I Never Want to Use Third-Party Software Again

> Clay Shirky wrote in 2004 that building an application for a few dozen users was "an absurd target population." Twenty-one years later, it’s time to rethink what’s possible.

A long time ago, I remember an earthquake, I wrote an app for our director and another for my boss, about 35 users short of a few dozen, a simulator for sensor tradeoffs, and a form-based "man page" documentation generator for some image-processing software we were writing. Quick turnaround, so I used HyperCard with some XFCN's to do all that was needed. Rapid prototyping in the service of rapid prototyping.

The idea never caught on en masse after HyperCard was axed. How could someone cook up an app for some home use? See the following quote:

> There is a “feedback” button at the end of every lesson so the kids can tell me if it was too easy or too hard, or if they want a particular story (my daughter has used it more than once to request a story in which she meets and gets to sing with Idina Menzel.) One request was not about the stories at all but about the rewards. They wanted something to collect. So I made holographic cards of their favorite stuffies. The rarer the card, the shinier it is when you tilt it!

So, you could search the app store for something that requires a subscription, meaning that you lose your data when you stop paying, or maybe there WAS an app, but the developer got tired of updating it with every yearly shock to the operating system.

> I spent the next few days elatedly designing for myself, adding in little moments of delight that would make sense to very few others.

LLM's, the supposed replacement for that nonexistent "app maker" only give you code, and

• Few created solutions in BASIC, or VB. It was too complex for them, and • HyperCard gave you a somewhat natural language, instant persistent database and UI builder, and objects (stack, card, field ...) and messages. • UI means a lot.

People don't want to program, but a lot of people scripted.

> So I made holographic cards of their favorite stuffies. The rarer the card, the shinier it is when you tilt it!

Need to know more.

When I worked at the optics company, I parodied one of the design software commands, as

CLOG, Comprehensive Lens Output on Glass.

From lens spec to polished glass.

It remains a parody. Getting anything real involves translation between the data world and the physical world, and until machines can manage everything, people are still an irreducible need.

So, there's hope. For a wile, anyway.

More and more average people are building and vibe coding their own solutions as the mainstream begins to realize what was once out of reach is now rather accessible.

So says a former VP of product design who spent 14 years at Facebook. Say what you will about Facebook, I'm sure she learned a lot about product design at that FAANG, as well as at Stanford and the startups since.

But guess what. The average person isn't going to want to build every piece of software they use. And if they do want to build it, they sure as heck won't want to maintain it.

I saw a colleague build a custom marketing workflow a few months ago using AI. It was cool, but I thought to myself "welcome to the world of software debugging".