perri.to: A mashup of things (by Horacio Duran)

The Golden age of custom apps.

I was a kid through the 80s-90s period. Where I lived, computers were not exactly a thing of the common household until I was about 10 (93-95). My town was striken by a really bad economic downturn: My city was heavily reliant on metal adjacent industry and the country had just killed it by allowing free imports from China. I also lived in a rather rural area of a poorly connected country so technology advancements were not trickling down to us until they had become very common in the capital.

One thing I do remember about my childhod and the use of computers was the customization. Sure everybody was using a flavor of Microsoft OS but the applications were heavily customized. A great example of this was accountants, most accountants used variants of FoxPro to go beyond the capabilities of spreadsheets. Accountants were already quite advanced QPro and Lotus but at some point they needed more, not from the math aspect but the flow.

My uncle, who was an accountant for the agricultural industry, had a lot of custom FoxPro programs that allowed quick and mechanical input of financial data and outputted paperwork to be presented and proper tax calculations.

Enter the spreadsheet renaissance.

With time spreadsheets gained a lot of abilities. Microsoft Excel, arguably the most popular spreadsheet software available, gained such abilities as interacting with Visual Basic, using macros and talking to MS Access. Gradually we shifted from writing custom apps to complex spreadsheets.

The bar for using computers lowered significantly and the new users were acquainted with UI abstractions but not the complex command sets older users had to learn in order to fully extract value from their computers.

Google Sheets Likely put the last nail on that coffin by automatically giving anyone the ability to work on a shared space over the internet.

Bridging the UX Gap.

With AI being all the rage now a door opens for the return of old habits. I recently had to return to being an “auto-entrepreneur” which is a french self employment type. I found myself once again in front of a spreadsheet trying to figure out how to model the household earnings to ensure I have a proper spending model to handle my finances when it hit me. AI is not yet super mature for anybody to just craft any software but given I do this for a living, I can tell a tool a very detailed architectural overview of an app, make it generate it and then proofread the result.

I had a conversation with Claude Code and in about half an hour (it was more in absolute time since I left it working and completely forgot to come back to it) I got a working personal accounting software tailored to my needs.

The generated app was by no means perfect. I checked the code and numbers and found a few glaring mistakes which I fixed by hand just to be cautious. I foresee this will be a common pattern as these tools become commoditizable (cheaper and less environmentally destructive to run) and less error prone.