Timur BrachkowI see a lot of depressed messages all around the software engineer side of the internet.
Our skill was largely democratized by AI. Anyone with some technical, design or product building experience can build apps, and we can’t gatekeep them anymore.
Tons of apps are flowing into the internet and app stores. A lot of them work badly, some of them look bad, and few are actually good.
But they are here, either competing with our work or not busy creating work contracts for us.
For people like me, whose hobby outside of my day job was working on my own apps, this may seem like even more devastating news. I’ve spent human-years making apps, thinking that someday this will be my career.
In this post I will explain why I consider democratizing our work a good thing, why I believe a relatively simple app made by real people will continue to thrive, and why I’m not sad about “wasted time”.
What we were actually doing all the time
Let me start from a distance: what is the goal of “making apps”, “SaaS”, “CRUD” and being a software engineer in general?
When I studied in university, my course was called “Information Resource Management”. I always considered this name a random buzzword, unrelated to my education that mixed business, economy and shallow dive into computer science.
With years of experience I found out that the name actually was very on point. The exact moment when I realized this was during an argument with my grandfather, a very experienced bureaucrat, who rejected some of my points saying: “if everyone was sitting in the office in front of a computer, we would have nothing to eat”.
Here came the realisation: all the multibillion companies, including the most real-world ones — Uber, Airbnb, DoorDash — don’t do much in the physical world. Their engineers are busy doing CRUD on data. No engineer carries a person from A to B, or maintains an apartment.
What we were doing all the time wasn’t “solving real-world problems”. What we were actually doing is multiplying real-world work via automated CRUDing of data.
But a trillion times zero is still zero — and the zero-or-not comes from people in the offline world. This offline work is the product.
This real work can be multiplied by 10 when organised via the most primitive information system as simple as ink & paper, by 100 when it’s done in Excel, the most generalized information system, and by 100500 multiplied by 9000 when it is done in a tailored, computerized information system.
That’s what business wants. That’s what we do. That’s our work.
The world we lived in before was not normal
A few years ago, the hottest topic in tech was Pieter Levels – a guy in shorts and no t-shirt, who was making thousands of dollars a month by making ugly and buggy CRUD apps with PHP & jQuery.
What he did was brute-force tons of app ideas via making very barebones apps, and this enlarged luck surface, multiplied by an ever-growing subscriber count, resulted in making a few simple but very profitable apps.
Set aside his huge audience, and it sounded like a plan anyone could copy. “SaaS indiehacking craze” became a lasting hot topic in the engineering world.
But please, hear me out
All this success was a symptom of an unhealthy situation. Everyone needed apps to multiply their business output. But only a few, The Engineers™, were able to make those apps.
This imbalance between huge demand for tailored information systems and limited supply of people who can craft them gave birth to a privileged class of “CRUD makers”.
They could make a minimal, barely working, CRUD app that solved a pain-point™, and businesses hungry for informational systems tailored to their niche began lining up to sign up for the annual tax-deductible subscription.
This was great for the “rich from making forms” engineer, but it wasn’t healthy. And this was acknowledged long before AI: “no code” soaked up venture capital, n8n and Zapier became tools of the common folk, and Excel has been the people’s information system since the 80s.
What I’m trying to say in this section is that you should clearly distinguish when you are sad not because of the “death of craft”, but because the era of golden software shovels is gone. And the new era is better for everyone.
The secret ingredient of a CRUD app
Another discussion that emerged from this topic is TaStE. Everyone decided plain CRUD is no longer enough — now you need tasteful CRUD to succeed. Also everyone found that they are lucky holders of this unique “taste” and talent, and that their CRUD apps are already tasty. Yum!
Taste is a stupid term. But disregarding the surrounding idea and agreeing that barebones CRUD apps are dead may lead you into a depressing thought – that only REAL software is one made by x100000 engineers.
So Parallels the VM, YouTube, Office suite with legendary Excel, Git and Graphics editors are the only software that deserves to live, and now you, just a good modest engineer, are out of the game, just like these non-tech people were before.
But I believe that CRUD apps have a bright future. The secret ingredient isn’t taste — it’s ideas: your opinionated vision of what the product should be.
