We have personalized software now

The hardest part about going to Disney World is waiting in lines, especially when you're under ten years old and each minute feels like forever. When I was at Disney World recently, I saw lots of parents passing the time with their kids by playing Heads Up. I decided to download the app and do the same thing with my kids. 

After loading it up, I was immediately turned off by all the upsells. I get that they're trying to make money, but I don't want to pay for a simple game like this. So what did I do? I recently made my own Solitaire game, so I opened Claude on my phone and made my own version:

Make a game for my phone that I can play in the browser. Make it one HTML page. Make it a clone of that Heads up game where a user hold the phone to their forehead, and people around them have to make them guess the word. The core functionality is rounds where users can tip the phone when they get the word right, or tip it another way to skip. Make the initial dictionary kid friendly

Within five minutes I was playing an ad-free, fully-featured game. A few tweaks later for better tilt-sensitivity, more words, more emojis, and my kids and I were breezing through every ride's wait times. I'm not even the first person to think of this, since I found a very similar version while writing this post.

A new era

In the past few weeks, folks have been using AI to reverse engineer executable local code to merge video games and make clones of Adobe software. It's not perfect, or even very good, but it's getting there. From the initial time Simon Willison generated an svg of a pelican to decompiling source code today, the capability curve of AI is still rising.

SaaS businesses continue to be more viable; It's a lot harder to decompile code when you don't have access to an executable. That's not feasible for things like video games or other software that requires direct hardware access, but so much stuff happens in a browser now. Even then, SaaS apps have so much functionality that users don't need, so they can clone the features they actually care about and disregard the rest.

That doesn't mean building your own stuff always makes sense. But if your app or service has a lot of cruft, poor performance, outages... then building your own tools will look more and more tempting over time.