Why "AI" ends up as the biggest category on a launch board

IndieNeed is a small launch site for indie makers, and listings carry a primary category. Its public categories page lists 38 of them, from AI to Writing, with Other as the fallback for products that fit nowhere else. A read of the launches table on November 8, 2026 showed 714 live products. 184 of them have ai as their primary category, about 26%. The next largest is productivity with 89, then developer-tools with 53. These are counts of one field on live rows. They say nothing about quality, traffic or which products do well. Method versus job. Most of the category descriptions on that page describe a job: Writing is "tools for drafting, editing, publishing, and improving written work", Image covers "creating, editing, organising, and delivering images". AI is described as products "for creating, researching, automating, and building". That reads less like a job and more like a way of building something. An AI writing assistant fits both AI and Writing, and a maker who has to pick one primary slot could reasonably choose either. What the count can and can't show. Rows in the table also have tags and categories array columns, so a single primary-category count is not the whole picture of how a product is described. The 184 figure only shows how often AI was chosen as the main label, not how many products use AI. The takeaway for your own taxonomy. If you are building a directory, marketplace or any browse page, decide which axis a category describes before you add it. Mixing "what it does" (writing, finance, design) with "how it's built" (AI, no-code, open source) in one required field means the method labels can collect products that also belong to a job category. Keeping the two axes in separate fields, or asking for the job first and the technology as a tag, gives browsing pages buckets that answer the reader's actual question: what will this help me do? Written with AI assistance using the sources linked above. Sources: https://www.indieneed.com/categories and a read-only count of IndieNeed's launches table (Nov 8, 2026).