You can just build it
Not enough software developers have understood the seismic change in the industry. That complex problem you’ve struggled with? That app idea you had? That trivial little utility you’ve always wanted but would have taken too much effort to build? That stupid game you thought of just a second ago as a joke?
You can just build it!
You don’t have to start a company. It’s not the beginning of an open source project. You don’t need to recruit anyone else to help. You don’t need to find users. You don’t need to sell it. You don’t need to market it. You don’t even need to spend time planning it.
If you need software this afternoon, you can just magic it into existence in the morning.
Building software has gone from an age of stonemasons slowly and painstakingly chipping away at blocks of granite, which an army of men needed to extract from the ground and transport to their location. Now we’re overseeing an IKEA factory that’s putting out useful, well-designed furniture at a price you can afford—and won’t be too upset when it breaks.
Eh? Ok, that’s a rubbish analogy but I just don’t think I can really express how infinitely malleable software has become, for such little effort.
I feel like software is now a tangible thing I can mould in my hands, fire I can conjure up out of thin air, dreams I can make real. I’m trying hard not to say I’m Neo in the Matrix discovering he can bend reality. Software is a material I can manipulate at my will. Technically that was always true but it’s now on a timescale that radically changes how I can use it.
“I bet the code is a mess!”
“Unmaintainable slop!”
“Probably riddled with security issues”
“What about the joy of software development?!”
“More trash software flooding the market”
You are fundamentally misunderstanding the game I’m playing.
When I can code my dream software in a morning, to use it in the afternoon, I don’t need to concern myself with the traditional trappings of software development. I don’t have to worry about multiple users, performance, other devices except the ones I own, finding a market, accessibility, scalability, teams, social login, security, branding, settings—the complexity just disappears and I can solve my own problems. I don’t have to worry about how the code is structured and I certainly don’t have to worry about what anyone else is going to think about the code.
And it’s far from trash I’m producing. If anything, I’d say my little projects are some of the best software I’ve produced in my 30+ years of writing software—probably because so many of my projects would have been left unfinished.
What did I do today to warrant this overly-enthusiastic post?
We’ve just replaced our kitchen and are putting the finishing touches to it and I needed to record the dimensions of the places that will be tiled, and calculate the area to estimate our costs. I also needed to record the dimensions of the windows so we can get estimates for new blinds.
I could sketch this out on a paper notepad like a sane person. I could add the dimensions to a note on my phone, maybe with some photos. But what I really wanted, and have wanted for many years, is a small app on my phone that lets me annotate photos much like Cleanshot lets me do for screenshots on my laptop.
So I just built it.
Starting at 10:50, I gave Fable a 4-paragraph spec of the main features and how I wanted to use it. I gave it the choice of using Rails 8, which I know well, or Cloudflare Workers/R2/D1 which I’m a lot less familiar with. Ultimately we decided on Cloudflare. I made it a PWA instead of a native app because that’s perfectly acceptable to me.
- 11:20: Claude started building the app
- 12:00: I had a local version to play with.
I had to go out to do a few jobs in the afternoon but picked it up again in the evening.
- 4:30: I had Claude Design build some mockups of the UI based on the initial app version.
- 4:45: Claude was implementing the new designs in the app. 5:20 Deployed a fully functional version of the app.
- 5:55: Testing on my phone revealed a few bugs
- 6:10: Some adjustments to the measurement units to make them consistent
- 6:30: Added some subtle animations to the menus
- 6:36: Added image caching
- 6:44: Added collections feature
I was rarely fully engaged in building this app. Most of the time I was actually working in the kitchen smoothing the walls and preparing the surfaces for painting. I interacted with Claude mostly on my phone via Orca’s mobile client.
So, for the curious, this is what it looks like:
Where’s the link? Where’s the code? Where can you try it?
You’re still missing the point!
I built this software for me, not you. I don’t need you to use it and I don’t need bug reports and feature requests. I don’t need to change to accommodate your needs. It’s perfect just the way it is.
You can just build your own things now. Whatever it is, whatever you need to solve a problem you have; you can just build it.