If anything, looking at for example what Microsoft has been releasing, it's been a year below average (in terms of quality).

You are not looking at right places. Github repo counts have been high since 2020 because there are companies & individuals who run fork scripts. So AI cant match the numbers.

But on product hunt, the amount of projects is First week of Jan: 5000+, Entire Jan 2018: 4000 approx.

That doesn’t mean industry output is high, it means people are starting new products.

Has the output of existing companies/products increased substantially?

Have more products proven successful and started companies?

hard to say but maybe a little

>Has the output of existing companies/products increased substantially?

Would be impossible to tell.

No, it would be pretty easy if it looked like new features were shipping significantly faster. But they’re not.

The software being written isn't coming to "the market". It's all internal development.

Look at smaller SaaS offerings and people selling tiny utility apps, those will go away slowly.

Why would I pay for something when I can make it for my own (or company internal) use in an afternoon?

This is such a stupid argument. A very significant amount of code never makes it into the public sphere. None of the code I've written professionally in the last 26 years is publicly accessible, and if someone uses a product I've written they likely don't care if it was written with the aid of an LLM or not.

Not to mention agent capabilities at the end of last year were vastly different to those at the start of the year.

Even if a portion of software is not released to the general public, you'd still expect an increase in the amount of software released to the general public.

Even if LLMs became better during the year, you'd still expect an increase in releases.

Maybe, but these days a vast amount of software is hidden behind online services. I'm not sure you'd see the hidden iceberg.