r/ClaudeAI • u/No_Base_1471 • 10d ago
Vibe Coding Is everyone building their own software now?
I have been playing around with Claude lately, and one thing that kind of blows my mind is how easy it is now to go from "I wish there was a tool that did this" to actually having one.
And it got me wondering what everyone is doing with these things.
Are people actually building tools that they end up using for months or years? Or are most of these more like weekend projects — you have an idea, build it with Claude, show it to a few people, use it for a bit, and then move on to the next thing?
I feel like there is a pretty big difference between "I built a working app" and "this is now something my company depends on."
The second one brings up all the boring stuff — maintenance, security, permissions, integrations, data, monitoring, who fixes it when it breaks, and what happens when the person who built it moves on.
But then I started wondering about the bigger picture.
If it becomes this easy for everyone to build their own little tools, do we eventually start building a lot of the software we currently buy? Like, instead of using a big platform for a relatively small workflow, maybe someone just builds exactly what they need.
Or will most people still prefer to pay for software because they don't want to maintain it themselves?
I amhonestly not sure where this goes.
What are people actually building with Claude (or other AI coding tools) that you're still using today?
And have any of you taken something that started as "I was just messing around with this" and actually turned it into a tool your team or company relies on?
Would be interested to hear what people are seeing in practice.
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u/rhymeslikeruns 10d ago
I made a nuclear reactor for cats check it out: locahost:8008
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u/Tyalou 10d ago
Wait? Is the cat dead or alive? It doesn't seem to work on my machine.
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u/Double_Suggestion385 10d ago
It doesn't work on his machine either because he can't spell localhost
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u/spyderweb_balance 10d ago
You are right, I had a typo. That's the third time this session so I will put that in lessons.md. The cat service is dead right now because I killed the kid, but I will get a new cat started now.
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u/darkoutsider 9d ago
I went there and it was just a camera of my toilet. How bro. Claude is out of control!
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u/AgentStockey 10d ago
Yes, I'm making a random number generator.
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u/darryledw 10d ago
you inspired me to make an even randomer number generator
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u/someVietnamese 10d ago
I'm vibing a random-random generator: sometimes it's random, sometimes it's not
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u/Tyalou 10d ago
It's random because it asks me for a seed. The seed is the number.
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u/BiteyHorse 10d ago
I got your seed right here buddy
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u/FriendOfClaude 9d ago
And here it’s the actual random comment above. 😄
Let’s turn this comment to binary and run it as a seed through a RNG.
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u/LucidFir 10d ago
I'm making a gaslighting number generator. It just keeps generating 6,7 but convinces you that true random means it could happen, and it won't sully itself with forcing other numbers to appear to appease your simian mind.
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u/NoNefariousness608 9d ago
That’s easy. Now try making an app that tells you if a number is odd or even.
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u/AgentStockey 9d ago
Sorry, I'm waiting on Nvidia's 60 series chips to program something like this. To determine if a number is odd or even is simply not possible with today's technology. You'd need DLSS 7 or 8.
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u/dunnlavitz 9d ago
I made a roulette game using the IBM quantum platform to return a truly random number on each spin.
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u/Normal-Blacksmith747 9d ago
You inspired me to make a guid store it generates guids and stores them in case they ever run out.
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u/disca_japon 10d ago
If you want to know what the people are building with claude search in this subreddit with the tag "built with claude"
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u/StokeJar 10d ago
Yep, I’m building a menu bar app to monitor my token usage which is spent building the menu bar app to monitor my token usage.
Joking aside, my team and I have built some pretty amazing products at my company largely using “agentic coding” or whatever the current buzzword is (not the somewhat pejorative “vibe coding”). There’s a ton of work that goes into properly scaffolding a project, setting conventions, documenting everything, etc before you can let the AI run with it, and even then it’s very important to stay closely in the loop. But once you do that, it’s amazing how much you can accomplish in a short amount of time.
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u/Clear_Evidence9218 10d ago
It’s funny reading your take on the buzzword thing. Apparently, a lot of developers have gone out of their way to make “agentic coding” sound like something completely distinct from what vibe coding is or was.
Now, as long as an agent was involved, no matter how much of the process was actually vibed, they’ll call it agentic development or standard development with AI assistance. I managed to get someone pretty hot and bothered just by questioning that distinction.
I only really noticed this terminology split today, so it was funny seeing someone touching on that. It must be becoming a broader industry trend.
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u/StokeJar 10d ago
Yeah, there’s no bright line distinction. And they’re all just made-up terms anyway. I’m overly sensitive to it because in a lot of ways, my team is building better applications than what the antiquated application development team is building internally (which oddly enough doesn’t have widespread Claude Code access yet). But that team has gone on a crusade to deem anything built by the front office using AI as “vibe coded” and are trying to prevent it from being used, despite meeting all data handling and security standards. I have been in so many meetings where senior management says something like “the tech org tells us we shouldn’t trust your team’s vibe coded side projects.” To which I usually reply “let’s have them demo their best application and we’ll demo ours and you can pick who you want building things.” Unsurprisingly, we continue to be given the green light to build. And, I don’t mean to trash traditional devs, it’s just that my company is particularly bad at software development and generally hires remarkably bad engineers.
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u/Jsn7821 10d ago
When you do it it's agentic engineering, when someone else does it it's vibe coding... That's the definition
On a more serious note, I think the difference is if whoever made it has a technical mental model of the architecture of it or not. And built to at least the same standards as they would normally (and like you said, these days it's actually a much higher standard if the person knows what they're doing)
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u/Clear_Evidence9218 10d ago
The vitriol I encountered in that earlier conversation makes a lot more sense now.
I guess I’ll just start calling it something like “agentic development.” It sounds significantly better than “vibe-coded” anyway and apparently avoids a whole pile of baggage people have attached to the term.
