Day 1363 and Landfill Apps

Building good software is a topic on which many of my friends and colleagues have extremely strong opinions.

Anything built by humans can become a craft with skilled artisans and building software doesn’t escape this. While there are 27 million software developers in the world and 4.4 million of them are in American, if you pressed the startup community most would agree the number of good software developers is much lower.

I came of age in the blogging era, where we got writing like Joel on Software. I learned to build thanks to other builders sharing their craft and discussing it on forums & personal sites. I had access to the insights of builders like DHH and Alex Payne. Their commitment to publishing accessibility helped onboard millions of normies like me.

In some ways, startups and the software giants of FAANG are a victim of our own success. We onboarded the world to our efficiency.

And now with AI coding software (incidentally trained by Stack Overflow data & GitHub repositories built by my community) we are experiencing a Cambrian explosion level of coding access.

And it’s not Zapier hacks or snide remarks about Rust anymore. Anyone who can think critically about a product feature can build it with clear thinking and natural language.

I recommend “In The Beginning There Was The Command Line” by Neal Stephenson so often because every time we have an abstraction leap that allows more access we move further away from the power of craft.

And that is an unmitigated good in many ways as more people get the benefits of these tools.

But we are also going to get a slot of shit churned out because of that. Soychotic called them landfill apps when Marques Brownlee or MKBDH launched a $12 a month app for phone wallpapers. The app enraged Twitter.

If history is any indication the growth curve in app building is just getting started. Much awful nonsense will be built and sold, but imagine how it enables those with taste and opinions to make new solutions to our problems.

Ironic a critic of software like MKNDH should play such a role in reminding us of just how hard it is to make something good. Making money though can have a much lower bar.