Applets will rise again!
The future of bespoke software
Agentic coding has already started causing an explosion of small, bespoke, single-purpose apps - which is sometimes taken as a sign of demise for the SaaS model, but I don’t think it’s that clear-cut.
For one, apps needs deployment and maintenance, and sure, this is starting to get solved. It’s easy to imagine a future platform that starts with a user specification of an app, goes into production with something analogous to “git push” + CI, and an OpenClaw-like heartbeat or cron jobs that fix security issues. Vercel is one of the companies on that kind of track. GitHub / Microsoft could do it easily if they could just imagine it.
But that’s one end of the spectrum. That’s not how behemoths like SAP are going to be built or used. Those kind of systems are not going away any time soon, not because of the quality of the software, but because of the data the businesses have accumulated in them. No one is going to replace SAP with a vibe-coded alternative, but they WILL adopt a natural language, ChatGPT-like way of building their bubble of workflows within SAP.
Big systems like those provide a huge amount of infrastructure and data that can be combined into usable pieces but currently just isn’t, because of quirky interfaces and legacy internal programming environments. But AI doesn’t care. Teach it to navigate those clumsy interfaces, form builders, inconsistent programming languages, and it becomes possible to just write “Create me a report that does this-and-that, and e-mails me the results each morning”, with the AI creating literal applications within the larger systems - applets, if you will - that are immediately useful.
Instead of waiting for integrators, consultants, analysts to align in building a new ERP feature, let the non-IT employees describe the problem (or even better, the outcome) to an LLM, and it will connect the dots behind the scenes to create a bespoke solution, usable by a specific department, or an employee.
At ThoughtLeaders, we’ve started applying that principle to our own product - reducing the cognitive load needed to navigate report filters and forms, and producing live reports from natural language descriptions - see it in action here!
When this kind of thinking really gets adopted across the industry, it will most likely result in some IT jobs disappearing, but certainly not all. You know what’s easier then doing IT? Growing vegetables - and still people rather outsource it to whatever. I kind of think that the number of people who have the patience to sit with Claude and instruct it to code isn’t that great. There will probably be less people working for huge IT companies (though economic - and compute / cognition - inequality will keep increasing), but in the short to mid term, some of those people will find themselves at smaller companies and startups, as Claude whisperers adapting the software to the sales team needs (unless the sales team disappears, of course, but that’s a bot2bot economy).
The danger here is the proliferation of such small apps - applets to an unmaintainable degree - but again, LLMs are really good at spotting patterns so they can periodically deduplicate or merge feature. It was normally a very tedious job, but now we don’t care.
We’re one of the first - these are great times for having a small and nimble team!