So where are all the AI apps?
March 16, 2026
Fans of vibecoding and agentic tools say they are 2x as productive, 10x as productive – maybe 100x as productive! Someone built an entire web browser from scratch. Amazing!
So, skeptics reasonably ask, where are all the apps? If AI users are becoming (let’s be conservative) merely 2x more productive, then where do we look to see 2x more software being produced? Such questions all start from the assumption that the world wants more software, so that if software has gotten cheaper to make then people will make more of it. So if you agree with that assumption, then where is the new software surplus, what we might call the “AI effect”?
Anecdotally, many developers are reporting significant improvements in their productivity.
So it’s fair to ask the question, where is all the software they are developing?
Here are the folks from AnswerAI. I look in particular at the Python ecosystem. In fairness, not a bad place to look for signals given Python is so intimately connected to AI and software development.
And in short, they find not particularly strong signals of an uptick in developer productivity.