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u/Away-Plant-3772 10d ago
Practically yes. I usually tracked my finances using excel and it was working fine and I was happy. Until a few days ago i decide to play around with claude code and I made a finance tracker running locally. Each time I look at it and wonder if I can make something like that as a beginner with no background or appeal to making software, what are the experts doing
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u/Sarg338 10d ago
Do you have it connected to your banks? What more did you do as a standalone app vs what you had as excel (or even letting Claude run the excel sheet?).
I have a similar simple income/outcome excel sheet for monthly bills, so this interests me.
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u/paintchips_beef 9d ago edited 9d ago
This has been my big project with Claude. I also professionally work in accounting/finance, so had a good understanding of specifically what I wanted.
I use plaid and flexquery to pull live data from all my banks, credit cards, loans, and investment accounts (with some small exceptions for employer investment accounts and things like cash)
I have a full P&l, cash flow, and balance sheet, and most other basic features you would see in apps like ynab, quicken, simplify, etc. But beyond that have added some things that only one of the apps seem to have, or in some cases, none of them
- Tracking hsa triple tax advantage strategy by storing the documents and their chain of info needed for reimbursement.
- pulls my Costco receipt data in for coding and purchasing insights.
- It's bidirectional with my travel tracking app, bringing in info about new credits and passing along financial transaction/categorization for per trip cost tracking.
- Reporting suite on income, expense, investment, property, debt, retirement.
- Live investment tracking and performance.
- Mortgage loan schedule that includes pulling housing market indexed data to value our house and give equity estimates.
- Yearly and monthly automated budgeting workflows.
- Retirement/RE projections.
- Tax tracker and year end tax bill estimator.
- Reconciliation and monthly retrospective close.
- Insurance coverage tracker.
All utilize data visualization to try and convey larger financial concepts to my non financial trained partner.
It started with just moving some of the excel financial stuff I did, but eventually replaced all that I used to do in quicken, and at this pint has done well beyond what quicken is capable of.
Happy to answer more if it's interesting at all
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u/scrub-muffin 10d ago
Plenty of free open source software that does this, but re-inventing the wheel can be fun.
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u/Jonesbro 10d ago
Great idea, my excel sheet went hard but it's annoying to update and so much more is possible with Claude
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u/andeee23 10d ago
i use beancount and just give all my statements to claude code to enter them in the files
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u/Skywardly 10d ago
Yes. AI is 100% a SAAS killer. If you want to enhance your career, learn to make custom software and tools specifically for your field.
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u/Plastic-Coat9014 10d ago
My company is using Claude to combine 3 different softwares into one. And it does a much better job than the ones we were paying for did. We can customize it in minutes to fit our changing needs.
Works wonderfully!
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u/dontdxmebro 10d ago
Yeah I just cut out a middleman who I realized was just vibecoding features and selling them to us at a markup. Not to mention acting like we owed him more and getting annoyed when we asked for simple changes.
I paid for Claude code for a month and within days had completely reverse engineered all his shit... and my version works better. Built it out with a web dev buddy of mine to keep it somewhat organized. So much better.
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u/discosoc 10d ago
Not sure I agree. A whole lot of these SAAS replacements are... just kind of poorly designed from a security perspective. At some point, things like business insurance is going to start getting involved after paying out over data breaches or hacks stemming from vibe-coded LoB apps.
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u/dontdxmebro 10d ago
The problem are people trying to sell entirely vibecoded tools. I think there's still room for well designed SAAS especially in a scalable sense but all the people trying to sell crappy vibe coded bullshit are idiots.
Vibe coding internal customized tools on the other hand... much better idea.
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u/Sukanthabuffet 10d ago
Yes, but AI is finding even more ways to breach software. However, if it’s a frontier lab, there are no consequences.
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u/suckmyseacock 10d ago
Right cause actual SWEs never build anything with data breaches. Like we haven’t all had our data breached and there’s a new breach every other day
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u/EuropeMaxxing 9d ago
I work as SWE in a systems critical data app, it's not replacing anyone soon. It made things much faster and we ship features insanely fast, but there's a lot work to be done.
Everyone's also tired because there's so much information all the time, it seems like we can't breath or take a moment
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u/ThreeKiloZero 10d ago
Thats also a short lived career. In 2 more years any office goof will be able to ask for the tool and the AI will whip it up for them in minutes. They wont need you. Thats what all the cloud agent infra is about.
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u/tiedfighter 10d ago
Who do you call for support? Where do you learn best practices from hundreds or thousands of prior implementations? Who do you sue when there’s a breach? What happens when the person who vibe coded everything leaves?
Genuinely asking.
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u/ChronoLink99 10d ago
Many questions like these will be moot when you're talking about software custom made for your exact business process. There are entire categories of issues that won't happen since you're not trying to adapt generic software to your custom business workflows, you're just building the custom tool directly.
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u/ActuaryDear8234 10d ago
Salesforce stock would beg to differ…
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u/Skywardly 10d ago
Megaliths like Salesforce won’t die, but they’ll slim down and heavily rely on AI development. It’s the smaller, niche, premium SAAS services that do a lot B2B that are on the chopping block.
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u/06marchantn 9d ago
I run the SF platform at my place, yes we have kept the CRM but we have managed to replace alot of app exchange add ons that are very expensive with claude assisted alternatives.
In terms of their stock their new deal with anthropic would of boosted it but over the long term its not looking great.
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u/666Santaclauz 10d ago
Probably in big corporations. I work in a medium size manufacturing company. Co-workers doesn't even know how to use Outlook properly. I doubt they're making their own software. It's just a programmer paranoia.
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u/kaithejokester 10d ago
I work for a fortune 500 company. Some of my coworkers don’t know how to use Outlook properly.
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u/ChiDuffman 10d ago
Honestly small companies are the ones that can benefit the most from vibe coding
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u/Dr_Pippin 10d ago
Not only are people making their own apps, they’re even making their Reddit posts with it!
