AI Changed the Speed of Development
Since the dawn of the LLM era, we have seen a steady increase in software productivity. With the initial tentative and apprehensive approach seen in the early days, we now (August 2026) see broad acceptance that AI can write code at a speed no human developer could ever hope to match manually, while producing increasingly high-quality results.
Here at You Can Build Tech, we started leveraging AI assistance much earlier than the industry average when we experimented with the "copy-and-paste" method by simply chatting with the "regular" ChatGPT. We found that by the summer of 2024, it was highly capable of rapidly increasing the speed of development. By May 2025, OpenAI released Codex, its autonomous agentic coding service, and it was blatantly clear that the entire game had changed.
And this leads us to the topic of this article, which is the rapid increase of software products being released into the market. Here at You Can Build Tech, we focus heavily on what the solo developer or small team can accomplish in this new world of agentic coding.
Small Developers Were Already Everywhere
In fact, small developers already made up the overwhelming majority of App Store developers before the agentic coding era. A May 2023 study done by Apple / Analysis Group found that more than 90% of App Store developers fit Apple's definition of a "small developer."
Big Tech Never Owned App Development
This blows to pieces the idea that software development or the App Store is solely the territory of "Big Tech" companies, and shows that computers are, and always were, an open frontier that empowers the people far beyond what was possible before.
Then Coding Got 55% Faster
Another early statistic comes from the famous code-hosting platform GitHub's 2022 research on developer productivity and happiness.
The findings included that developers using GitHub Copilot completed a coding task 55% faster than developers who completed the same task without Copilot. This meant that a coding task that took the non-Copilot group an average of 2 hours and 41 minutes took the Copilot group only 1 hour and 11 minutes to complete.
And That Was Only the Beginning
Of course, this was only the beginning of the AI coding era, and we've seen enormous progress in just these last four years. But it points to the almost astronomical effect AI is having on coding productivity that we are currently experiencing.
More Power in the Hands of Developers
So it's undoubtedly an exciting time in the software industry and for developers, and You Can Build Tech is thrilled to be a part of it. We are proud that we are able to help educate individuals on how to harness this incredible power and use it to build software that can change people's lives for the better.