I'm seeing a ton of niche apps being built that otherwise wouldn't have been. As an example, NegPy is an app that gives you much more precise control when working with film negatives, and has been built largely w/ AI tools. There are a small couple of other photography related niche apps I've seen taking off, for example, for managing your Fuji recipes. I'm working on a Lightroom replacement myself, which I never would've taken on before AI tools.

In terms of personal life, I certainly find AI tools pretty useful especially given how awful Google is now, and coding tools are indispensable at work.

Do you build things for yourself? I’ve unlocked tremendous value just by scratching my own itches so to speak.

But taking those bespoke contraptions to market is not something I want to out effort into. Especially when anyone can just clone it with AI.

The AI revolution might not show up so easily in GDP.

I wrote a golf simulator that helps visualize golf architecture with help from Gemini. When I published my first piece, I got an email from Tom Doak and the head of data science at Arccos. An absolutely insane response for my dumb blog. I was invited to the Renaissance Cup this year, almost certainly because of that post; golf nerds can tell you what a huge deal that is.

The blog post is here for anyone interested: https://golfcoursewiki.substack.com/p/i-spent-the-last-month...

Things are happening… and quickly, even if we are not quite to the point where VC’s are ready fund prototypes of robots to fold your laundry. Most of what’s happening is nerds finally building the project they’ve always dreamed of outside the traditional funding pathways.

I suspect the plan is not “make 6T revenue by having AI add >6T value in new and improved software”, but rather it is more like “make 6T in revenue by having AI substitute for ~6T cost or human labor”.

I'm de-FAANG-ing my life. One AI subscription can do the lift of a lot of other subscriptions when it comes to putting OSS tools on my homelab, and I truly don't need _everything_ when I'm on the go.

Exactly. Software seems to be getting worse. The internet is getting filled with more and more bloat and falsehoods.

I have yet to see any truly great products made with heavily agentic coding. Correct me if I'm wrong?

I remember making a comment here on HN a couple weeks ago.[0]

One of the things that was promised in 2024 was a "deflationary spiral" for physical goods and the economy in general because of insane efficiencies that AI would supposedly bring. I believed that whole-heartedly and I was a huge AI fanboi even as my artists friends and Lib Arts friends were complaining.

We're in almost October 2026 now and they're nowhere in sight. We have a bunch of unreliable agents that do clerical and design work here and there, but where are all the industrial productivity boosts? If AI were so good, large industries and factories should be adopting them as a never-before-seen scale. Where are they?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49735506

Anecdata to be sure, but my personal experience with AI has been that I've used it to do stuff that is certainly useful but far from significantly transformative. It definitely helps make certain tasks easier and faster, but it doesn't do so consistently enough with enough of those tasks to make my overall life experience feel that much different.

Maybe I'm using it wrong, or maybe the tooling around AI hasn't yet caught up to the capability of AI models. It feels somewhat wrong to me that the benefit any individual person gets from AI is derived from their own prompting rather than autonomous systems that run in the background for them. But either way, the massive investment in AI compute seems very disproportionate to the actual benefit the average person, or even a tech savvy person, is seeing day-to-day right now.

computer scientists/software engineers and their completely messed up sense of how long it takes for things to actually take a hold in real life is always a bit amusing to me.

Half a year is not a lot of time when it comes to meaningful change in directions that matter.

We have replaced multiple 100k contracts from SaaS vendors with fully AI created alternatives. AI is a tool. In the hands of talented and efficient workplaces, it is like any tool. But, if you give the latest DeWalt OMT to a person who doesn't know or is scared of it, and put them in an organization that is full of politics and bureaucracy, then that tool is going to be useless.

Most big companies are performance theaters see token maxxing as one prominent example.

But go and talk to small companies. What they are able to pull off is just incredible. More features in shorter time. Improved UX and client satisfaction.

On a society level 6 months is nothing. This will take about 10 years to penetrate all organizations I assume.

