There’s a trend going around X lately.
Programmers are realizing that instead of paying $20 or $30 every month for some relatively simple SaaS, they can now vibe code their own, customized version.
Need a tiny web scraper for your news service? Build one. Need a tiny dashboard for your SaaS analytics? Cool, just build one. Need some obscure tool that does exactly one thing? Build it over the weekend.
So far, so good. It’s nice to have this flexibility But then the argument goes a little bit overboard:
If everybody can build their own software, apps will disappear.
I don’t buy it.
In the video above I explain my point of view, and also bring 2 of my apps, Shape Walk and AI Kiddo as examples.
If you’d rather get this as a blog post, just keep reading.
I’ve Seen this Before
Twenty-something years ago, having a personal website required quite a bit of knowledge: some HTML, how hosting works, in general you needed to understand how to actually put the thing online.
Then WordPress happened. Suddenly you could click a few buttons and have a website.
Did the website business disappear? Nope. Maybe the opposite.
An enormous economy appeared around WordPress: themes, plugins, hosting, consultants, agencies and businesses that couldn’t have existed at that scale before.
I think AI and vibe coding will do something similar to apps.
Some Apps Will Disappear for Sure
This doesn’t mean nothing changes. There is an entire category of apps that is vulnerable: generic calorie counters, simple scrappers, any thin interface around something you could reproduce with a few prompts.
If an app has no differentiation beyond performing a simple function, AI is going to put enormous pressure on it.
That layer may indeed disappear. But that’s not the same as saying ALL apps will disappear.
Here’s the kind of apps that I think will survive.
The Apps that Are Personal
I have a small app called Shape Walk. You draw a shape over the map of your neighborhood and then walk that shape. The app guides you through the waypoints, tracks the walk and saves the result. It’s part fitness app, part GPS art, part game.
Could somebody reproduce its functionality? Of course. That’s actually beside the point.
The interesting part is the experience, your history inside it and the repeated relationship you develop with the product.
Software that becomes personal is much harder to replace than software that merely performs a function.
The Apps that Require Trust
Another app I built is AI Kiddo First Words.
I originally built it for my one and a half year old son. I’m Romanian, his mother is Vietnamese and we speak English with each other, so he’s growing up in a trilingual household.
The app is very simple: he sees familiar objects and can hear their names in Romanian, Vietnamese and English.
Could somebody vibe code something similar? Absolutely.
Would I give some random vibe-coded app access to my young child without knowing what it does? Absolutely not.
The closer software gets to sensitive parts of our lives — our children, health, money, identity, private data — the more trust matters.
The App Is Not the Code
For a long time, building software was expensive. AI is rapidly making that part cheaper.
That’s a really big change, but an app isn’t just its source code.
It’s the idea, the decisions, the accumulated experience, the users, the data, the trust and the strange little details that make somebody open it again tomorrow.
As the cost of producing code approaches zero, those things don’t become less important. They become more important.
So, Is the App-pocalypse Coming?
Maybe.
Just not in the way the doomers think.
A lot of mediocre software is going to die.
A lot of simple SaaS functionality will become a prompt.
Some businesses that existed because software was difficult to build will disappear.
But I believe something much bigger will grow in their place.
WordPress didn’t kill the web. It made creating for the web accessible to millions more people.
Vibe coding may end up doing exactly the same thing to software.
And that doesn’t look like the death of apps to me.
It looks like the beginning of a much stranger app ecosystem.
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