Productivity ⏫ - Businesses disrupted and adapted.
I was playing board games with friends last weekend and we were annoyed to find that the simple Player Chooser app had started to require a paid subscription. The app is a simple client-side application that made money disproportionately to the development effort by showing sticky ads to millions of users.
What a shame. I turned to my laptop and, with a few lines of prompts, asked it to build a replacement. Within minutes, my IDE generated the HTML and JS for a working version. Within another minute, I pushed the code to GitHub Pages and was instantly able to use the app on mobile. Of course, I had to spend a little time polishing the UX and converting the app to a PWA with a proper iOS download prompt, but the productivity gains were real, and I started to suspect the original app began charging because of this—profiting from existing users’ reluctance to change instead of creating value.
I think we are going to see the landscape change for many businesses, where their value propositions are drastically altered by AI. In my recent part-time project, the founders built their own logging and tracing system without relying on vendors like Splunk, Sentry, or Datadog. This was doable with a few prompts. What’s especially disruptive is that the effort required to find the right product is often similar to the effort of building a simple solution yourself. So nowadays, many existing companies must find innovative ways to create new value for customers within their own products, which is a very hard problem — almost like voluntarily disrupting one’s own business.
Anyway, now there’s a free version of Player Chooser at https://shawn-cao.github.io/player-chooser/. Downloadable to mobile phones and usable without internet connection. And I’m totally open to anyone cloning this public repo to make a even better app.