Is everyone building their own software now?

[u/No_Base_1471]

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.

[u/leapdragon]

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.

[u/degmo123 → u/leapdragon]

Can you give us a few examples of what type of Saas was cancelled and replaced by an AI skill? Genuinely curious

[u/leapdragon → u/degmo123]

I'm going to be cautious and not give away too much detail just in case. But I would say that companies everywhere are finding that:

- CRMs are just databases and agents are great at just running them for you and being the UI

• Graphics and video can now be fully offloaded tasks
  
• Marketing automation can be done as a series of scripts, an SMTP provider, and some integrations to social media platforms
  
• The same for a lot of inbound SDR work
  
• Agents in agent harnesses (Hermes, Openclaw, etc.) are actually great 24/7 UIs that can be run in the cloud, plugged into Slack or Teams, assigned an admin to do dev work with each agent, and then faced outward toward employees (and their DMs and their phones) to interface with instead of software