It's actually is an interesting point. On personal level I've built a few products but I did spend a ton of time exploring things I was really curious about that will never amount to anything practical beyond satisfying my curiosity.

are you under the impression 6 months is a long amount of time?

I just invented a simple upgrade script for my father's ancient Fedora install. I've gone from version 33 to the latest(44) with a simple utility I one shot in 5 minutes.

Since Fedora moves old releases to some mirror it's a nightmare to update old installs.

Now I did it very conveniently. Did I build a space ship with the help of ChatGPT? No. Is it useful to me? Yes.

I'm doing many much cooler things that I haven't released yet but I am launching projects I never dreamed I could do as a solo dev in 2-3 months.

Models are obviously not powerful enough. If they were you'd be able to fire all employees that do knowledge work.

I think it's more, let's layoff 20% of the people, give the rest some of the money saved in tokens, deliver features a lot faster (or at least expect them to). Jury's out how long this can continue before the "nobody understands the code anymore" chickens come home to roost.

But I bet you’re making restaurant reservations so much faster than before!

In early May, I broke my leg. Doctor eventually said get on a bike trainer and recover. So, I bought a trainer, didn't like the software that came with it, "wrote" my own with AI. Since it is just written with AI, I made it open source and free for everyone. I'm now months ahead of scheduled recovery. I'd call that a success.

https://github.com/RideControlOrg/RideControl

> Maybe it's just me, but nothing has changed in my life so far.

Manifest whatever you want!

Strongly disagree, and I am one of those who believe this is a bubble.

At home, Claude has been a god send to make it easy to learn using linux, and all sort of technologies. My personal learning curve has gone steep at an age where people start flattening out (40s).

At work, we use AI to automate 50-75% of our work. Better quality output, more productivity. I work in a bank. But the average plumber or electrician benefits too. In minutes they can become an expert into some tech they never touched before.

I thought crypto was bullshit, web 3.0 [corrected] was bullshit, meta-universe was bullshit. AI is bubbly, not sure how you can justify multi-trillon valuations for companies with 80% operating margin in a competitive market where you can switch to the competitor with a drop down. But the productivity gains will be massive for the economy. I think the economy will ultimately reap the reward, not so much the labs. But I may be wrong.

What we've seen in the past with generally applicable technologies generally take 20 years to show up as productivity.

There was a Bank of Korea study that showed AI saved workers about 1.5 hours a week, with with no increase in output. Just because I'm more productive at a task, it doesn't mean the people up or downstream of my work benefit. And my time probably gets sucked into meetings. (In the study, solo entrepreneurs did benefit--probably because they own everything end to end)

In term of cool little projects, there's all sort of things that people are doing to improve their own lives or make interesting things. No shame if you're incurious about those.

I mean, I don't know that there is some sort of AI equivalent of the lifechanging magic of rural electrictrifcation. But I don't know that it was ever likely in the near term anyway.

I formally proved an important 2025 CS paper (which I did not write) in Lean last month, it took like 2 or 3 weeks of intermittently poking at claude to keep going. AFAIK, it is the first rust-like borrow checker completely formally proven in Lean.

I'm currently using it as a basis for building a systems language with Rust's memory guarantees, but with new features like generators and co-routines, and effects instead of colored functions. The fact that the borrow checker's properties are formally proven means I can trust more of what Claude is doing than you normally would be able to do.

I run my own custom version of BlueBubbles and a locally run clone of Wispr Flow. In addition, I've vibe-coded lots of nonsense throwaway apps that helped me with a one time boring task.

Wouldn't have been possible.

Among a few things ive boticed one notable is devops has been less of a blocker / faster to address issues. Most of the time the asks are trivial but incompetent Devops couldn't figure it out. Now they can ask ai and through their elevated permissions quickly solve the problem.

Faster Linux screensavers

> I'm wondering, where are all those great things that were created with them

Maybe you are not looking in the right place. Maybe your expectations are not right. Maybe the revolution isn't a super app but a mini app. Not an app with code written so beautifully it could win a Pulitzer but an app that will be used a couple of times and then discarded.

