Build for Yourself, Not Someone Else
About eighteen months ago, when I started agentic coding, I told a coworker, "Software is now disposable." I meant that I could build whatever I wanted. Back then it took more effort, it cost more, and the quality was lower than it is today. But the idea was already true: I was reaching the point where I could build any software I wanted. Since then, that capability has spread to a lot of people, and most of them are using it the same way: building anything and everything to try to make money. Almost nobody is building for themselves.
Software that fits one person
I think one of the keys going forward is software that's completely customized to you and your own life. Build something you actually want to use, something that makes your own days better. Whether anyone else would pay for it is a different question, and often not the important one.
It hit me while I was working on search traffic for luttrell.ai. I looked at everything I've built so far. Most of the search visitors come for the guitar tablature and chord books, which now cover thousands of songs. Some come for the bird database and other pages. Then I realized that I've built a lot of applications, some possibly better than anything on the App Store, and I'm not trying to make a single penny from any of them.
The sky
My sky app combines databases of airplanes overhead, visible satellites, and the positions of the planets, day or night. You point your phone at the sky and it tells you exactly what you're looking at, using the phone's compass and motion sensors to guide you to an object and tell you more about it. It will even text me when a specific satellite is about to come into view.
I wanted it, so it exists.
The birds
Most bird apps tell you what they can hear right now. Mine takes years of history from my own location, looks at migration patterns, and scans local news to anticipate when a species is likely to show up or disappear.
Take the Mississippi kites. They come to Oklahoma in the spring, nest through the summer, take over the neighborhood, and are known to dive at people who get too close to a nest. By late September they're mostly gone. Everyone is relieved, and the other birds pick back up. My own data shows that whole arc, year after year, and that's far more interesting to me than a single identification.
The weather
Weather data in Oklahoma is split across agencies for political and commercial reasons. The Storm Prediction Center does the outlooks and storm reports, the local forecast offices issue warnings and launch the balloons, the radar, satellites, and forecast models each come from somewhere different, and private companies package their own slices.
I wanted all of it on one map, so I built that. It combines the convective outlooks, the live radar with reflectivity, storm-relative velocity, correlation coefficient, and echo tops, satellite imagery, the HRRR model's view of the next few hours, and the storm reports. You can look ahead, watch what's happening right now, or replay a past storm to see what actually happened. I can't wait to use it next spring. I wrote more about it in The Weather App I Built for Myself.
The arcade
You're not supposed to play games in a Tesla while it's driving, but the browser is right there. So I built an arcade with exactly the games I want: poker, chess, checkers, backgammon, solitaire, sudoku, and more. My daughter worked on Othello.
The App Store versions of these games, free or paid, come with pop-up ads, 3D worlds, and a lot of fluff between you and the game. Mine are slimmed down and do exactly what they are supposed to do.
Coworkers have started using them. One told me, "Matt, I love your poker game. No ads, no extra fluff, you're just playing poker." It turns out that something as simple as an app that does exactly what it's supposed to do is remarkable.
The fun menu
There's a Fun menu on the site that has quietly grown into its own collection: a Songbook with chords and play-along lyrics, Learn Guitar, Hum-2-Tab, a Song Generator, a spatial audio project, a plant catalog with frost warnings, the documented build of our Defender, a 3D scan of a living room, and a city builder of Norman. I'm sure I'm forgetting something.
None of them were built for a market. Every one of them was built because someone in my house wanted it.
Disposable, and a lot more fun
I wouldn't be surprised if, twenty or thirty years from now, these apps have evolved into exactly what I want. And they'll still be around, because I don't need an app store to get them. I can build what I want for myself, my friends, and my family.
Eighteen months ago, "software is disposable" was a statement about capability. Now it feels like a statement about freedom. Software really is disposable. It's also a lot more fun.