LLMs have made simple software trivial

I was out for a run today and I had an idea for an app. I busted out my own app, Quick Notes, and dictated what I wanted this app to do in detail. When I got home, I created a new project in Xcode, I committed it to GitHub, and then I gave Claude Code on the web those dictated notes and asked it to build that app.

About two minutes later, it was done…and it had a build error. 😅

But it was a simple fix, I fixed it, and the app was running on my phone. And you know what? It worked. The UI wasn't perfect, but it was damn close. And I already had a product that achieved the goal I set out to achieve. All in all, I'd say it was about 10 minutes from idea to functioning MVP (and half of that was finishing my run).

Now, of course, I've already spent another 30 minutes iterating on this initial design, fixing some weird issues I came across and thinking of other logical features to add. But still, we're well less than one hour away from even having the idea, and I have something that I could genuinely use for this purpose on my phone.

There's more work to do, and I don't plan on making this a public app. It's more something that's extremely specific to my needs, but I can't help but start to wonder what the ramifications are in a world where generating software like this is so trivial. Yes, I'm an experienced product and design person with some development skills, and obviously, software development has gotten easier over the years, and I would bet that even before ChatGPT released in 2022, there were more people developing software than there ever had been in the world. But it really feels like this lowers the barrier to entry by an order of magnitude that simply must have ramifications.

As a simple example, it's possible the app that I thought of could already be achieved in some piece of software someone's released on the App Store. Truth be told, I didn't even look, I just knew exactly what I wanted, and I made it happen. This is a quite niche thing to do in 2026, but what if Apple builds something that replicates this workflow and ships it on the iPhone in a couple of years? What if instead of going to the App Store, they tell you to just ask Siri to make you the app that you need? It feels a bit like when Shortcuts came out and tiny utility apps that just did one thing suddenly became less useful because shortcuts could just do that and people could construct their own. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, but it certainly makes me think about how we're well past the gold rush era of the App Store. I'm also not saying you can't make money with software anymore, but I do think that it's going to take more to stand out from the crowd.

I'm also thinking about the rise of personalized software in general. With the example above, I bet I could find an app that did what I wanted, but I doubt I could find an app that did exactly what I wanted. In general, software developers for the longest time have tried to make software that is flexible enough to satisfy the needs of as wide an audience as possible. If you didn't like a little detail of how an app worked, well, you would just learn to live with it and get used to it. But in a world where you're the one creating the software, you can just change it. You can make exactly what you want. Does this lead to a world where instead of 100,000 people using Things 3 for their task management, there are 100,000 people all with their own task manager that works exactly how they want? Is there a world where Cultured Code releases things to the App Store and everyone gets the same base functionality, but you can use a large language model to modify the app to your needs? It sounds a little crazy, but I don't think it's impossible in the long run.

I'll leave it there, and I don't have some definitive statement on exactly what I think will happen in the future. I genuinely think this is all up in the air, and nobody really knows what's going to happen. I know it's a cliche and you've probably heard it a thousand times, but one of my favorite quotes is, "we are cursed to live in interesting times." I find myself thinking that a lot lately.