Cal Newport

That type of thinking only makes sense when you kind of obfuscate this all as some sort of alien brain we don't understand.

No, it's an LLM that's unpredictable plus a very predictable coding harness.

All right, so let's step back here.

What's a better description of the reality where we are right now as these...

programming tools built on LLMs are getting good, right?

Like, I mean, we've only been working on it for less than a year, but we're finding like, oh, this is a great application of LLMs.

We're still trying to figure out what these tools can do and can't do and how best to integrate them.

What's a better description of this reality?

Well, I want to bring one more chart up here on the screen.

It comes from a recent John Byrne Murdoch article in the Financial Times.

I actually saw this chart first through Gary Marcus's newsletter.

Here's the chart.

The title here is Relative Change to Monthly Volumes of iOS App Releases and Reviews.

And here's what we see is over time, starting in 2025, when these AI-based coding, mature coding tools were first released, the number of iOS apps released jumped up.

You got a dark blue line there.

At the same time, let's look at this light blue line, apps with significant usage, it stayed steady and is even falling.

All right.

This, I think, captures something important.

We're seeing that the introduction of these software development tools led to an increase in the number of mobile apps, which are like exactly the type of programs that like basically anyone with like some tokens to burn and cloud code can just spit out.

They're easy for AI to produce.