TechCrunch’s article The rise of ‘micro’ apps: non-developers are writing apps instead of buying them reminded me about something I’ve been wanting to say.
In 1988… I think… I attended a tech conference and found myself having dinner with a group of attendees I hadn’t met before.
The person sitting next to me was super excited about this new organization called The Free Software Foundation (FSF) and their new project called GNU.
“They’re making a free C compiler! Soon it will be good enough for production use!” he said excitedly.
At the time there was no such thing as a C compiler that didn’t cost money. The good C compilers were very expensive (thousands of dollars per seat).
“It’s going to change everything! Everything! Anyone will be able to write code!”
Me, being still a teenager, deferred to his expertise. I hadn’t attended the presentation that had gotten him so excited.
In hindsight, I wish I had said, “Oh, you think coughing up $99 for Borland C is what’s stopping people from writing apps? You really think $99 is the problem?” (That’s about $275 in 2026 dollars)
But I was 19 or so and didn’t think to say that.
A few years later spreadsheets stopped sucking (mostly because MS-Excel was so much easier to use than its predecessors) and people discovered that a mediocre spreadsheet is better than buying an app, or waiting for some vendor to think of writing the exact app you want. When spreadsheets were new only accountants used them. The first time I saw one being used to maintain a list of phone numbers a lightbulb went off in my head. Oh, this is something anyone can use!
None of that compares to what I’m seeing people Vibe Code today. A friend wrote an iPhone app that allows her kids to take pictures and scribble on them, even share them with others. I made a highly bespoke inventory system with a web UI that is lightyears ahead of what my HTML skills can produce.
90% of all apps are CRUD apps (not an insult… CRUD means “create, read, update, delete”… the 4 things you do with entries in a database). Claude Code is great at that kind of application and a lot more. Why? Probably because 99% of the desired applications in the world don’t invent anything new, and LLMs are great at regurgitating what already exists.
Why hadn’t there previously existed an app that let’s kids to take pictures and scribble on them? Because there’s no profit in such a bespoke app. Isn’t it interesting that late stage capitalism, which created the horror that is Generative AI, is enabling us to create the apps that we’ve been denied because the so-called “free market” didn’t deem worthy of creating for us.
This article on TechCrunch has some excellent reporting on this: The rise of ‘micro’ apps: non-developers are writing apps instead of buying them
