Glad to see Jerod properly follow up on this one:

In September of last year, I covered a post by Mike Judge arguing that AI coding claims don't add up, in which he asked this question:

If so many developers are so extraordinarily productive using these tools, where is the flood of shovelware? We should be seeing apps of all shapes and sizes, video games, new websites, mobile apps, software-as-a-service apps — we should be drowning in choice. We should be in the middle of an indie software revolution. We should be seeing 10,000 Tetris clones on Steam.

I was capital-T Triggered by this, having separately fired off my own retort to Judge's post at the time, and even going so far as creating a Certified Shovelware README badge:

And that badge has gotten a lot of action in the intervening 2 months. Shit, last night I released two—count'em, two—Homebrew formulae last night. I wouldn't have bothered creating either were it not for the rapacious tenacity of coding agents. (Please ignore the fact that both projects exist in order to wrangle said coding agents).

Anyway, I've been thinking a lot about that Shovelware post ever since, and again recently with all the mainstream press coverage of ClawdBot/Moltbot/OpenClaw this week—especially as I see long-term skeptics of AI's utility like Nilay Patel finally declaring this as the moment where he sees the value in agents. (My dude, I was automating my Mac with claude-discord-bridge and AppleScript from my doctor's office in late July!)

But I was too lazy to take those thoughts and do anything with them. Unlike me, Jerod did the work of rendering the chart that properly puts the original, "where's the shovelware," complaint to rest. Rather than hotlink his image, I encourage you to click through to see for yourself:

This, to me, looks like the canary in the coal mine; the bellwether leading the flock; the first swallow of summer; the… you get the idea.

Hard agree. I said then and continue to agree with myself now that (1) it makes no sense to start the clock in November 2022, because no AI coding products prior to terminal-based coding agents ever mattered, and (2) people woefully underestimate the degree to which programmers are actually late adopters. (Raise your hand if you're still refusing to install macOS Tahoe, for fuck's sake.)

Even today, I'd be shocked if over 5% of professional programmers worldwide have attempted to adopt a terminal-based coding agent in anger. The amount of technically-useful, mostly-broken software we're going to be inundated with a year from now will be truly mind-bending.