Top all-time · #4455
Mike Judge
Personal blog · mikelovesrobots.substack.comaiprogramming
Mike Judge's personal blog at mikelovesrobots.substack.com covers ai and programming. Since 2025, 17 different Hacker News readers have linked it 22 times, most often “Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-09-28, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (20) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Mike Judge's "Where's the Shovelware?" post, which argues that the lack of a surge in simple apps and games undercuts claims that AI tools greatly boost software output. Commenters cite it often in AI productivity threads.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 20 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Software developer for 25+ years. Principal Engineer. Currently investigating whether AI coding tools actually work (spoiler: they don't). Click to read Mike Judge, a Substack with thousands of subscribers.
Most-linked posts?
- Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up17 people · 22 mentions · first linked 2025-09-03
What Hacker News says?
I think we agree no the limitations of the study--I literally began my comment with "for seasoned maintainers of open source repos". I'm not sure if in your first statement ("there are no studies to back up this claim.. I welcome good analysis") you are referring to claims that support an AI-speedup. If so, we agree that good analysis is needed. But if you think there already is good data: Can you link any? All I've…
Comment linking /p/wheres-the-shovelware-why-ai-coding
on “Google Antigravity”Submitted Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up as a story · 770 points
HN discussionThe best argument I've yet heard against the effectiveness of AI tools for SW dev is the absence of an explosion of shovelware over the past 1-2 years. https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware... Basically, if the tools are even half as good as some proponents claim, wouldn't you expect at least a significant increase in simple games on Steam or apps in app stores over that time frame? But we're…
Comment linking /p/wheres-the-shovelware-why-ai-coding
on “Everyone in Seattle hates AI”Data so far says that it doesn't https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware...
Comment linking /p/wheres-the-shovelware-why-ai-coding
on “Ladybird passes the Apple 90% threshold on web-platform-tests”> The ROI is clear if it delivers even 10% productivity gain What if what feels like a productivity gain is actually a productivity loss? https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware... (see link in the article to a study showing developers thought AI gave them a 20% gain in productivity, but measuring this showed they instead had a 20% loss)
Comment linking /p/wheres-the-shovelware-why-ai-coding
on “A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code”I'm getting real "put everything on the blockchain" vibes from answers like this. I remember when folks were telling me that hospitals were going to put patient records on the blockchain. As for radiology, it doesn't seem this use of AI is as much of a "slam dunk" as it first appeared[1][2]. We'll see, I guess. Right now I kind of land on the side of "Where is all the shovelware?". If AI is such a huge productivity…
Comment linking /p/wheres-the-shovelware-why-ai-coding
on “OpenAI and Nvidia announce partnership to deploy 10GW of Nvidia systems”Good question. Why hasn't there been a profusion of new game-changing software, fixes to long-standing issues in open-source software, any nontrivial shipped product at all? Heck, why isn't there a cornucopia of new apps, even trivial ones? Where is all the shovelware [0]? Previous HN discussion here [1]. Don't get me wrong, AI is at least as game-changing for programming as StackOverflow and Google were back in the…
Comment linking /p/wheres-the-shovelware-why-ai-coding
on “Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?”my dear guy, where is the shovelware https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware... Where's the Shovelware? Why AI Coding Claims Don't Add Up
Comment linking /p/wheres-the-shovelware-why-ai-coding
on “AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?”Good example of shovelware that some say is absent.¹ ¹ https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware...
Comment linking /p/wheres-the-shovelware-why-ai-coding
on “Show HN: I'm a dermatologist and I vibe coded a skin cancer learning app”Do you have any example repos of these OSS projects? I'm being reminded of this post every time people keep extolling how "productive" LLMs are: https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware... Where is the resulting software?
Comment linking /p/wheres-the-shovelware-why-ai-coding
on “A year of vibes”He's just parroting stuff done by this guy: https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware... Shouldn't it be the "Judge Paradox" ???
Comment linking /p/wheres-the-shovelware-why-ai-coding
on “The Gorman Paradox: Where Are All the AI-Generated Apps?”Source? See contradicting data here: https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware...
Comment linking /p/wheres-the-shovelware-why-ai-coding
on “The Gorman Paradox: Where Are All the AI-Generated Apps?”Any metric that measures the amount of software delivered. The link at the bottom of the post ( https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware... ) goes over this exactly. > Businesses, on the other hand, announce headcount reductions due to AI and of course nobody believes them. It’s an excuse. It’s the dream peddled by AI companies: automate intelligence so you can fire your human workers. Look at th…
Comment linking /p/wheres-the-shovelware-why-ai-coding
on “The Gorman Paradox: Where Are All the AI-Generated Apps?”The link in the last paragraph provides some data to back up the claim. https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware... - If the goal is to increase the rate of software production, there isn't much evidence that AI has moved the needle. Sure, code gen is faster now. And the industry might finally be waking up to the fact that writing code is a small part of producing software. Getting infinitely fas…
Comment linking /p/wheres-the-shovelware-why-ai-coding
on “The Gorman Paradox: Where Are All the AI-Generated Apps?”I think you mean this one: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45120517
Comment linking /p/wheres-the-shovelware-why-ai-coding
on “"Be Different" doesn't work for building products anymore”Remember that "Where's the Shovelware?"¹ post? ¹ https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware...
Comment linking /p/wheres-the-shovelware-why-ai-coding
on “Over 12% of links posted to Hacker News are Show HN projects now”I hadn't heard the app store submission stats. Does this answer Mike Judge's question of where the shovelware is [0,1]? Did we just need to wait a few months? [0] https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46262545
Comment linking /p/wheres-the-shovelware-why-ai-coding
on “AI is going to kill app subscriptions”Not a scientific study, but someone did replicate the experiment on themselves [0] and found that in their case, any effect from LLM use wasn't detectable in their sample. Notably they almost certainly had more experience with LLMs than most of the METR participants did. [0] https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware...
Comment linking /p/wheres-the-shovelware-why-ai-coding
on “CTO Says 93% of Developers Use AI, but Productivity Is Still 10%”> Thus far, we do have evidence that AI (at least in OSS) produces a 19% decrease in productivity I generally agree with you, but I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that it's plausible that the slow down observed in the METR study was at least partially due to the subjects lack of experience with LLMs. Someone with more experience performed the same experiment on themselves, and couldn't find a significant differen…
Comment linking /p/wheres-the-shovelware-why-ai-coding
on “Opus 4.5 is going to change everything”As of the middle of the year, there was no increase in publicly available indicators of new startups at all [0]. No change in the trend in steam releases, domain name registrations, app store releases, etc. People might be able to keep the fact that they're a one person team that built the app with AI secret, but they wouldn't be able to keep the fact that they made an app secret. Unless someone has evidence that's…
Comment linking /p/wheres-the-shovelware-why-ai-coding
on “The creator of Claude Code's Claude setup”> The game has change. The ‘how’ we build it is easy. The ‘what’ we build is and always has been the hardest part of any SaaS or business. This is what the promptfondlers don't want to admit: the how has been easy for a long time. This last, I dunno, 35 years or so, Visual Basic, Delphi, whatnot, producing code has been very easy. You don't need a fundamentally fascist probabilistic nightmare to do it. The hard prob…
Comment linking /p/wheres-the-shovelware-why-ai-coding
on “The Sideprocalypse”Interestingly, things like domain name registrations and new github repositories didn't have the an inflection point in recent years [0]. This means it's almost certainly that a greater portion of new projects are getting submitted as Show HN, not that there's more new projects overall. [0] https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware...
Comment linking /p/wheres-the-shovelware-why-ai-coding
on “Show HN: Show HN submissions have tripled since 2023”
