Everyone seems to be reading this chart from Financial Times
Everyone seems to be reading this chart from Financial Times as:
"AI is creating lots of apps nobody wants."
That's not what the research says.
The National Bureau of Economic Research paper's actual finding is that AI creates massive productivity gains in coding, but those gains get bottlenecked as they move through the system: reviews, releases, distribution, and ultimately adoption.
In other words, the hard part was never writing code.
The hard part was everything after.
AI increased the supply of software.
It didn't increase the number of hours people have in a day.
If app releases are up 80% and adoption is flat, that doesn't necessarily mean the apps are bad.
It may simply mean more products are competing for the same finite pool of attention.
The bottleneck hasn't disappeared.
It just moved.