Comment by maplethorpe
4 hours ago
If there was a website called InfiniteAppStore, which contained every app imaginable, and where you could type in your search and it would return the code for that app, would you find that as satisfying to use as Claude Code?
On the surface this does not sound as satisfying, because it more resembles shopping than coding. But once Claude Code is finally tuned to do its job perfectly, you will essentially be using that infinite app store. You're actually using it right now, every time you use Claude Code — just an imperfect version of it.
If you enjoy using AI because it allows you to "will anything into existence", it's because the process is currently imperfect. Using Claude Code is closer to shopping than coding, but because the process is obfuscated, it feels like you're the one making the products in the shopping catalogue every time you place an order.
In that scenario the 'joy of creation' would just shift to the 'joy of discovery'. Both of which are innate to humans.
> In that scenario the 'joy of creation' would just shift to the 'joy of discovery'. Both of which are innate to humans.
They may be innate, but that doesn't mean they are related or that one is a good substitute for the other.
I agree. Thinking about it a little more, I've realized that people create things today even if unnecessary (e.g. grow their own food), a lot of it for the satisfaction of it.
So we would still build stuff, but it would not be out of necessity.
Trust me, the two are not the same, and are orders of magnitude different in terms of human satisfaction.
When I walk down a street, I get 10 people stopping me to ask "Where did you get that?". When I tell them I made it, their heads explode. I know which side of that interaction is more satisfying.
We also go all-out for Halloween, and at the big Halloween festival there is literally a line down the street of people waiting to take photos with us. We created something amazing.
People aren't going to line up for slop.
In media there was a rule 1-9-90. One creates, 9 comment, 90 use or are silent/don’t care.
Richard Branson realized that a company starts to behave differently when it reaches more than stuff of 135 people that coincides with average number of people you can consider as personally known to you.
Context switching is a bitch. You cannot do it for a long time. Abundance brought by AI will somehow consolidate as people cannot digest everything created by it.
There are more than 45,000 models avail at HF (if I remember it right). Choose wisely :)
Do you think that creation only comes with hard work?
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For folks who are not familiar, this is "The Library of Babel" by Borges. There is no creating, just selecting among characters sequences we already knew were possible.
If there was an infinite App Store, we wouldn't have scarcity and I'd be doing literally anything else other than selling my time for money. I'd also be killed because there's no point to my owners/the world keeping me around anymore in that scenario, except, maybe for my winning personality/companionship.
To be fair, the shoppers of the InfiniteAppStore can still bikeshed endlessly about the merchandise.