The Era Of Bespoke Applications

Applications have historically been written to target a large group of users with the aim of acquiring enough to justify a business. Many companies have failed because they built high quality apps that simply did not have a large enough user base to sustain the development necessary to keep the business profitable. This is changing. AI is now capable of coding, self-correcting and even achieving complex goals independently, which means it will soon take ideas and make them applications without human intervention. Given time-to-market of near zero for AI, we are entering the next phase of application development: applications built specifically for each user.

LangChain and agentic AI is already showing us that LLMs paired with other systems can perform a sequence of tasks —including unassisted corrections— to achieve a complex goal. Stitching data sources and connecting APIs together no longer requires a developer; AI can do this unassisted.

AI is handling the transformation and movement of data, but we still require a UX to take inputs from the user. Currently, we rely on human designers to produce coherent designs and interfaces, but AI will eventually conquer this domain. Even if it cannot create unique design systems in the way humans do, it would be able to analyze existing design systems and approximate for the majority of applications.

But if we're at a point where AI is building the UX, the data layer and writing the glue logic, what stops these systems from doing this for every user? There's no reason for applications to be built for a demographic when the time to market is virtually zero. The reasons for having singular applications target large groups of people is related to cost: building n versions of your application is not scalable. AI solves this.

If apps can be built for each user per a request, like "I want to track my work outs for the next year", in what sense is a self-contained, and installable app necessary? If the AI is at the OS level, does an app store exist? Do third-party developers make sense?

Once existing OSes elevate their AI capabilities to a point where their users can construct app-like experiences through natural language, the idea of an app store seems odd. Users will create custom applications for themselves, then template out those experiences and share with friends and family.

Google and Apple have the advantage here. They have OSes with millions of users. If either one focuses on AI and achieves this level of capability (or buys their way into it), they will present an enticing option: buy our phone and you get every app you can dream up. It will make the browser wars of the 90s feel adorable in comparison.

I'm not sure what will come of this. I'm currently the more pessimistic of my tech-minded friends. To me, the efficiency multiplier of AI is unparalleled in the history of disruption and invention, and I'm not confident historical analogs like the industrial revolution can apply here. Personally, I'm preparing for a world where application development is gone and a high volume of software engineers have no work.