This has been true in some form for a while. It's worth really wrapping our heads around.
You can install an app on your phone and drive an LLM, in English - no wait, you can in basically whatever language you want - to build anything you want. Apps, websites, writing, animations, games. Every model keeps getting better. Opus 5.5 is one-shotting all of these things, and Claude Code is generally available to anyone with a Claude account.
There's been so much writing online about taste. And it does matter. But lost in the discussion of taste and the discussion about what it means for the cleric class is, again: anyone can build anything now.
I think a lot of software developers who came up in the industry the same time as me - in the early 2010s - have a long-standing fantasy about building apps for small-business owners. Or making these solo-builder apps that absolutely take off. The prototypical example of this was Patrick McKenzie's Appointment Reminder, which was discussed often online as an example of how solo builders could make money building software on the Internet.
More recently, there was the sweaty startup movement. In short - you could find businesses and rapidly transform them, lower operating costs through automation and tech. You could imagine these (not a fan of this term, but alas) unsophisticated businesses and how you could claw back some time and energy with CRMs and automation tools.
Both of those visions still required a technical operator somewhere in the mix. A programmer builds software, or someone sufficiently technical enough to set up some white-label solution brings it into the mix and definitely shifts operations to it.
But anyone can build anything now! An owner or operator can build their own apps that directly reflect how their business runs. You can start net-new projects without needing to know how any part of the lower-level stacks work.
And that's going to be tricky. There's going to be issues. Security issues, AI slop issues. We're in the rough patches.
Regardless of all of that, I find the place that we're currently in quite exciting. I like the idea that anyone can build anything. I want to be inspired by how people who aren't software developers will approach building tools for themselves. They won't look like how we've done it in the past. It's outsider art.
I've spent a few days on and off coming back to this write-up - but the truth is, I keep building stuff instead. I'm too jazzed on seeing things appear on the screen. Excited to write more about it soon.