Software in the AI era

I have decided to retire the Contraption Company brand, and merge the domain contraption.co here into philipithomas.com. Emails will come from this new domain.

The impetus was a desire to add some new features to the site, and led to a reflection on how AI is changing the software industry.

A few years ago, I spent the day in the test kitchen and fermentation lab at noma while it was ranked #1 restaurant in the world. That experience was formative for me because of the level of craft I saw everywhere from the kitchen to the dining room - handmade ceramics that were each slightly imperfect, novel applications of koji in the fermentation lab, and a Jante-influenced service style that was warm without being performative. Over the holidays, I read this passage in New Nordic Cuisine, Aesthetics, and Place: A Compendium that captured what I was experiencing:

In many ways, the closing decades of the 21st century were all about having more of everything, a period marked by an aesthetics of abundance. In the private home, kitchens grew bigger and glistened with chrome and cool surfaces. Since then, things have changed. The glossy sheen of the mass-produced gave way to a desire for something warmer, for objects that radiate individuality, history and a sense of place. People wanted to signal their adherence to values such as sustainability and shared responsibility, but at the same time to mark themselves out as individuals.

As I read this passage, I realized that software has been following the same path - from mass-produced to custom.

Over the last decades, the economy made the transition from analog to digital. Schedules moved online, direct deposit replaced paper checks, and every restaurant got an iPad and a website.

To aid in that transition, many software factories were born. Salesforce, Kronos, Atlassian, and many others built tools that were adopted by millions of people. Customizing them for the specific workflows of each business was tedious, but the efficiency gains were significant. There was not enough talent for each business to build their own software, so they relied on economies of scale from big tech to digitize for less than the cost of a single software developer. It was the "shiny kitchen" era of software.

Over time, people grew frustrated with the limitations of mass-produced software. It was hard to set up, companies spent a lot of money on agencies to customize it, and it could be tedious to learn. "Low-code" emerged as a stop-gap, but was still difficult.

Then, over the last year - coding became "solved" by AI. LLMs became powerful enough that the bottleneck shifted from writing code to deciding what to build.

While many fear that AI will kill the software industry, I disagree. I think AI is changing where software gets developed - away from large software vendors and into small teams within companies.

There is latent demand for custom software. Some is regional - like ecommerce that integrates with OXXO Pay, some is niche like software for managing political campaigns, and some is frontier like self-driving cars.

Until now - companies have had to fit their needs into the catalog of features available from vendors. With AI, companies can build without constraints - and the result is going to be more software built for a single company or a single user. I believe the result will be an explosion of new, unique, and interesting software.

I have experienced this shift firsthand. I originally explored the idea of personal software in An app of one's own. Since then, I have continued to build a lot of software for myself, my projects, and my writing. Over time, I felt constrained by the limits of mass-produced software and the overhead of building software for multiple people.

For the past few years, contraption.co has been built on the Ghost blogging platform. I can develop themes on top of it, but lack low-level access to the code. I built a plugin for it called Trivet. But, as my development moved from hand-written to AI, I hit snags. As I wanted to build better search into the blog powered by Chroma, I found myself fighting the framework rather than being empowered by it. So, I ripped it out and rebuilt the website from scratch (with AI) using a coding framework rather than blogging framework. Unitasker frameworks are becoming a vestige of the pre-AI era, because AI development works best with full access to the underlying code.

My personal website philipithomas.com used to be built in Postcard, which is a personal website building software I build, open-source, and operate. It was made for an era when making websites was hard, and to do that there is a lot of logic about authentication, authorization, multi-tenancy in a shared database, and data privacy. Well, for my new website - I thought from first principles about what I wanted, and I decided that because I was building this software for myself - I could replace my database with the local filesystem. It was a curiosity I explored in Three-Ring Binder. But, in many ways - you can simplify software if you are building it for yourself. And, I could lean into quirkiness like incorporating blog cover images into search. A lot of the complexity of modern software comes from multitenancy and business needs - so when building just for yourself, you can sometimes greatly simplify design.

Along the way, I found myself facing new challenges for AI-powered development. I decided to build email sending through a command-line interface, but had to figure out how to stop AI agents from autonomously triggering emails to thousands of people. The solution I found was to wrap secrets fors production commands in the 1Password CLI, so I would have to scan a human fingerprint to send emails. Software now needs guardrails for AI as much as for humans.

My new website is live today at philipithomas.com. The UI is a new project called Bully Pulpit, and the backend newsletter software is called Printing Press - both open-source. The search and AI are influenced by Mintlify.

The original vision of Contraption Company when I set it up in January 2020 was to build calm and dependable tools. Now, everybody is empowered to do that.

So, farewell to the Contraption Company brand, and onwards to the new software era.