What If My Mum Can Build It Too?

If my mum could build her own software, why would she pay for software ever again?

That question has been the crux to much of the debates I’ve noticed being had about whether anyone will still build software for a living.

And to be honest, the strongest part of that argument, to me, is the part about it being bespoke. Custom.

Often underexpressed is the fact that not only will my mum be able to vibe-code the tool she would have previously had to pay for, but that she will be able to have it specifically tailored to her individual needs and circumstances.

Someone who highlighted this to me, before I even started delving into the practical realities of this myself, was co-founder of 37signals:

On September 30th, 2026, Fried shared a post on X demonstrating some custom, personal software he had built himself in a weekend.

What Fried built was a text editor - but one made specifically to facilitate his ideal form of writing exploration:

For years, maybe a decade, I've wanted to build a writing tool that just did a few things I couldn't find anywhere else.

A system that mimicked how I think when I write. A system that provided clear affordances, features, and places to do the things I wanted to do. A way to play with my writing as I’m writing it. A way to settle into just the right way to say something.

It never made sense to make it a 37signals product because it’s not commercially viable, nor would it be worth pulling people off their other work to hack on this. Plus, it would have taken months the old way.

So this weekend I just made it myself, with Claude’s help.

It’s called Write_On and the short video walks you through it.

Essentially it’s “alternative control” at the word, sentence, and paragraph level, plus a way to dim stuff back, and stash stuff near by. Not version control, but alternative control. You’ll see what I mean when you watch the video below.

Practically, this means giving users (writers) a way to attach different word choices to a particular word placement, with controls to easily switch between those options.

With this, writers can see different options for a word without writing over and losing their previous word choice. The same can also be done with sentences or even whole paragraphs!

Fried also added the feature that lets you “ghost” a selection of words or sentences - which dims it, letting you review the text that remains visible without entirely removing the text you ghosted. (Fried neatly named the feature that lets you bring the text back: “Reviving”).

What’s wonderful is that, in a way, this whole tool has been designed with a principle in mind: that writers should be able to visualise all of their options before committing to any one of them, so that they can make their most creative choice from those options.

But this principle was also highly personal to Fried. It was baked into his own experience of writing. He didn’t glean it from market research. He didn’t even really know if this was something others wanted. It was just an itch of his own that he wanted to scratch.

And the result is lots of replies just like this one:

And yes, Jason, if you’re reading this - me too!

(In fact, if I had this tool, perhaps I wouldn’t have lazily used the word ‘options’ so many times).

But if the result of scratching your own itch is finding others with the same itch: surely most software should be built with a principle like this in mind, right?

Well, in his post, Fried also shines a light on why his company, despite being a software company, didn’t previously make this exact tool:

It never made sense to make it a 37signals product because it’s not commercially viable, nor would it be worth pulling people off their other work to hack on this.

Or more accurately, not obviously money in it.

The great blocker of any potential innovation: the fear of risk - of investing in something that doesn’t present itself as a sure thing.

But let’s get into exactly why this causes such a great tension:

It’s because software companies have always had every incentive to build something that scales well.

See, traditionally, software has been costly to build. So if you’re going to build it, you’re economically incentivised to find a way to make that investment ‘worth it’.

One tried and true strategy has been to make it scalable: for that one piece of software to be useful to as many customers as possible.

That way, every new customer adds revenue without adding much cost, because you’re building one product for everyone rather than something bespoke for each of them.

Wait, revenue increases without significant expense increase? Sign me up!!* - *Every investor of the past ~16 years.

This scalable approach has protected the HUGE gross margins software companies could unlock, and the incredible valuation multiples that came along with it.

Scalable solutions also helped companies capture a market quickly, helping them build a moat around the status quo bias in those they served.

So again, why would a software company not put time and effort investing in features that are highly specific and personal?

Because their incentives fight against it.

In fact, when most companies organise their product development priorities on ‘impact’… what they really mean is how much a feature aligns with the incentive to appeal to the largest possible set of customers.

I’m not saying this as judgement; I’m just observing why a company like 37signals perhaps never prioritises a tool with a unique way of interacting with writing; and why your favourite software still hasn’t added that feature you asked for 3 years ago…

That’s the thing: when I came across Jason Fried’s post, my mind immediately opened up. The things I can build!!

Not in an ‘I just watched The Social Network and feel I too can conquer the world as a 20-something who loves computers’ kind of way—

But more in a ‘I can make so many niche forms of software that no software company has ever been incentivised to work on’… kind of way.

See, before I read this post (only around a month ago, wow), I was still quite overwhelmed by the seemingly endless possibilities and changes that AI was presenting us with.

