GoKawiilThe tyranny of software is almost over. Since the first computer programmers wrote the first computer programs, we, the users of that software, have been forced to live in the worlds those programs create. The features are the features. The design is the design. Want something else, something better? Learn to code, I guess.
Until now, the people making a given piece of software — mostly well-paid professional developers — have rarely been the same as the ones using it: lawyers, doctors, churches, schools, me. (Where they overlap most directly is with developer tools, which are often the best and most passionately designed software you’ll find anywhere. Wonder why.) Software is built for the masses, designed not to be perfect for anyone but to be passable for everyone. Even when tech companies have tried to build tools to help people tune their software to their own needs, all they’ve been able to offer are hacky go-betweens like IFTTT and Apple Shortcuts. If you’re thinking in if-then statements, then you’ve lost most people.
Then, in the out-of-nowhere way that is common to the recent AI boom, the paradigm changed. In late 2025, an update to Anthropic’s Claude model turned its Claude Code tool from a code generator that was surprising if it worked to one that was surprising when it didn’t. Suddenly, all you needed was $20 a month and a half-formed idea, and an AI model could build you functional software. If you could explain what wasn’t working, Claude Code could probably fix it. Andrej Karpathy, an educator and researcher who was on OpenAI’s founding team, had called this new behavior “vibe coding.” Suddenly the vibes were off the charts.
The rise of AI coding tools like Claude Code — and OpenAI’s Codex, and GitHub Copilot, and Cursor, and Lovable, and Replit, and a thousand others — is already changing the way software developers work. They’re also giving way to an entirely new kind of software: the software we make just for ourselves. Not to raise venture capital for, not to eventually sell to Google. The era of personal software is upon us, and it is changing our relationship with technology forever. It has certainly already changed mine.
AI lets us make apps the way we used to make lists and spreadsheets. Managing the family budget? Do it in a hand-built app with every feature you need and exactly zero you don’t. Can’t make a to-do list app stick? Roll your own. Rather than triangulate a dozen schedules for the next family trip, whip up a custom meal planner (with built-in grocery assigner). Use it forever, use it once, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t come with a subscription fee or send you marketing emails once a day for the rest of your life. It’s your software. And there’s never been anything like it before.
Robin Sloan, an author and technologist, wrote a blog post in 2020 entitled “An app can be a home-cooked meal.” The post has been shared widely in AI circles over the last couple of years, though Sloan wrote it well before the crop of generative AI tools. In it, he explains why he built a simple messaging app for his family. “There will be no sudden redesign, no flood of ads, no pivot to chase a userbase inscrutable to us,” he wrote. “It might go away at some point, but that will be our decision.” Five years later, in late 2025, Sloan updated his post: “I have changed literally nothing in the app, and it’s glorious.”
Sloan is a fairly knowledgeable coder and built that app by hand. These days, though, he’s using AI to make even more home-cooked software. “It’s always weird little things,” Sloan tells me. He runs an olive oil company, and has whipped up ways to pull together product and customer information to automatically generate shipping labels. “It’s just a little Ruby script that pulls data from Shopify and USPS and kind of ties it together and it’s great.” It’s also extremely hacky. “If I ever get hit by a bus, it’s going to be a problem for my olive oil company, because only Robin knows how to run the software.” But while Robin’s around, it’s working great.
Personal software has its limits, of course. Your bespoke apps don’t come with a support line or a customer service team. They haven’t been thoroughly tested and make no security guarantees. The notion that large companies will ditch expensive enterprise software for something their marketing department vibe-coded is mostly fiction. So is the idea that we’ll all be running legions of AI agents, filling our phones with bespoke software, and obviating professionally made software altogether. Most of the apps we download are fine, regardless of who or what made them. But we all have those edge cases, the entirely reasonable ways in which we’d love to morph our software to our exact needs — the only problem is everyone else has needs too, and none of them are ours.
We all have those edge cases, the entirely reasonable ways in which we’d love to morph our software to our exact needs
My own edge cases are most present when it comes to productivity tools. Over the years I’ve tried every acronymic get-stuff-done system on the market — GTD, CARE, PARA, BASB, SMART, MIT, ZTD, and more — and dutifully poured my brain’s contents into every app with a checkbox feature. Eventually, I get annoyed with the app’s one tiny missing feature or bizarre design decision, stop using that app, start forgetting things, find another app that does those things better, spend a day porting my whole life into that app, encounter its own missing features and bizarre design decisions, and start the process anew.
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