They're sticky because they stay focused on their specific domain, and they work well.
I also really don't understand the value pitch on "6 apps no one can use" in the post.
I publicly host Seerr and Jellyfin for my family, and they use that combo just fine. They explicitly don't get access to see any of the sausage making under the hood.
Given this doesn't support music yet (according to op) and you still need to host plex or jellyfin... what is the value statement here over seerr?
(It's fine, of course, to use AI tools—we use them heavily ourselves. Just please don't use them to generate or edit text to be read by fellow humans on Hacker News.)
It's impossible to know for sure what was LLM generated or edited, but we have to rely on imperfect classifiers or else the site would be completely flooded by genai text, which is not what the community here wants to read, nor in the intended spirit of HN.
Only difference i can see is mine will stream a torrent while it's still downloading. muahaha. Let me work on releasing this damned thing.
For example, I've been using a Spotify replacement called Spotifast for a month or so. It's way better than the official Spotify app, and it's all vibecoded by one developer, and it gets lots of updates (it's basically a 1-to-1 clone of Spotify, plus additional features). It wouldn't have been possible before AI, or at least not that easily.
It has always been the case that open source lived and died thanks to developer attention. That hasn't really changed with AI. The amount 1 hour of developer attention can do is drastically greater. But if the developer loses interest (which may well happen after a year or two), the project still dies unless there's other people to steward it.
Hopefully that will be true. But it's really amazing how many established open source projects are basically supported by one person working tirelessly for years or decades on end.
The arrs don’t have that much in common under the surface. It’s good for them to behave and evolve differently for different type of media.
It’s also less likely for any of them to be targeted and shut down by courts as piracy tools.