I am trying to offer an alternate viewpoint (I don't necessarily support it but I thought it was needed).

thing is, I'm creating great things for our internal operations _from_ local models.

The idea that the commercial value will all be capitalized is a farce. Qwen3.8 seems to me to have hit the threshold to these things being good enough without every buying a single cloud service.

That should scare cloud AI more than it obviously does.

The responses you’re getting are quite telling. LLMs have unlocked a whirlwind of shit where we can no longer trust most things, communities are suffering with noise, lack of water, increased energy prices, mass surveillance is rapidly increasing, private information is being leaked and sold…

But hey, you can now close yourself off even more, not interact with anyone or develop a skill to get a dumb bash script for a menial task you wouldn’t miss that much anyway if you didn’t have it. Woopie, totally worth it!

You don't think enabling a mass surveillance state as a great thing?

I heard they've been great for the advertising industry, who can now shove personalized slop down all our throats without having to pay animators

Keep in mind wealth is not a fixed thing. If AI makes their businesses more productive, it would allow the creation of more wealth, giving them more money to pay for AI with.

This of course hinges on the big if: does AI create wealth? I think yes, but maybe not $6 trillion of it in five years.

Customers coming up with it is basically fine*, but it's also why the SpaceX IPO chose to use "TAM" as a big number to dangle before investors: if you can do the work of {$6T + markup}/year worth of desk jobs, that's your customers.

However, customers coming up with the money is the easy half of the problem. The hard part is having them pay you.

Wikipedia's valuation is on the small side of {number of people on the internet worldwide} * {peak price of Encyclopaedia Britannica} † despite containing a lot more content.

LLMs can only chase high margins while they're ahead of their competitors; the moment the investment stalls, open weighs catch up, they loose their edge. Cloud compute providers still win on supplying inference, but there too competition will likely lower margins, not justify huge valuations.

NVIDIA may remain as valuable as today, but their P/E ratio will likely shrink a lot even while keeping up the price.

Model makers still have a problem here even if the tech is so useful it rapidly grows the economy: "free" is right behind them almost immediately after they stop.

* under the assumption the tech is real; there's plenty of people here on Hacker News who still dismiss it as a "scam"

† that would be about 13 trillion USD, from what I read

> Do we really expect all the world’s corporations to suddenly up their annual spend by 1,000% on average? Why?

If they keep replacing employees with AI, that is indeed the direction.

"Do we really expect all the world’s corporations to suddenly up their annual spend by 1,000% on average? Why?" Because they will replace people with tools I am guessing?

In a recession, too. You have to ask where the money even enters the funnel.

you might make a hypothesis they'd offset operations costs like headcount for this but I think the counterpoint is stronger, if they benefit from increased productivity in your example, why not run more net production from same input.

Still though, the thesis seems based on an assumption that the companies would experience either major growth or major efficiency gain, neither of which really pass the smell test to me. Option 1 growth - money has to come from somewhere ultimately? Option 2 efficiency - put into profit rather than simple offset to AI provider?

Or the AI providers get companies hooked with subsidized pricing that unwinds later and you end up with the Uber/AirBNB situation of market capture and good product reverting to mean level of price/quality over time. Tinfoil hat thinks it ultimately gets squeezed out of retail investors in index funds.

The global GDP is $126T, a 5% productivity increase would correspond to $6.3T.

So, I have the following thoughts:

How much more productive can AI for knowledge work realistically make the global economy? 5%, 10%, 20%?

What if it also does robotics soon and can be deployed in manufacturing and construction? Can we get 50% more productive, or 200%?

Then there's science, medicine, and so on. Who is to say what happens if AI solves also that?

While I do not know if AI will be capable for these use cases, I see no reason to believe it unlikely that AI could be applicable to eg. robotics and speed up production by factor 3x.

Total software developer comp (worldwide) is ~$1T

No, they are dropping expensive people for cheap people who can steer AI. That will reduce their spend by quite a bit.

