I built a small app recently that blocks distracting websites and nudges me to read. When I navigate to Reddit, it opens an epub instead. It took a morning while I was having coffee. It does exactly what I need and nothing else.
It’s not an isolated example. I’ve made a handful of these little apps just for me, each one scratching an itch and saving a few dollars. An iOS app that keeps the screen awake while displaying a recipe (or anything else). A prototyping boilerplate. A night-vision ereader that doesn’t glow in bed. A little notepad that lives in the menu bar.
A shift in thinking
Something changed in how I think about software. It used to be that when I needed a tool, I searched for an app to handle it. Compare options, justify the subscription. The usual routine. Now the first question is whether I can just build it myself.
The answer is increasingly yes, and quickly. The cost of building collapsed. Financial cost, sure. But also time. Things that would have taken weeks take an afternoon. Things I’d abandon halfway through, I finish. Things that would’ve sat in a half-finished state get polished enough to use routinely.
Robin Sloan wrote about apps as home-cooked meals. Software made for the people you know, or just for yourself. No users, no roadmap, no scale. I keep coming back to that idea because it captures something I’m experiencing but hadn’t named.
Most software, notably SaaS, is built to serve many people. The SaaS model depends on a specific assumption: that building & maintaining is expensive enough that renting makes sense. For decades, that held. It’s starting not to. When you can build something in an afternoon that replaces a $10/month subscription, the math changes. Not for everyone, not for every tool. But at the margins, for the kinds of small, specific utilities that make up daily work, the economics are shifting.
Another thing. To make software profitable, you need scale efficiencies. One product needs to support many people. The consequence is that they’re full of compromises. Features you don’t need, workflows that don’t match yours, settings panels you’ll never touch. Joel Spolsky, over 20 years ago, talked about the 80/20 myth. You can try to build 80% of the most valuable features, but each person will have a different perspective on what the 80% means. Consequently, software tends to accrete bloat.
What I hope to see
What does this mean for commercial software when building is so easy? I don’t believe it will evaporate, but I have a feeling it will change dramatically. I could envision people creating highly personalized software, but built upon composable primitives that afford security, reliability, and interoperability. I imagine seeing more niche software designed for micromarkets. I could see greater attention given to single-purpose features, something at the level of Skills or workflows.
Maybe software evolves to look less like a monolithic grand piano, and more like a closet full of synths that can be chained together on the fly.
It’s going to be weird and I’m here for it.