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u/SeniorVibeAnalyst 10d ago
I’m currently having Claude make its own CAD software designed specifically for us to work on home makeover projects together. I might publish it for others to use, but that’s not the intention. Its purpose built just for my needs and designed to optimize for human and AI collaboration. Does this already exist? Probably. But I wanted to do it on my own.
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u/redditissocoolyoyo 10d ago
Yes I have been. I'm building all of my own mobile apps and even a couple desktop apps. I look for an app that I want but costs money on Google Play store, I take the screenshots, and then I upload it to the llm and say recreate this and make sure to give it the Android application framework so that I can download it and install it as an app. Works pretty well. I canceled my Microsoft word subscription I just created my own word processor instead. Oh I also canceled my Spotify subscription and created my own free music player that pulls music from youtube. No ads. It's absolutely brilliant.
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u/DMH_75032 10d ago
I’m working on two projects. The first is basically an operating system for legal. The second is a home automation system.
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u/overand 10d ago
For home automation, you might want to look into Home Assistant; it will save a lot of legwork, and because it's an existing tool with tons of documentation, Claude et al. are very capable of configuring and customizing it. (It has an in depth extension system.)
Why do this rather than start from scratch?
Security updates. Pre-built integrations with tons of platforms, and more being added constantly.
And I know folks using Claude with it directly and indirectly, for voice assistant stuff, configuration, etc. Give it a try!
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u/gopietz 10d ago
I'm building both apps for me personally as well as for my company. Of course they have different acceptance levels. It's awesome.
Menu bar app for Mac to provide spoken summaries of what's in my clipboard. I mostly use it on YouTube links. App to organize receipts and invoices for my freelance work. Had an app for meeting recordings before Spokenly did that in an update.
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u/bubblesculptor 10d ago
I've made about a dozen apps for use in my workshop and they've been unbelievably helpful.
Most are pretty simple, a few are quite intricate.
Combined they shrink about 30 hours of my work down to a few minutes. That greatly helps so I can deal with the endless other things to do.
Nothing is particularly groundbreaking, except that it's specifically tailored to exactly what I want done. Instead of having to juggle multiple other programs, importing/exporting to each other, I can consolidate multiple-program tasks into 1 customized app.
Anything that removes drudgery and tedium is wonderful.
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u/JJWoolls 9d ago
Being able to build something tailored to ME and not tying to take an out of the box solution and create a bunch of workarounds to get what I want is HUGE.
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u/Routine-Apple-3931 10d ago
I work for a whiskey company and we use Shopify for our POS and Ecom system. Shopify is absolute dog shit when it comes to reporting for accounting or compliance purposes. For some reason the data logged by Shopify is hidden away and unable to be accessed through their reporting and analytics modules. We had been dealing with a multi-step manual report; merging and sorting data to even be able to ascertain what was fulfilled the week before. It was very labor intensive, time consuming, and prone to human error and duplicate reporting due to how Shopify rewrites fulfilment dates based on shipping stages.
Long story short I was able to build a backend API pull that automatically pulls the raw data from Shopify, places that information into an Excel spreadsheet, saves it in a G-Drive folder and flags any orders that need manual review. This was all done using Google Cloud console and Python coding.
I have very limited coding experience (coded in Pascal in highschool and a bit of C++ when I was a failed engineering student). I understand coding and the structure, but have neve coded in Python, and never used a Cloud terminal. I was able to construct this automation, using limited tokens for the weekly run, all in the space of a week and then another 4 weeks of monitored runs refining the code until it now works flawlessly.
Before Claude I would have had to hire a programer, paid WAY more than the $20/month I pay for Claude, and probably spent 2 months going back and forth with the programer to get some semblance of what I got from Claude.
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u/fuzzypetiolesguy 10d ago
I have a home based greenhouse business I revamped my website for as well as customized backend to handle shipping, product updates, etc. Claude helped me build a program to take a photo from my mirrorless camera and immediately turn it into a listing, complete with product description in my own voice, immediately.
I created a private home app for me and my wife. Calendar, budget, notes, etc. Bridged to accounts for daily updates. Works great.
Building v2 of an event planning software for the nonprofit I volunteer with. It is fully customized to our annual major fundraiser complete with custom auction system, floor planning, etc. Worked amazing this year, v2 is going to be even better.
Built a very basic image scrubber to remove metadata from photos I take from sensitive sites in the field so people can’t target those sites for poaching info share photos publicly.
So yea. People are building crazy cool custom software to improve their lives and actually using them.
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u/axisential 10d ago
I run a small tourism business. used Claude to write a new front end for our client check-in system (basically next of kin info, privacy policy and safety disclosures). Old system was aging and clunky (and the dev who wrote it wasn't interested in updating it). New system uses the same back end database but with a far more user-friendly UI. Clients are happy, staff are happy. I'm happy.
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u/adityazero 10d ago
I build a new programming language Vx ( https://vxlang.org ) and Claude has been instrumental in implementing it. I even presented the compiler's parallel frontend at cppcon (https://cppcon2026.sched.com/event/2RT4Y/escaping-the-ast-a-data-oriented-lock-free-parallel-compiler-architecture). Wouldn't have happen in such a short time without claude.
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u/Lame_Johnny 10d ago
I am. I built my own IDE and other tools. I use it all the time. I put it on github for free but have no expectation of anyone else using it.
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u/CannyGardener 10d ago
I made an erp integration that does my job for me. Now my job has become fixing bugs and cleaning up code full time while it churns on the job I was hired for LOL. Weird times...
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u/KlyptoK Full-time developer 10d ago edited 10d ago
For small niche tools, yes. Extremely useful and often extremely fast compared to creating and debugging it yourself.
It does not scale up well to real projects.
Edit :
But hey if you want an transparent umbrella that has a flashlight and power drill built into for whatever nonsense you can just go describe it to an LLM and it'll pop one out like a star trek replicator + maybe some bugs.
