People don't need a calculator website anymore. They can just prompt their own AI account to generate whatever calculator they need in the moment. I already have a few pinned in my favorites that I use often.
That is the real promise of AI driven software. Bespoke tiny apps available to anyone whenever they simply just ask for it.
For the foreseeable future until maybe we systems that can predict what someone will need/want for an app at any given time (a prospect as horrifying as it is awesome imo), there’ll be plenty of people, maybe even a majority, that don’t know what they want or need until it’s shown to them.
There will be many more niche applications vibe-coded by people with lots of knowledge and no coding experience/desire that people will use rather than thinking of an app themselves to create.
Then there will be people like you, me, OP and 99% of the other HN community that have a million ideas they want to create, use, and sometimes share.
There are a lot of things I don’t know about and even more I don’t know I don’t know about and in those cases, there’s still a wide open door for people to create applications and experiences that share their knowledge/vision.
I could ask Claude Code or some other future platform to build be a financial calculator every time I need it but why would I do that when someone with the benefit of prior knowledge and experience has already done that for me?
They probably included calculators I didn’t even know I needed.
The software paradigm is changing.
People don't need a calculator website anymore. They can just prompt their own AI account to generate whatever calculator they need in the moment. I already have a few pinned in my favorites that I use often.
That is the real promise of AI driven software. Bespoke tiny apps available to anyone whenever they simply just ask for it.