YounesDz

I’ve followed BetaList and similar directories for years, and I regularly read side-project posts here on Hacker News.

With the explosion of AI coding assistants, I expected a noticeable increase in useful small SaaS tools and practical software. But honestly, I’m not sure I see it.

HN users have always built impressive things. One example I remember: a developer who quickly built a simple website to help his family find COVID vaccine appointments, it cost about $50 to build. Stories like that show how many practical builders are here.

Yet even with AI making coding easier, the quantity (and quality) of useful tools doesn’t seem to have increased dramatically.

It reminds me of this line from Charles Bukowski:

"but as God said, crossing his legs, I see where I have made plenty of poets but not so very much poetry."

Sometimes it feels like a modern version might read:

"as VC-backed tech said, sitting on their laurels, I see we created a lot of AI hype and vibe-coding platforms but not so much useful software."

What do you think the real bottleneck is now? Ideas, distribution, taste, persistence; or something else?

I read here a lot about (maybe a mythical creature) called 10x engineer and today it occurred to me the above question.