> enterprise productivity tooling market

AI is not a replacement for powerpoint and excel. You can't substitute those.

White collar worker salaries is ~$30T+ global.

> Do we really expect all the world’s corporations to suddenly up their annual spend by 1,000% on average? Why?

Because spend on "enterprise productivity tooling" (or whatever category they want to place AI spend in) can now increasingly offset human labor cost.

anecdotally, my AI aka personal productivity spending has gone up something like that

I think we've barely scratched the surface of available 'evil' applications for AI that will be immensely powerful. Building, for example, an application capable of building personalized emotionally targeted advertisements based on a user profile would be incredibly effective and probably expensive but I bet it would pay dividends.

MSFT office suite alone sells $.1 trillion a year

I truly don't think anyone serious believes that, but if they pretend to believe it and preach it aggressively they might make out with an historic payday and stick the rest of us with the bill. People did the same with Crypto, with NFT's, with a bunch of things for as long as the ball is rolling.

Because they’ll be able to just fire all their employees and redirect the spend to AI. That’s the current delusion.

> Do we really expect all the world’s corporations to suddenly up their annual spend by 1,000% on average? Why?

because AI is gonna make them so much more productive of course. /s

it seems fairly obvious to me that once ai becomes as good as a worker, people will pay a workers wages to use it - 24/7, can't quit, can't complain that badly, no lunch breaks

productivity tooling replaces employees

AI is the second Industrial Revolution! You cannot use outdated notions. The nature of work and value creation itself is changing. Those who do not embrace AI will be left behind. Soon AI will accelerate in its ability to self-improve resulting in general artificial intelligence. This will result in not just our economy reaching the next level but will illuminate the very nature of knowledge and existence. We will ascend becoming beings made of pure energy.

The article says $6T by 2031 and it's global spending, not just in the US.

> Bain forecasts that annual spending on AI infrastructure might hit $1.5 trillion by 2031.

So maybe in 5yrs it will need enough revenue to cover $1.5T in capex spend globally in a year, investments which as the article mentions is also being supported by governments in "the UAE, Saudi Arabia, the EU, South Korea and the US". ... Or spending growth could lower over the next couple years to be more realistic.

missing the forest for the trees

sure there's $30T of opportunity here, but how much of that will be lost from people being unable to consume like they do now from being out of work or the same companies participating in this market losing the desire to pay white collar workers what they pay them now?

someone's gotta buy those $2-5M SFHs in the Bay and the ~$6/gal gas and the $15-20 burgers and...

COVID sure as hell proved that we are a long ways away from people being fine with contributing to UBI, so...

> these companies are gunning for knowledge worker salaries

I think there's a kind of arrogance involved here in how they value what "knowledge workers" do. On the the outside they see some documents written, spreadhsheets filled out, forms submitted, emails sent and conclude AI could do all of that.

It's true AI can do a lot of the mechanics of it, but the assumption that there is nothing beyond the pure mechanics of it to me is highly untested and history would bet against it. Some significant part of it sits genuinely within the human relationship component that is almost definitionally not doable by a computer.

there‘s another option. It could be both. The labs are never able to recoup their massive investments, eventually causing a huge loss on the stock market, AND the efficiency gains from tech they pioneered but failed to capitalize on wipes out millions of jobs.

(3) it could be real but with new jobs and increased output rather than depression era unemployment.

> I think what's lost on the general public who mainly thinks AI is ChatGPT,

There are so many people who have never used Claude Code or Codex who think that Google's AI results are representative of what AI can do.

> I think some people will make a lot of money and more people will lose a lot of money.

---

Yeah, this is exactly right. The numbers look impossible because they _are_ impossible. The _vast majority_ of AI spend is wasted and the vast majority of AI companies are going to go bankrupt. There are _still_ going to be unimaginable amounts of wealth earned by the survivors.

Same thing that happened to blue collar work witch used to be the path to the middle class before the 1990s. The economy managed to create plenty of wealth without doing anything for 40% of the population.

