it doesn’t need to be done in the first place?