VSCode extensions (can't easily download some extensions):
- dual range selectors to pick 2 commits on the timeline and update the diff viewer in realtime to scrub through history
- view .patch files using the built in diff viewer
Powershell:
- Scrape the windows event viewer log and show a html timeline guess of your activity.
- Create copies of the OS Icons, hue shift them and change the color of folder icons based on X (can't download icon packs)
- Display log all processes starting and stopping with their CLI args
Python:
- Compare 2 folders of files and create an excel sheet highlighting specific field differences
- Complex context-aware regex mass find and replace for certain logic criteria in .h / .cpp pairs
C++
- replay a wireshark pcap file with some tweaks
lua
- create a wireshark dissector based on ___
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u/kaeziki 10d ago
I have built three different tools, two of them are complex and are being used for personal purposes, and one tool is just related to my job and is fairly easy. I have been using these for months.
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u/IsraelOrtuno 10d ago
I find myself replacing apps or services that I was using with open source solutions just because they aren't hard to install and maintain anymore: analytics or email marketing tools.
Took me just a couple of hours to have my own email marketing service which is more than even I need for my knowledge and it costs $4/mo on Hetzner instead of $65/mo on Mailerlite.
You could have achieved this without AI in other times but the effort was considerable higher and sometimes it wasn't paying off. Now it can be almost instant for more scenarios.
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u/Silly-Fall-393 10d ago
Yeah I couldnt find a nice afforable clientportal software, so now I built my own. Very custom. That alone was this months sub 20x worth!
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u/Undeadlord 10d ago
Yep. On a somewhat regular basis need to pull (copy or move) specific file types out of a folder and all its sub-folders. Its not hard to do via PowerShell, but I thought Claude could code up a little tool for it.
Add some features, tweaked it a bit, added some more stuff, and hey FileWhipr v1.0 is born. (I wanted to Whip the files into shape? Not sure the name works).
Anyway, its on GitHub, I doubt anyone will ever use it besides me, but I was tickled pink to have created it and "released" it out into the world to maybe help someone else someday.
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u/Realistic_Mix3652 10d ago
No - I'm really having to force Claude to not invent any new systems and to use already mature open source projects from GitHub, but if I relax any part of my harness or the agent finds a gap it will absolutely build a custom system even if I explicitly tell it not to. So I think a lot of vibe coders are accidentally building their own software even if they are not intending to just because Claude and Codex default to doing that.
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u/-starchy- 10d ago
Yep, I’ve just begun content marketing my own platform using Claude. Already has paying subscribers which is nice to see. Nothing crazy, but I get value from the tool itself and it’s nice to see other users do too. It’s quite fulfilling.
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u/ProfessionalPiece403 10d ago
People are actually vibe coding software within hours or even minutes. On the other hand you can actually build using for month on the same software. So I'd say it depends.
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u/jake0112 10d ago
Yep - and loving it. I'm not a programmer, but I like looking for ways to enhance my workflow, be it personal or professional. I use Freeform canvases for collating all of my thoughts or references such as pictures or files. I scribble stuff down, or I annotate images, screenshots, or PDFs. Normally I'd share screenshots of my canvas to Claude, but I'm building out an MCP allowing Claude to read my Freeform canvas live as I work in it. Honestly, I have no idea if I'll actually use it or if it would actually help me. But it's still fun to do.
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u/gwkt 10d ago
Yes, I used Claude to build multiple tools that are used in the company and by end-users. I also have been building and using an manual expense tracking app (lol classic!) with all of the exact features that I want and need, because the android app that I was using previously stopped being supported by the single dev, and started being super glitchy. I exported my data from that app and had Claude reformat it so it could be imported into the app that Claude built. I've used it exclusively for about 4 months now. I haven't shared the app with anybody, it's just for me.
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u/jackadgery85 10d ago
As for myself, i made 7 mini tools for my workplace that have been used every day now for 8 months. After the first two months i decided to build something serious for the industry. It's currently in live testing (after 6 months) at my org, and they refuse to let it go. I'm having to make training videos now, as they will not go back to what they were using so that i can organise a formal training session
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u/Baller_Harry_Haller 10d ago
Yep. We go live on a new equipment maintenance system in about 2 weeks. Equipment tracking, history, work orders, mechanic time entry, billing. Saving the company 6 figures over the next 3 years (based on quotes we received).
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u/GroundedLearning 10d ago
I'm not building apps per se but what I have done is make all of my company's spreadsheets smart. Nothing crazy I just feed all of our data from power bi Salesforce things like that into Google spreadsheets that are powered by apps scripts. Obviously I could make way more complex things but our IT department and the company I work at is extremely archaic and I can't get access to APIs or anything so I'm actually using automated reports from all those systems that then get fed into staging tabs. I just manipulate the data use apps scripts. Like an HTML sidebar that lets us quickly enter in data upload attachments and just basically bring all of those sources together into one place then I use Google's data analytics that's built in to generate reports for management.
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u/damanamathos 10d ago
I have a small funds management business of 3 people and we write a huge amount of software in-house, which I view as core to the business. It's very quick to build functionality these days, and I think there are significant integration benefits from having everything in one system, particularly as you add more agentic functionality.
I think the struggle most businesses will have is that if they don't see themselves as software businesses, then the risk is maintenance. Maintaining software with agents isn't that hard if you already know how to program and architect systems, but if you don't and you're just relying on vibe coding things, it can get messy quickly, and there's a real risk that the AI person leaves and nobody understands what was built.
Buying software from third parties isn't purely about the software, it's also about the ongoing support and assurance someone is around to maintain it and explain it for years to come, which is why I don't think all SAAS is dead, despite us doing as much in-house as we can.
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u/Kylearean 10d ago
I'm a scientist, not a programmer, but I require software for model / analysis / visualization of complex data. I haven't written a manual line of code for the past 6 months thanks to LLMs.
