Around 1995, Bill Gates’ famous vision of ‘a computer on every desk and in every home’ was well on its way. Then in 2007 the iPhone came along, and soon everybody carried a computer in their pocket with more computing power than NASA used to put people on the moon.
(I tried hard to find a 2015 stepping stone to make this a neat ten-year rhythm. Consumer-wise, nothing with quite the same punch. Developer-wise though, you could make a case: AWS, Docker, affordable private repos, CI/CD, and JavaScript eating the entire stack from Express to React Native etc etc made ‘shipping code’ an order of magnitude more accessible right around then.)
Because now, with AI coding, the next step is here: not just a computer, but a software company in every pocket. And then software stops being something you buy, and becomes something you make, for yourself, your family, your friends.
An audience of four
At least that’s what I see with my own projects. Something funny happened to the projects page of this site over the past months: it kind of exploded. (Go ahead, scroll through it, I’ll wait.) But mostly I noticed who they’re for.
Ten, fifteen years ago, I built things for ‘users’: a startup idea, a side project with some imagined audience out there. These days, a good chunk of what I build has an audience of about four people. And they all live in my house.
There’s a quiz for the kids on long trips, with a dedicated horses & ponies theme (I’ll let you guess why). There’s our own version of Monopoly Deal, where every color set is a family trip. There are pony games co-created with my daughter Julia, a very demanding product owner. And in Instant Cities, next to the usual suspects, I added Salerno and Pompeii, simply because I happened to be traveling there and wanted to get a feel for them first. None of these would ever pass the ‘is there a market for this?’ test, and I couldn’t care less. (And then there’s Wouter’s App, a bit of a personal joke slash concept art piece: an app for an audience of exactly one.)
And the ‘in your pocket’ part is quite literal: a lot of this was built not behind a laptop but on my phone, with Claude Code. I type what I want, it commits and pushes, and a minute later it’s live. So a kid asking for ‘more horse questions!’ halfway through a trip is no longer a feature request for some vague future weekend. It can be there before the next stop. I can live with that!
Built for the people at the table
As someone who has been coding for (gulp) decades now, and who is, let’s say, somewhat prone to side projects (exhibit A: this entire website), I’ve had a front row seat for how this happened in steps. Twenty years ago, a serious personal project took years. Then cloud hosting, containers and JavaScript frameworks (so many frameworks) made it more like months. Now it’s weeks, sometimes even days, minus the evenings of cursing at obscure error messages.
And that changes what software is for. We’ve seen this before with spreadsheets: serious tools for financial analysts that turned out just as handy for planning the family holiday or who brings what to the BBQ. Nobody calls that ‘financial modelling’, it’s just a spreadsheet. Software is heading the same way: less restaurant, more home cooking.
Back in Lecce I once wrote that I’m not an ‘idea person’, nor a ‘getting stuff done’ person, but rather an ‘improving and optimizing little thingies’ person. Looks like the world finally caught up with that particular personality type. Ha!
Anyway, if you’ll excuse me: somebody has requested a new pony.