Personal Software Strikes Back

A fascinating shift is happening in software development. For the first time since the early days of personal computing, individuals can build sophisticated applications that rival professional software. The catalyst? AI.

Most people don't realize how significant this is. The last time we saw something similar was in the late 1970s with VisiCalc. Back then, if you wanted to do financial modeling, you either had to write a program from scratch or hire someone to do it. VisiCalc changed that by letting regular people "program" through a simple table interface. You didn't need to know BASIC or FORTRAN – you just had to understand cells and formulas.

This pattern kept repeating. HyperCard let people build interactive programs without being programmers. Excel macros and Access databases gave office workers the power to create custom tools. Personal websites let anyone publish to the world. Each wave democratized some aspect of computing, but there was always a ceiling – a point where you needed "real" programming to go further.

AI is removing that ceiling.

Consider what happens when someone wants to build their own note-taking app today. Previously, they'd face months of work implementing basic features: text editing, sync, search, auth. Most people would give up and use Evernote. But with AI, you can generate much of this functionality through prompts. It's like having a team of junior developers at your command.

The really interesting part isn't just that AI makes development faster – it's that it enables entirely new kinds of personal software. Want to build an app that automatically generates workout plans based on your fitness data? Or a personal assistant that understands your exact workplace jargon? These projects would have been impossibly complex for an individual before. Now they're weekend projects.

This matters because the best software often comes from solving your own problems. When you're scratching your own itch, you have perfect product-market fit. You know exactly what the software needs to do because you're the user. The challenge has always been bridging the gap between what you want to build and what you're capable of building. AI is closing that gap.

What we're seeing now reminds me of the early days of the web. Back then, people built weird, specific tools just because they could. Most were useless to anyone except their creators, but that was the point. They were personal software in the truest sense.

I expect we'll see a renaissance of this kind of development. The combination of AI assistance and modern development tools means that the scope of what one person can build is expanding dramatically. We'll see more people creating highly specialized tools for their own use cases – not to start companies or get rich, but simply because they can.

This won't replace professional software development, just like spreadsheets didn't replace databases. But it will create a new category of software that sits between consumer apps and professional tools – personal software that's sophisticated enough to be useful but specific enough that it wouldn't make sense as a commercial product.

The really exciting part is that we're just at the beginning. As AI tools get more sophisticated, the gap between what an individual can envision and what they can build will keep shrinking. We might be entering a golden age of personal software – one where the limiting factor isn't technical ability, but imagination.