But this post just put so many of those possibilities on ghost, and focused my attention entirely on the benefits of being able to build small, custom, and personal software.

(I’ve even built my own tool around the way I like to write).

As is often the case with AI-related discoveries…

Just moments after my excitement arose, so did a sudden fear:

What does this mean for me as a designer of software?

I mean, sure, I can now easily build all the ideas I’ve ever had—

And if my mum can… Then how will I get paid in the future?!

And now we’re back to the crux of the problem we started with: if the average consumer, who previously paid for software, can now just build it themselves… why would they pay for it? And what then happens to the economy of software, to the jobs of builders of software?

As many, much smarter than me have pointed out in countless studies, we humans aren’t exactly rational consumers:

We’ve observed that we will pay over $17 a visit for a gym membership despite their being a $10 per visit option, because we are so bad at predicting how often we’ll actually go.1.

That we will pay roughly three times as much for a branded aspirin as for the identical store brand.2

And that we will still buy extended warranties despite being advised not to, which ends up costing us about as much as the repair they insure against, which many of us never even claim on.3

In each case, we’re not really buying the product. We’re buying a feeling around what the product promises.

And I believe this will be a remaining issue when it comes to this whole notion of personal software.

And that just because someone could easily make their own software - doesn’t necessarily mean that they will.

One problem we software builders have as forecasters of ‘trends’ in technology is that when we see the cost of developing software drop, we LEAP at the opportunity to build that one idea we’ve always had!

(I told you I was more than just an ideas guy!)

And since we’re surrounded by similar people (I see you Design Twitter); we automatically assume that everyone is equally excited by the prospect of building their own micro-software.

Until you actually do have a conversation with your mum—

And you find out that no, it’s not that exciting for her. And no, when she runs into a problem, she doesn’t think: is there a software solution for this that I could build?!

Most people dont give a crap about building software. In fact, most people hate computers.

They just want the dishwasher to work and the app to open. Nobody’s spending their weekend chatting with Claude on their phone. They’re living their lives, and they want tech to stop getting in the way.

An analogy I want to bring up here, that I’ve sometimes seen on X, is how during the COVID pandemic, a lot of us learned to cut our own hair.

Doing so, naturally, saved us a lot of money.

And yet, as soon as barbershops and hairdressers reopened, many rushed right back into that leather seat, happy to exchange their cash for… well… what exactly?

Well, before we answer that, let’s first actually challenge this analogy.

Because sure, paying for software you could easily make yourself is kind of like cutting your own hair at home during the pandemic…

And sure, it’s kind of like going to a restaurant and paying for a meal you could cook yourself…

But I feel these analogies actually underplay the real, potential power of AI-leveraged software building.

Having Claude Code is not just having clippers, a hand mirror, and YouTube on your phone during the pandemic, but more like having a machine at home that you can pop on your head, describe to it the kind of haircut you want, and it would just give it to you in seconds.

I think this feels more apt for the nature of what’s been enabled by AI: a machine that’s context-aware, worldly in its knowledge, and carries with it the expertise that a lot of professionals do.

This means whilst she might not be excited by the idea of building software, if she ever does think to build something, she doesn’t necessarily need the expertise to build something that’s workable. And that’s good enough.

“Good enough”. This is a phrase that makes people immediately jump to their keyboards on X - where people will point out that the good enough could be great if only a person with “taste” stepped in…

But to be honest, I’m less interested in exploring that nuance.

After all, if my mum can’t tell the difference…

Now there is one counterpoint from a famous study in behavioural economics that I’ve thought a lot about recently. Its the IKEA effect.

Researches have found that we value things more when we’ve put our own labour into them. In these studies, people who built IKEA furniture, folded origami, and assembled Lego valued their creations above identical ones they hadn’t made. (Even judging their amateruish origami to be worth almost as much as an expert’s).

So maybe if I force my mum to sit down and spend a weekend vibe coding a tool (sorry mum), then maybe she’d actually end up loving it — mostly because she made it herself.

But the thing about the IKEA effect is that it really emphasises the effort part of the building…

Our instant haircut machine? It requires no effort. You simply describe what you want, and it appears. And even if there is some pride still in the iterations and debugging required to make something with it today - the better the AI gets in the future, the less labour there will be to fall in love with.

But still, loving something and trusting it are two very different things.

So even if my mum loves what she’s made, does she trust it?

Jason Fried actually put his finger on why she might not, in a blog post he wrote all the way back in March, 2026 (10 years ago in AI years):

“Giving everyone access to s