this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2026
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No Stupid Questions

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Say I wanted an app , could I just ask AI to write me the software and voila now I have the app for free.

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[–] testfactor@lemmy.world 6 points 18 hours ago

Not really. Let's see if we can't put together an analogy as to why.

When talking about software, the term "source code" comes up a lot. Think of this as a recipe someone would use to make the software. The software itself (for instance, Windows 98) is like the food made from cooking that recipe.

But something like Windows 98 is more like a giant cookbook full of recipes, and all of those recipes are written in a way to make a giant, cohesive meal.

Now, it's important to realize that Microsoft has never released any of those recipes. And in the same way that you could make a copycat version of your favorite restaurant's specialty, you could have AI give you a copycat recipe for some software.

But while you might be able to get close, your computer is a very picky gourmand. The little differences matter a lot, especially when you start trying to use things that were designed to work with the "real" version.

Another important thing most other people have already identified is what the AI can actually do. By default, most AI like ChatGPT is just a chatbot. It can talk to you, but not much else. So, you can ask you to give you a copycat recipe for some software and it will give you one, it'll just be the recipe. You'll have to do the "cooking" yourself.

They do now make what are called "agentic" AI's that can do the "cooking" for you. But again, they would be working off the copycat recipe that the normal AI came up with, which is going to be a little bit (but importantly) wrong at the outset. Especially for something as big and connected as Windows. And the agentic AI's aren't free to use like the chatbot ones. In fact, they're very expensive.

So, all that to say, it would be very difficult if not impossible to do what you are asking via AI.