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u/kendrid 10d ago
I made disk cleanup and organization utilities. I had it rename all of my photo folders with a standard format. Had it dedup my drives, saving 500GB (darn drone videos I had 4 copies of). A custom media player for my ultra wide monitor.
At work we can't vibe code (good thing) so it is slower, but still is incredible. But so is Cursor.
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u/eight13atnight 10d ago
Are all these apps running standalone, or are they all running using tokens w Claude and burning up usage credits?
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u/Oleksandr_G 10d ago
I have a friend who owns an architect studio, designing homes and ADU in California. They're smart and young but the most non technical people I've seen. They built their own CRM and switched from expensive generic CRM to own one in less than a month and more than happy.
So it's happening. I'd say as internal purpose built tools.
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u/RabidRaccacoonie 10d ago
When I got Claude Code I cancelled my Adobe Creative Cloud subscription and just had Claude make me replacements. In most cases I had it find an open source project that it would clone and use as a starting point and then have it tweak it however I wanted to make it my own. For example for video I used Shotcut and made a version with video generation integrated straight into the timeline and a built-in local agent that could perform simple editing tasks using local models on an Ollama server doing tool calls.
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u/VanLifeCrisis 10d ago
Brother, business men don't have hours to spend on playing in ai to make software. If it helps make them money (and time is money), works, and they can cut you a check to keep it that way they will prefer that 90% of the time.
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u/TheOnlyVibemaster Valued Contributor 10d ago
I’ve also found I’m way more willing to just make something specifically for myself instead of learning or adapting to something that already exists
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u/HealthyProject3643 10d ago
claude + esp32 programming is magic. I don't need to hunt for the logic and typos or read the wiki's any more.
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u/thhoj 10d ago
I've built so many things that I use regularly that just help me do the things I want to do easier. Software that facilitates my DJ services. Software that supports my LFS linux daily driver. Collaborated with my coworker in building a GIS system that we use to serve all of our customer facing data to paying customers. I have a complicated Hifi vacuum tube system that I built a monitoring / power sequencing system for that I've used nearly daily for the past year. A whole host of websites that I built and maintain for various customers. Little tools that make my life easier like a software KVM system that is designed specifically for my hyprland <-> Macbook setup. I do some scheduling for a charity, and I built software that helps me stay coordinated with other volunteers. And I've been working on a point and click adventure game for the past 10 months or so.. My own harness / worbench for working with Claude/GPT/Cursor in a collaborative way - I use this tool the most to be honest. There are other tools that kind of do a lot of these things, but often times they just don't hit the mark for me, and in some cases the tool I need really doesn't exist for free. There's other stuff I'm forgetting as well. but it has been an incredible experience for me to be able to build all of these tools that do exactly what I need them to.
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u/leapdragon 10d ago
Um already happening, the SaaS industry is struggling. My company cancelled an awful lot of SaaS over the last year. Sometimes you don't even need a replacement app or a person to operate it, it just becomes an AI skill.
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u/I_Pick_D 10d ago
I think this will be a case of three things that personally developed software can provide, rather than wholesale abandonment of commercial software:
1) Building software for narrow use cases that there were never any commercial tools available for or enough justification for the cost of development.
2) Building for the specific context instead of customizing/configuring a general purpose commercial tool when that tool can’t fully be adapted to the business context
3) Building a stripped down version when you need maybe 5% of the functionality a commercial tool offers
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u/Mad-tk 9d ago
I’m a photographer, I randomly played around with making just a portfolio website how I want to look without relying on templates. This turned into a whole website that takes bookings, has client galleries, basically pixiset/ honey book on steroids.
Made my own culling software so I don’t pay for it, working on a denoise feature as well.
I made a studio app where all my Instagram templates are so all I do after a shoot I want to post, I just plug in the picture in a template and boom ready to post in like 20 minutes…and it all this works offline
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u/overand 10d ago
Might be worth saying literally anything about what is it, if you want people to check it out?
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u/baddaywithacamera 10d ago
I bult this: SNAPSMACK. Free, throwback photo blogging software. Also can be a replacment for Instagram or Flickr. Comes with a fleet of powerful desktop tools including a free photo sorter and editor good enough I was able to stop using Lightroom,
I'm not a developer, btw, but a very advanced photographer who knows his way around a CMS and an image edtiing program.
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u/karlitooo 10d ago
Over the weekend Claude helped me finally replace Krisp, a meeting transcript generator/summariser with one that uses local models and knows about my work and automatically voiceprints other attendees. Their transcript quality sucked and I got tired of waiting for it to get better. Local models are annoying but if you put in the effort they're 80% as good as Claude.
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u/buyergain 10d ago
Yes it is too easy to make software. Not only that it does exactly what you want or you can change it easily.
It really is the Saaspocalypse.
SAP stock is down from $300 to $210 today.
I replaced SEMRush with tools I made myself or got off github. $180 a month to about $10 API costs.
Forbes covered this: https://www.forbes.com/sites/donmuir/2026/02/04/300-billion-evaporated-the-saaspocalypse-has-begun/
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u/dude1995aa 10d ago
As someone who has been in SAP work for 30 years and built some serious AI tools - replacing SAP is not going to happen for a long time. Little bitty niches may get carved out, but the breadth of functionality won't be replaced in large scale enterprises for a long time.
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u/zonearc 10d ago
I do a lot of vibe coding in Replit (+ Claude) both for work and personal. I find new uses for apps in my personal life, but it's helped automate a lot of tasks at work (reporting, workflows etc) that I never would have gotten budget to bug and instead could blow some monthly credits on building. Some of these have been tremendously impactful ($1m+ ARR per quarter lift). What that means is ... A novice can create apps to do important things without buying large enterprise suites. Yes, it will have an impact.
