“Now that the barrier to creating software has dropped so low, everyone is building custom applications for specific, personal use cases.” You’ve probably seen posts like this lately (or several of them). But it turns out there’s one group I doubt is applying that principle. I’m talking, precisely, about those who develop software.
If that’s your case, you probably already have a subscription to a coding agent. And if you do, why create an application for a personal need? Most of you will be creating CLI utilities and skills that let the agent work directly with the data, and then asking it for what you need from different interfaces. An application has to be modified if you ever want it to do something differently or add a new feature. An agent just needs you to ask. And if you do it with a technically specific and bounded language, it’s hard for it to get it wrong these days.
So here’s the paradox we find: people who didn’t usually develop are creating applications and struggling with deployment and updates. Those who did develop only create applications if other people need to use them. We’re trading CPU clock cycles for on-demand token generation out of pure convenience. Even though we pay that toll in cost and latency, it seems hard to go back.