The Year of Internal Tools

I have a feeling this is going to end up in the same place where a lot of AI generated projects end up.

There has for sure been a reduction in the amount of effort to create software. But that friction that existed before helped in determining what was WORTH making. There will be a subsection of tools that are now creatable, that are needed. But there'll be a lot of tools that get created that will be abandoned precisely because they didn't solve enough of a problem.

Having a gating mechanism, in the past the friction and effort, was good.

A lot of internals tools were built where I work, not a lot were used.

I think we're going to see a huge number of small internal tools that simply wouldn't have been worth building before coding agents. Even more so in SMB, because they have less budget.

The part I don't think you can leave to the agent is everything around the application: backups, authentication/access control and vulnerability scanning. Those things aren't rocket science, but getting them wrong can have a much bigger impact than a bug in the application itself.

That's what I'm building with https://AppHaven.eu My bet is that vibe-coded apps will become cheap and almost disposable, while the platform underneath them needs to provide those boring safety guarantees automatically.

Can also say the year that subscriptions go down, because now you can finally build your own systems exactly to your liking. Save money and have something that works just for you. LLMs are awesome.

Anyone noticed the trend of tools being more read than write, with writes shifting to agentic tools and natural language instruction?

It makes me wonder about the web a bit and whether it becomes glossier, more video driven but ultimately less directly maleable.

Do people prefer streaming text over static pages?

I read this as the year of "Infernal" tools.

... that don't work

> Numerous Grill Me sessions, using Matt Pocock's wonderful Grill Me skill, which interrogates a plan until the weak parts fall out.

If you haven’t yet drunk the /grilling Kool Aid, give it a go

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