These ideas may be either right or wrong, visionary or delusional. You either feel it, or you don’t.
Just like in music. A well-funded pop star, a homegrown musician going viral on TikTok, or a sincere guy missing notes on a talent show that will end up a meme – all of them sing, all of them believe in their ideas to some degree.
I would like to explain what I think matters.
There is a lot of peak software that could be labeled “just CRUD”, but they hold a huge value in ideas and product field expertise:
- Things – is the top GTD app on iOS. This is the CRUDest app possible. If you open developer Twitter, all they do is politely reject ideas from their customers. Some customers are offended by that. Plenty of apps have the features they want. People stay with Things anyway, because developers know what you actually need to be productive, and what you only think will make you productive.
- Are.na – is a CRUD app with images. There are a lot of moodboarding apps, but via very specific PR, aesthetics and pricing, they were able to attract a unique community of creatives. I had way more meaningful connections via Are.na than LinkedIn and Twitter combined.
- Fastmail – everyone can make their own mail server, but they do old’n’boring email so well that people are paying them for the features available in Gmail for free.
- Flighty – is a CRUD app with aggregated API output. They make tracking flights into a smooth, nerdy, fun, and social experience.
You can build “a clone” of any of these apps in a week of prompting, but what you end up with is a visionless “Temu iPhone” of a CRUD app.
So mind reading is a new moat – your vision and your ideas, either brilliant or delusional, are completely private to you, and anyone who copies you is permanently one step behind, racing on a track you laid.
Stealing your precious ideas is not a thing you should worry about. It was always possible to steal an idea.
Your successful, but uninspired SaaS CRUD app could be easily cloned and outcompeted by a guy with a good VC network, who liked an idea for your app that you shared on Twitter.
But no one can copy your app plans before you make them happen, which means you always have an advantage with your ideas.
What motivates me to work on my CRUD app
For years, I’ve been making a wishlist app. This is the CRUDest category ever.
The most generic CRUD app you can think of, competing only with bookmarking apps. It is CRUD to the point where the biggest competitors are Google Sheets and {your-local-online-marketplace-name} Wishlist.
I started it way before the AI agents craze. It began as an app for my friends, then I decided to expand it to more people, then to a real product. This is the third or fourth iteration of the app since 2022.
You might think that I’d at least be mad that three years of my work can now be done by anyone who gave $100 to Anthropic.
But I’m not. Here’s why:
- I didn’t like any wishlist app that existed prior. Now I have an app I always wanted. There is an idea behind everything in my app. From simple, raw look and font choice, to drag-and-drop working in places unusual for the web. There is a lot of me in this work – I just believe in and enjoy everything in this app.
- I have a clear, far-reaching vision for the app that gives me hope it can outcompete anyone in this field. I know what people like me may want, and I believe there are enough of them to make the app sustainable in the long term.
- I learned a lot about software development, SEO, security and DevOps while making it. It was also built on a quirky stack that led to a few well-paid contracts on interesting projects, outside my primary scope of work.
I already gained a lot from this app: I’m already a happy user, and all emerging vibecoded apps are way below my app’s quality.
Maybe the one thing that’s quite sad for me is that marketing got even more frustrating, as tons of low-quality competition breeds a “yet another vibecoded wishlist app” prejudice. And I was already bad at marketing. But it’s a challenge to overcome!
Conclusions
So, what I tried to say here:
- The past decade was a SaaS gold rush, caused not by magnificent results of our skill, but by demand for “informational systems”, most of which were expensive to build due to our labour costs.
- Now they are not expensive to build due to AI, and many SaaS can be replaced internally for a cost lower than an annual subscription to such SaaS.
- What can’t be vibecoded is knowledge of the topic, engineering experience and ideas (but ideas can be wrong!). If you cared a lot about your product or craft in general, you already have this advantage!
- You might still be sad about the disappeared “Golden CRUD shovel making” era. To not be sad, you need to build what you care about and use it yourself. This way you will always end up winning. And, if you think about it for a second – maybe it is a change for a better future? Like, when was the last time making B2C apps was viable in comparison to B2B? It’s today!
Go and make something you care about!