You can make an app for that

A striking development has emerged in artificial intelligence. Tech TechPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. FollowSee All Tech AI AIPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. FollowSee All AI Apps AppsPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.

FollowSee All AppsYou can make an app for thatAI is empowering a generation of vibe coders to build exactly what they want. The personal software revolution is here. by David Pierce David PierceEditor-at-LargePosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.

Technical Details

FollowSee All by David PierceMay 14, 2026, 11:00 AM UTC Image: Animation: Verge Staff, Getty Images David Pierce David PierceEditor-at-LargePosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. FollowSee All by David Pierce is editor-at-large and Vergecast co-host with over a decade of experience covering consumer tech. Previously, at Protocol, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired.

The tyranny of software is almost over. Since the first computer programmers wrote the first computer programs, we, the users of that software, have been forced to live in the worlds those programs create. The features are the features.

The design is the design. Want something else, something better? Learn to code, I guess.

Industry Implications

Until now, the people making a given piece of software — mostly well-paid professional developers — have rarely been the same as the ones using it: lawyers, doctors, churches, schools, me. (Where they overlap most directly is with developer tools, which are often the best and most passionately designed software you’ll find anywhere. ) Software is built for the masses, designed not to be perfect for anyone but to be passable for everyone.

Even when tech companies have tried to build tools to help people tune their software to their own needs, all they’ve been able to offer are hacky go-betweens like IFTTT and Apple Shortcuts. If you’re thinking in if-then statements, then you’ve lost most people. Then, in the out-of-nowhere way that is common to the recent AI boom, the paradigm changed.

In late 2025, an update to Anthropic’s Claude model turned its Claude Code tool from a code generator that was surprising if it worked to one that was surprising when it didn’t. Suddenly, all you needed was $20 a month and a half-formed idea, and an AI model could build you functional software. If you could explain what wasn’t working, Claude Code could probably fix it.

This advance offers important signals about the future of the sector, and the tech world is watching closely.