Apps are the new memes

No more road maps, no more review committees. Just build a frickin’ app and see if it goes viral and makes you rich. No big deal if it bonks, just build another app. This happened in crypto with meme coins; now: apps.

“The people building this way aren’t asking ‘will this scale?’ They’re asking, ‘does this feel right?’ That’s an artistic question. Not a product management question.

And the companies that matter in the Code-as-Content Era won’t look like the ones that mattered in the last. They won’t be organized around roadmaps and dashboards. They’ll be organized around drops. Around taste. Around cultural timing.”

Of course there are already apps that are showcases for these apps. Wabi is an app that wants to be a YouTube for mini-apps.

Hackers used Meta’s support chat bot to break into a few high-profile Instagram accounts just by asking the chatbot to change the email address associated with those accounts. Ha ha. Oops.

“The length of tasks that LLMs can reliably complete on their own has been doubling roughly every four months, up from an earlier trend of doubling every seven months. In March 2024, Claude Opus 3 could complete software tasks that take humans about four minutes to complete. A year later, Claude Sonnet 3.7 managed tasks that took about an hour and a half. A year after that, Claude Opus 4.6 managed 12-hour tasks. If this trend holds, tasks that take a skilled person days could come into range this year. In 2027, AI systems could be capable of tasks that take a person weeks.”

This chart, which shows how often Anthropic engineers have to step in to rescue Claude Code, is also pretty bonkers. In 9 months, Claude Code went from about 10% success rate with difficult coding tasks to (claimed) roughly 75% success.

Some of the ads were spec ads. It’s getting harder to tell what is AI and what isn’t. A couple of the winners are not that great. My personal faves were ads for Pac Man, Gorilla Glue, and Knight watches.

Describing it won’t help, just click the link and look at the examples of what it can do.

Wild possibilities for web design.

Accounts can create these mini-pages, which allow them to tailor the information about them that pops up in response to a Google search. The feature will be rolled out for publishers and creators with large followings in the US.

Sentry wanted Claude to fix up its website. Claude did a great job … except for Sentry’s blog, which it could not touch because it was locked behind a CMS. They converted 2,500 pages of marketing content from CMS to markdown files.

This makes sense. I never use Claude chat, because Claude Code can also do chat. Spyglass speculates that this is a tacit admission that Anthropic’s focus on enterprise and agents, vs chat, is the way to go. A new interface and website will prompt GPT customers to code, generate images, and use apps from external partners. I haven’t seen it yet but that sounds like it could be messy and weird.

It can access 62 popular apps and 110 skills for work across sales, data analytics, creative production, product design, and stock-picking.