You can make an app for that

The 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. 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. Over time, I built the list of features my ideal productivity app requires. Every one of them has been built extremely well by at least one developer, so I know I’m not asking for anything impossible. But there are no apps, not one, exactly zero, that check off the whole list. When I called a bunch of developers to ask why they were missing such obviously crucial features, they all told me the same thing: Everyone has a list of requirements like this. No two users have the same list. And if you build everything for everyone, all you’ll really do is make a mess of your software. “It’s ridiculously easy to build features right now,” says Amir Salihefendic, the CEO of Doist, which makes the popular Todoist app. “But if you just do it naively, you end up with a system that nobody can figure out.” He then described a bunch of features other people have demanded he build, none of which made any sense to me at all. [Image: Sometimes you just need an app to track which stair your package comes to. https://platform.theverge.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/05/Brett-R-stairs-app.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] In the era of personal software, though, you don’t have to build a system that works for everybody. And it is, in fact, ridiculously easy to build features right now. Which is why, over the 2025 holidays, like seemingly everyone with an X account and $20, I got a Claude Code subscription and set out building the app of my dreams. I’d show them! I gave my app a name — Timetable — and described all the features I needed. It took 20 minutes or so to build a reasonably functional prototype. I then spent several days describing to Claude Code all the things that didn’t work, which mostly meant copying and pasting error codes and typing “what’s the full Terminal command” sixteen thousand times. I know how to code the way I knew Spanish in high school: I can ask about the library and order dinner, but nobody’s confusing me with a native speaker. My interactions with Claude Code amounted to a lot of pointing and gesturing and hoping the tool figured out I wanted soup. Eventually, I had an app that worked more or less the way I wanted it to. It showed my calendar, my notes, and my tasks all in one place; it looked nice; it was easy to get stuff in and out of. It also, I discovered, only ran locally on my laptop. Thus began several more days of wiring everything up to GitHub, Supabase, Vercel, and other platforms, then an interminable round of complaining to my AI developer bot that no, it’s still not syncing, and why did my Google Calendar connection fail, and I’m so sorry but I have no idea what my GitHub secret code is. All that eventually sorted, I decided to make a native mobile app, since that would feel better, which kicked off several weeks of new errors, new features, and more accounts to sign up for. Actually writing the code is but one part of creating and maintaining great software, and even the most advanced current tools have their limits. Design is maybe chief among them. Claude Code attacked my app’s design with fervent determination, the way I assume Jony Ive stares at a slab of aluminum and imagines removing all the ports from your laptop, but in this case every background ended up a gradient purple and every icon suggestion closely resembled a hamburger menu. When I pushed the bot to think a little more abstractly about the concept of a day, and to design an icon to fit the combination of journal and planner, it proudly displayed its answer in PNG image form. “I’m so sorry to tell you this,” I typed back, “but that looks like a butthole.” Claude’s next revision was once again three horizontal lines. “I’ve found that most coding agents suck at writing good interfaces,” says Brian Lovin, a designer and software engineer who works on AI products at Notion and several AI-centric side projects. He has also experienced Claude Code’s love for purple gradients. “I don’t know how to get it to not do that, except just annoyingly prompting it more and more and more.” Lovin says he’s learned to trust AI completely on the level of adding a tab to the settings panel, but “in the early days, when there’s no scaffolding, I don’t trust it at all.” [Image: There are many tracker apps like it, but this one is Allan’s. https://platform.theverge.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/05/Allan-migraine-app.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] Evidently, lots of other people do trust it. These limits don’t appear to have stopped huge swaths of people from becoming app developers. The Information reported that the total number of new apps in Apple’s App Store grew 30 percent in 2025, after nearly a decade of slow decline, and it looks likely to grow even more in 2026. According to Apple’s own count, the App Store had just shy of 2 million apps at the end of 2024 — vibe coders could help double that count by the end of 2026. Meanwhile, GitHub had its fastest year of growth in 2025, and found that 80 percent of new users use the Copilot coding agent within their first week on the platform. Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code, tells me he knew the product was going to be a hit when he discovered the sales team was using it — “that’s when I really started to get that this is not just for engineers,” he says. While some of these developers are looking to build The Next Great App, many are also just shipping the thing they built for themselves. Many, many more aren’t shipping anything publicly at all. In the course of reporting this story, I’ve heard tales — from sources, friends, and readers — of countless different kinds of personal software. (“What are you vibe-coding these days?” is a surprisingly good icebreaker in tech circles right now.) There are infinite variations on the to-do list, because writing a to-do list app is the coding version of learning Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water” for beginner guitarists — it’s just the way to learn where your fingers go. I also heard lots of stories about bespoke text editors, habit trackers, trip planners, family information managers, and blatant ripoffs of existing apps built just to avoid subscription prices. I also heard from Brenden, who made a command line app for ranking fantasy baseball players based on their recent stats and future projections; Nathan, who told me about a script they wrote with Claude Code to introduce the concept of renewable energy to Transport Tycoon Deluxe, a game that came out in the 1990s and otherwise only knows about coal; Anthony, who built a tool for optimizing

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