Pete Koomen
April 24, 2025
When I use AI to build software I feel like I can create almost anything I can imagine very quickly. AI feels like a power tool. It’s a lot of fun.
Many AI apps don’t feel like that. Their AI features feel tacked-on and useless, even counter-productive.
I am beginning to suspect that these apps are the “horseless carriages” of the AI era. They’re bad because they mimic old ways of building software that unnecessarily constrain the AI models they’re built with.To illustrate what I mean by that, I’ll start with an example of a badly designed AI app.
Source: AI Horseless Carriages
As many have observed about new forms of media, they emerge form existing media and in their early stages ‘ape’ the forms of their predecessors.
The same argues Pete Koomen is true for many AI products. A helpful way of thinking about how to build products with AI.