The headline is phrased as a conditional, this is perfectly normal usage

I think most people would not continue to code if their coding agents stopped working, just like if the internet went down.

I agree its not on the same level as the internet/electricity but its been quite a lot more impactful than you are giving it credit for, and that has only been increasing over time.

If agentic coding isn't dramatically changing your productivity you're getting left behind. There's a clear difference between vibe coding and AI assisted software / systems engineering from how I think about things. With AI you can be massively more productive. I do a lot of things beyond code and this is what I've built in 2026 (quick snip from scc, it has proper excludes for node_modules and other pulled in deps that I didn't build) from ~code/ on my dev box:

  ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  Language            Files       Lines    Blanks  Comments       Code Complexity
  ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  TypeScript         10,705   2,445,724   191,695    71,737  2,182,292    167,330
  JSON                1,435     604,218        58         0    604,160          0
  Rust                1,260     718,912    56,372    57,773    604,767     65,562
  Markdown            1,087     162,160    36,375         0    125,785          0
  SQL                 1,046     129,795     6,142     7,389    116,264      1,344
  Python                705     168,359    22,710    23,235    122,414     17,962
  JavaScript            657     209,397     8,824     7,587    192,986     45,383
  ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  Total              19,009   4,903,248   353,289   186,252  4,363,707    326,094
  ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  Estimated Cost to Develop (organic) $179,262,721
  Estimated Schedule Effort (organic) 98.79 months
  Estimated People Required (organic) 161.19
  ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  Processed 206,138,543 bytes, 206.139 megabytes (SI)
  ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

If the market crashes, and I can buy a TB of TPU on the cheap, I can host 4.1 flash myself. :D

Open source models are just going to... disappear?

No. The vast majority of SWE are not going back to 'hand coding' so this will not happen.

An issue is that if you’d have believed him two years ago and taken your money out of the market or even shorted it, you’d have lost money over and over again while he’s continued to pipe exactly the same tune.

“Being right at the wrong time is as good as being wrong” - Howard Marx

I wish people would realize that Zitron is nothing but a grifter who saw an avenue for content and went all in.

I don’t even disagree with some or even a lot of his takes, it’s just he is singularly a content generator with a track to run on. Look at his previous work, it’s much of the same kind of attempts at being relevant. To me he’s nothing more than a drive time radio host, shouting about something just to fill the air

Knowing that Zitron wrote about this makes me think that 6T will actually be reached, given Zitron's abysmal track record.

1. This is global, not USA only

2. Global GDP will be ~$165T by 2031

3. This is not $6T of ChatGPT subscription revenue. The article actually specifically says of the $6T, $200-$400B would be subscription and AI app revenue in 2031.

4. The $6T figure is AI "economic enablement". Drugs, robotics, research, coding, manufacturing, materials, etc...

It's less* than that, and if AI replaces workers at that scale it will create such a problem* the system would fall before these companies manage to demonstrate they escaped bankruptcy.

*https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2026/09/22/how-americ...

Why are you restricting it to US?

Yes but for most people electricity is an absolute necessity, the average person could easily live without AI should it disappear from their lives.

The magic is that some of them will get some not-trivial fraction of that $6T. Feels like the .com boom all over again - most of these companies won’t make it, but the few that do are going to be FAANG level monsters. All the investors want a slice of that.

Boomers will stop paying for enterprise once it stops being cool

Chatgptd emails are not adding value anywhere

Very few professions if any get anything remotely like the value coders get from LLMs right now Maybe lawyers or doctors but it's just way too risky error wise A comma off in a legal doc can end your career

If everyone loses their jobs there will be no demand for the products and services those workers used to create.

A perfect ouroboros.

Except that it would be priced based on pass-through prices rather than existing value perception. It used to cost hundreds to send a letter on horseback, it costs pennies to send an email, consumers aren't going to tolerate spending hundreds when they know it take pennies to send.

Models are getting cheaper, and more efficient, but I don't see how they cross the threshold of full autonomous intelligence in the way that an employee needs to be fully accountable for their actions.

What about the part where workers take less money?