I feel the same way about bespoke software as I do about 3D printing. For a small subset of people who like to tinker it is amazing, but there is a pretty big market for paying other people to please to 3D print for you.
For technical people who are developers or in other technical roles, sure. For everyone else, no way.
The hard part isn't the code, for most problems it never was. The hard part is being able to think logically about what problem you are trying to solve, making sure the guardrails are in place so you don't accidentally wipe your whole photo library, and staying on top of the specs for multiple walled gardens that you want to interface with. In short, maintenance.
Building is fun, maintaining is a slog. This is also why saas isn't going anywhere. There is a benefit from not reinventing the wheel, having a shared language and shared ecosystem.
On the other hand, I do think that the software that is going to succeed is the software that is the easiest to build on top of.
Everyone creating their own bespoke apps sounds great until all these people realize what they were paying software companies for, maintenance, security and inoperability.
I'm seeing this in my ops role currently. Everyone from development to marketing vibe coding things that look good and function on a surface level but are creating more maintenance headaches for me to support since once they get their pretty front end, they think they did the hard work and now it is on ops to support.
A couple weeks ago, I had accounting come to me to show me their cool app they vibe coded and asking for help "just finishing it up." They spent 6 hours making the front end to a form.
A form that I could have spun up in 10 minutes if they came to me first using tools we already had. But now because they "made it" they feel ownership of it and don't like the idea of me rebuilding it in a more standard way.
Marketing last week showed me another "app" they spent all week on. It again was just a form. They didn't like the jira form interface so they decided to make a prettier way to submit tickets. However it doesn't actually do anything, it is just a front end. But of course they showed leadership and got kudos for it because it looks so nice, and now I have to figure out how to wire it up and maintain it.
And don't get me started on an engineer who decided to make their own BI tool that is half baked and not even connected to anything (they give it a csv every day and hit run). When we literally have a live dashboard with the same data.
These things are killing efficiency. You have teams "building things" instead of dieing their job. And leadership loving it because sexy UI must mean productivity.
I feel this. Since my team has jumped into an AI everything working style, expectations have tripled, stress has tripled and actual productivity has only gone up by maybe 10%.
It feels like leadership is putting immense pressure on everyone to prove their investment in AI is worth it and we all feel the pressure to try to show them it is while actually having to work longer hours to do so.
Also not sure about the usage of theater there. I'd probably swap it out for "show". Never heard theater used like that although it is pretty close to a standard idiom, "to make a show of something".
I won't argue that it is a universal truth but it has played out the same for my kids and my friends groups kids.
They treat it like a drug and lose all emotional regulation. I don't believe all screen time is bad, but it is something you have to teach them to regulate and 3 year olds and younger are just bad at regulating emotion in general. Teaching them to do this is just part of parenting. One of the most important things we can teach our kids is that it is okay to be bored. In fact it is great to be bored sometimes.
On the other hand, being a parent is hard and keeping your sanity is important in order to be a good parent. So if it helps you be a better parent all other times, it could be worth it.
The issue is when screens are used to in place of parenting. Parents using it as a way to fuel their own screen addiction.
On the other hand, for me airplanes are a special case and all rules go out the window to help keep the kid calm.
It is an over correction because of all the empty promises of LLMs. I use Claude and chatgpt daily at work and am amazed at what they can do and how far they can come.
BUT when I hear my executive team talk and see demos of "Agentforce" and every saas company becoming an AI company promising the world, I have to roll my eyes.
The challenge I have with LLMs is they are great at creating first draft shiny objects and the LLMs themselves over promise. I am handed half baked work created by non technical people that now I have to clean up. And they don't realize how much work it is to take something from a 60% solution to a 100% solution because it was so easy for them to get to the 60%.
Amazing, game changing tools in the right hands but also give people false confidence.
Not that they are not also useful for non-technical people but I have had to spend a ton of time explaining to copywriters on the marketing team that they shouldn't paste their credentials into the chat even if it tells them to and their vibe coded app is a security nightmare.
Related it seems AI has been effective at forcing my team to care about documentation including good comments. Before when it was just humans reading these things, it felt like there was less motivation to keep things up to date. Now the idea that AI may be using that documentation as part of a knowledge base or in evaluating processes, seems to motivate people to actually spend time updating the internal docs (with some AI help of course).
It is kind of backwards because it would have been great to do it before. But it was never prioritized. Now good internal documentation is seen as essential because it feeds the models.
The way you put that makes be think of the current challenge younger generations are having with technology in general. Kids who were raised on touch screen interfaces vs kids in older generations who were raised on computers that required more technical skill to figure out.
In the same way, when everything just works, there will be no difference, but when something goes wrong, the person who learned the skills before will have a distinct advantage.
The question is if AI gets good enough that slowing down occasionally to find a specialist is tenable. It doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be predicably not perfect.
Expertw will always be needed, but they may be more like car mechanics, there to fix hopefully rare issues and provide a tune up, rather than building the cars themselves.
The money is going to rent seeking middle man corporations. Our system is basically a jobs program for lawyers, defense contractors and insurance companies. They contribute nothing to the country but absorb so much money.
Their talents would be better used if we cut out the middle layer.
Bay Area here. No real hours however "business hours" are 9 to 5, that generally means any meetings need to be within that time frame (ideally actually more like 10 to 4). It is common courtesy to also not schedule 12-1 for lunch, but that gets thrown out the window a lot and so working lunches are the norm. Even if I don't work through lunch, I usually only take 20 min or so.
Most people are in the office (when they are actually in the office, which isn't often these days), from 9ish to 5ish. I've worked at many companies that offered dinner at 7 to encourage people to stay late, but that only seems to have the effect of having people start later. No one really tracks hours as long as the work is getting done. Plenty of time I'll cut out of work around 2pm for something and then check in later in the evening for a couple hours.
General trend is people in their 20s work longer and later. Most people over 30 at any tech company I've worked at are out the door before 5. But also people over 30 tend to more reliably be in the office at or before 9.
For technical people who are developers or in other technical roles, sure. For everyone else, no way.
The hard part isn't the code, for most problems it never was. The hard part is being able to think logically about what problem you are trying to solve, making sure the guardrails are in place so you don't accidentally wipe your whole photo library, and staying on top of the specs for multiple walled gardens that you want to interface with. In short, maintenance.
Building is fun, maintaining is a slog. This is also why saas isn't going anywhere. There is a benefit from not reinventing the wheel, having a shared language and shared ecosystem.
On the other hand, I do think that the software that is going to succeed is the software that is the easiest to build on top of.