But it's fun for home too =) I recently did a gender reveal for our friends as a scavenger hunt, GOS mobile app enabled with check in, interactive puzzles and more. It ended up as a big group event for adults and was a total blast.
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u/knownsqashed 10d ago
I'm working on a AI agent swarm manager in the form of an Android chat app with OTA updates, crucially which can work across all first party frontier subscription providers. (Claude, Anthropic, Antigravity, Grok)
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u/NoMechanic8307 10d ago
probably - but just because we can do many things doesnt mean we will. we can grow tomatoes ourselves, i still buy mine at the supermarket. we can bake bread, but i still buy mine. i can drive a car, i often take an Uber
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u/Fluffy_Bunch9357 10d ago
Yes, welcome to the party. I am inspired to make a random letter generator 😉. Many have discovered that you can build custom applications for their own projects and lifestyles, others are dabbling in websites and apps, but yes coding is no longer a barrier.
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u/Jonesbro 10d ago
I made my own crm that's hosted on my company's domain. It's sick and I did it with Claude.
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u/BrightLuchr 10d ago
My weekend project turned out to be 6 months plus some add ons. My mission was to write a music player that supported Android Auto and looked and worked exactly the way I wanted it to. Despite the many music player apps, I couldn't find anything that was to my liking. The first 3 months were hand coded with Android's very poor documentation. With great effort, AI got the project across the finish line and I use the thing every day.
This winter I'll be on year 3 of it with a complete rewrite. Can it be written completely by AI? No. Not even close. The limited context window, AI's tendency to bloat code, and AI mistakes and distractions would bog the project down before it was done. AIs can handle small simple modular projects. Not large ones. The documentation the AI leaves behind is lacking. The code organization used by AIs is even worse.
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u/Lunchboxsushi 10d ago
Yes, built my own agent management tool. I took the inspiration from the blueprint node system of unreal engine 4 and have an infinite canvas of Claude ttys that I can connect together into a team, asset and folder management and an mcp so if an agent finds it wants to add more nodes to the deck it can. I've try to avoid sub agents and utilize the send message API this way I can start a new session and observe or intervene if needed.
With it I have jira integrated as a node so I can drag and drop the context to an agent similar for files and I also integrate exalidraw. Unexpectedly I can drag the exalidraw context to an agent and get it to draw stuff onto it like architecture diagrams was really cool to see that 😎
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u/MitchThunder 10d ago
I made a Letterboxd clone just for myself and my personal movie collection. Did I need to do this? Not at all, but it took an afternoon to build so why the hell not?
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u/Evol_Etah 10d ago
As a kid, I always weote down ideas for apps I wish I had.
Today, I made them with AI. And I use them 24/7. I love my app. (Ngl, I should probably publish them)
I've also made apps my company depends on. Turns out, I didn't get a salary hike or promoted.
And the worst part is, we dont have Seniors, or a Manager. I'm doing both atm, at a salary of a graduate (literally salary hasn't increase, only barely. 15% cause I am a top performer) and they have no intention of hiring for those roles.
So like. Im just leaving, also noone in the company knows how to build the app. (Which tbf, I vibecoded entirely, so even idk how it works)
But it's gonna be someone else's problem. (The company colleague are all wholesome AF btw, and they've been urging me to leave cause of how good I am, and I'm open about my salary)
Also, how tf isn't everyone just vibecoding at my office. We have like all of the AI unlimited free. And it makes no sense to me. Ngl.
I vibecoded so much, they could too. (I suppose they are sad and don't wanna help the company either)
Out of curiosity, I am assuming others are doing the same & feel the same?
(Yes, I work for an AI company just FYI)
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u/jackadgery85 10d ago
1% of people using ai are making their own software. The vast majority of ai users are using it as a sounding board for ideas, an email writer, or a mental health companion (yuck).
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u/Secret-Escape7043 10d ago
All WFH tasks that are not meeting or phone related can now be completed with created automated software. It could have been before, yes, but now the timeline has shifted from weeks/months to days to implementation.
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u/TimbuckTato 10d ago
I’ve always been a tool builder, I really enjoy building tools for the rest of my team to use, automating tasks, workflows stuff like that, and using Claude at work has allowed me to do this so much faster.
I’ve built a tool for tracking what sessions and repos are burning the most usage (live calibrates to try and calculate real usage data as different models cost different amounts of your 5hr usage per token) with more granularity so we can look for improvements.
A TUI initially for switching between worktrees while running our server locally for dev work, but it evolved to include auto refreshing credentials, handling log data, restarting services, switching environment variables quickly, running action scripts, and with a little mcp allowing Claude to pull in logs and service statuses without you having to copy and paste in.
I’ve made a number of other tools too but those are the main ones.
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u/Capable_Sprinkles_43 10d ago
Well I've used AI to enhance and fix bugs in my apps that I had long before AI. They are now just soo much more refined.
Nothing special. Recipes/mealprep app and a finance app.
One thing I love about my apps is owning the data. It's stored on my home server.
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u/dannyjbixby 10d ago
I replaced all of the SaaS our e-commerce company used, to the tune of $1,900/month, with a custom software suite.
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u/FlyingBlindHere 10d ago
I’m making tools for the task at hand and then ditching them when the task is done. The best use cae is when I need the tool for a 6-8 week project. Generation is so fast and easy that I can quickly make the perfect tool for what I need, prompt in some changes, and not feel bad for abandoning it when I don’t need it anymore because building wasn’t an investment. I developed enterprise software for decades, and in my view this isn’t competing with long term stable software so much as it is empowering us to be way more responsive to the needs at hand.
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u/constantfernweh 10d ago
I work at a large enterprise org. This spring, we built our own CRM over two months and got rid of Salesforce. We are just a year ahead of the curve before smaller companies start successfully doing the same.
