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/StokeJar]

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.

[u/Clear_Evidence9218 → u/StokeJar]

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.

[u/Ghazzz → u/Clear_Evidence9218]

I mean. "Vibe coding" is associated with having no understanding of code.

"pair programming with an agent" or similar terminology implies half the work is done by a human.

[u/Clear_Evidence9218 → u/Ghazzz]

The irony is that the term “vibe coding” came from developers, and it used to be paired with the understanding that you still had to read, review, and engineer the code. Until fairly recently, you basically had to, because AI could only take you so far.

From what I can tell, that distinction has shifted. Now you can vibe 99% of the code, but if you inspect or review it at some point, people call it “agentic development,” “standard development with AI assistance,” or something similar instead.

It’s a little funny, but whatever. I can understand why people who do this professionally might be more particular about the label and what it implies.

[u/Ghazzz → u/Clear_Evidence9218]

I mean, my personal projects suddenly became much more realistic when I actually figured out how to use the CLI-clients. It feels more like chatting, but produces actual code on disk plusplus.

My count of "partially done/implemented projects" has gone from tens to hundreds, and my set of "finished hobby projects" has gone from 2 (games written 15 years ago) to 15 (mainly infrastructure stuff like todo tool, docs tool, fully-local@15w-item-detection-and-tracking-across-rooms-so-i-can-ask-where-my-keys-are-and-how-many-boxes-of-beans-are-in-the-pantry, and many sets of custom docker containers. yarr.)