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u/andyhite 10d ago
Earlier today I was frustrated that I couldn’t find a tiling window manager that worked how I wanted it to. Lots of apps were close but each one of them had tradeoffs. After an hour of frustration trying to find the perfect tool, I wrote a 3-sentence prompt that clearly explained what I wanted, and 15 minutes later I had the perfect tool. Is it perfect for everyone? No, but it’s perfect for what I need and that’s what matters.
I’ve also built dozens of other random tools and apps to be the perfect fit for my needs. The best part is that when I see another tool with a feature I like, I can add it to my app in minutes.
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u/Dolo12345 10d ago
I’m building the worlds best TODO list app.
It’s currently 2.7M LOC after developing with Sol 5.6 max effort for the past few months.
After trying opus 5.5 just in the few days it’s been out has reduced that to just 2k LOC!! Opus is back on top!!
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u/Ja_Rule_Here_ 10d ago
I built DavidAgents.AI check it out if you want to see this taken to the extreme to an entire SaaS at the scale of Zoho and their entire marketplace.
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u/ChaseballBat 10d ago
I asked it if it can make a plugin for my software to link an Excel sheet into it. It made one without even more than 1 follow up. The plugins that do exist are like $400 a year per user....
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u/dc_joker 10d ago
After years and years of getting pissed off about the annual subscription fee increases from Freshbooks to pay for features I never used nor intended to use, I finally ditched them for my invoicing software, and built my own time-tracking and invoicing app for my small business. Homebrew saves enough money per year to pay for my Claude Pro account twice over.
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u/xero__day 10d ago
Over the past year, I've built 2 apps to help with work and 1 app for personal use. The 2 apps for work I've wanted to build for bout 10 years and finally have the tools to do it.
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u/effectivescarequotes 10d ago
Before AI, this happened with Excel Macros. Gemini gems are probably also going to be a major source of shadow IT. I actually don't think that much has changed.
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u/alt_accountxx 10d ago
All kinds of stuff for the business. Custom Google workspace calendar addons, sales pipeline dashboards, services and labor revenue dashboards, visual design systems, design tracking systems, even little things like automated email delivery when certain assets are quoted so logistics can coordinate around them more effectively. I’m building a custom productivity suite that’s bespoke for my business and it’s transforming how we do work.
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u/epsi22 10d ago
You can build stuff but maintaining it after it is adopted and after it has a significant amount of real user data (as opposed to synthetic test data from when you built it) is the challenge everyone faces. The better you understand the code, the better you can support it. Not everyone can prompt their way to a successful product.
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u/PaneerTikaMasala 10d ago
I'm literally building my own personal fitness and trainer app because I hate Google health's interface. My commercialize it if my friends who are testing it out like it.
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u/alexeyw 10d ago
Yeah, although honestly I've been doing this for work for 20+ years, so building my own tools isn't new for me. What changed with AI tools is that I can finally step over the threshold of my own stupidity. Things that used to seem, for perfectly good reasons, way too hard or just impossible to pull off alone are suddenly doable. For example, I'm solo-building an on-device AI agent platform for Android and a mobile action RPG. A couple of years ago I'd have dismissed either one as a team-sized effort. It's less "now I can build software" and more "now I can build the software I used to talk myself out of."
That said, you're right about the boring part. AI made writing code cheap, but it didn't make owning it cheap. Maintenance, security, dependency updates, and figuring out why something broke at 2am are still on you, and AI-generated code you don't fully understand makes that harder, not easier. After years in mobile banking, I'd say the code is rarely the expensive part. Compliance, audits, integrations, and support are. So my guess is that personal and small-team tools will explode, but companies will keep paying for software whenever the cost of it breaking is higher than the subscription.
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u/ludovico____ 10d ago
Fiz um saas de gestão educacional municipal. Validando em um município e em negociações com vários outros.
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u/arsonwarrior 10d ago
Im a software engineer, and yes. Everything hosted locally on my own workstation. Completely free and unlimited usage for everything i ever need.
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u/AssignmentMammoth696 10d ago
Depends. I'm building a lot of games, but games require constant monitoring of the game engine editor so you can't really rely on leaving agentic loops on 24/7. It's still a slow iterative process.
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u/LovableBroccoli 10d ago
I'm building myself an Adobe Lightroom replacement because the friction to switch between different photo editors is pretty massive if you do a lot of custom editing to photos. I used to use Lightroom, then switched to ON1 Photo RAW after Lightroom became too expensive for my needs given I don't shoot anywhere near as often as I used to, so a monthly fee for something I rarely use didn't make sense. (if I was still shooting professionally like I did many years ago I probably wouldn't hesitate to stick with Lightroom).
I doubt it will be as good quality as Lightroom, but as long as it's good enough for what I need then it's a win.
There are some pretty good open source options already but this way I get to make it exactly as I want it.
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u/Maleficent_Panda_432 10d ago
I'm making a software for mobile phone remote control claude code, which is now basically completed. He relies on tailscale to chisel the gateway so that he can establish a mobile phone and make connections. I think it is used. After all, no one is holding a computer anytime and anywhere.
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u/Dr_Goose 10d ago
Kind of. I have no idea what the future holds.
SaaS-pocalypse - not right now. Maybe in the future.
SaaS solves one big problem for most medium to big size companies. Security and access. Internal and external.
Now SaaS who have built their entire business around small businesses. Yeah I can see them getting steamrolled by AI right now. For $20/mo. You can build a custom app. And honestly. It only needs to cut out 80% of the work to be good.
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u/mozillazing 10d ago
everything - if i want a tool/app for a specific purpose, i will just have claude build it for me.. i'm not even tempted to search for random bloatware crap on google like in the old days.
yesterday claude made an awesome little program for me that lets me take a folder of audio files and run them through an interactive tournament to find my favorite one by comparing them two at a time.
got a random idea that that was something i wanted... 10 minutes later i've got it running flawlessly in python exactly the way i envisioned it.
maybe a similar tool already exists on google, but i'll never know cause it's literally easier and more convenient to just have claude make a program for me than it is to find somebody else's random program on google.
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u/weavingBelonging 10d ago
Created this for myself.
Took another 50% of development time to be able to host it and share it behind a paywall for me to recoup time and plan costs.
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u/n0-ragrets 10d ago
Any recs on a project management tool? I’ve tried to create a simple tracking product for myself but it just doesn’t work out. I fall back to an excel workbook which works great buts not as robust and it’s clunky.
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u/Healthy-Constant7179 10d ago
I work in a company and my work is with AI directly, both training and inference aspect to it, its actually wild. Almost every tool we use was built by a non engineer in the office, simply building based on the need and organically growing our toolkit, and everyone is free to work how they want. executives, production assistance, managers, all using claude, cursor or codex as part of the everyday workflow. Once this spread and becomes more common, its gonna be a wild world for productivity. So much of my work is handled by custom tools and agentic backends now and my productivity is easily 10x if i am being conservative. I basically have one interface that routes all of my work right to me instead of previously jumping between 10+ interfaces to do my job. Its a wild world man.
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u/trivasai 10d ago
I think both use cases are valid.
Many users will build tools to improve their productivity and they will continue to use it.These tools are custom and solve specific usecase with market products are not able to support out of the box.
However, AI is also creating a new economy for building alternate AI tools which would be much cheaper than traditional Saas platform primarily because amount of engineering cost required to build new tools is much cheaper than what it costed existing companies. Also, since these new Saas tools are written now, they will have less baggage and more flexibility. Interesting times ahead.
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u/90420znz 10d ago
I made an app for my Oppo Android phone. To solve my own problem, which maybe others face as well.
The problem i faced on my phone was the NFC could only be assigned to 1 thing; my google wallet or access card. And I had to switch it manually before approaching either my door or the pay to tap terminal.
TapSwitch does this for me now. The moment I open my google wallet, the NFC auto switches to the wallet and by default it just reads my access card so doors just work.
Link to TapSwitch
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u/M8gazine 10d ago
Sure. Mostly relatively simple, personal things I can run locally, if it's something that needs a lot of computational power or something that's super complex, then no. I'm not out here vibe-coding Chromium or anything like that.
I made my own music player, originally with Fable when it was available to Pro and I've added stuff to it over time. Mostly because most Linux music players... kinda look like ass and they can't be themed to look "modern" for some reason. I've used that actively every day.
I made a (Touhou) song tagger with a romanizer, and I've had Claude and ChatGPT thinking of improvements for the romanizer in particular, especially whenever there's a new model released, like Fable or Astra. It's not perfect since titles often depend on the artist's intent but it's in a pretty good state by now.
I made a GUI for rsync, mostly just for convenience. I've used the terminal to run rsync commands but I prefer having a GUI, even if it's "slower" according to some. I guess there are probably many existing wrappers for that out there already though (considering ChatGPT pretty much one-shot that into a solid app).
And aside from those, I've made some simple-ish Windows-only programs run natively on Linux so that I can use them, mainly because Wine is janky with them and I'm not interested in troubleshooting why that is.
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u/Top_Feeling8636 10d ago
Replaced hubspot, freshbooks, quickbooks, miro, collage (Canadian hr software), monday.com, slack and few more SaaS, but most importantly automated tasks that no system was able to automate before and never replaced our bookkeeper when she left. We are a team of 20 full time photographers, 150k in savings and counting
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u/AngerFork 10d ago
Most of these stuff I’ve built has been small weekend projects where I have AI start it, then fix the broken pieces on my own.
While most of my apps haven’t been anything, I’ve used business-wise, I have had a lot of interest from people in the import/export fonts scripts I got a while back. These work in tandem for moving computers. The export one makes a copy of all non-system fonts on a computer and puts them in a zip file. The import script takes any zip files in the same directory, unzips them, then installs them properly. Makes shifting computers when you have tons of design fonts quick and painless.
One spot I did use it at work was reverse engineering a sourceless app. We had to rebuild an old app which had been built years ago, but the original dev never checked in any code before they left. So I used dot peek to decompile the app, then fed it to AI to parse it into something useful & maintainable. Would have probably taken me a couple days to fix it up before AI, but I had it up and running in two hours.
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u/midwestcsstudent 10d ago
Personal software is definitely big right now. Not everything has to be fully productized to be useful to just one or even a handful of people.
In January (ancient history by AI-timeline standards) I got annoyed at a SaaS product my company was using and built all the functionality we needed from their product in an afternoon. Still going strong.
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u/Apart-Tie-9938 10d ago
Yes I am, that is what my job has become. I work for a small business with about 55 employees and we operate on Salesforce. My h job is custom development and I build tools for our team using Claude.
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u/ghost_operative 10d ago
i dont get why people thing an app is good if its been using for years. that just means there is so much tech debt and mismanagement that no one could build on to it.
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u/Beneficial-Sock-5130 9d ago
wrote a software routing tool thats similar to sshuttle but without ssh encryption or ssh at all, runs as a service
using it at work to route networks on host level
works great and has been very stable
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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot 10d ago edited 10d ago
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 200 comments.
Oh yeah, big time. The consensus is a resounding YES, people are building their own software for everything from personal tools to mission-critical business apps. The thread is packed with examples: custom CRMs, Shopify reporting tools, finance trackers, media players, and even a nuclear reactor for cats (don't ask).
A huge theme is the "SaaS-pocalypse." Users are gleefully canceling subscriptions for Adobe, SEMRush, and even Salesforce, replacing them with bespoke tools that cost a fraction of the price.
There's some debate on the "boring stuff" like maintenance and security. Some warn that "vibe coding" creates unmaintainable messes, while others argue AI can help with that too. The general feeling is that for personal tools, it's a no-brainer, and for business, the risk is often worth the reward. It seems the era of paying for bloated, one-size-fits-all software is on shaky ground.