The Rise of Highly Personal Software – Michael Bassili

General Developer Forum In The News
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I think there’s a strong desire for uniquely personalized software permeating the market these days, spurred by the commodification of cheap large language models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google. We saw companies try their hand as enabling this kind of behaviour through MCP and other model-level integrations, but Muse and other forms of agentic helper tools have turned the tides again. My friend is using Muse to help him look for a new apartment. Unlike the APIs of yesteryear, foundation models are really good at distilling vague, nebulous requirements into tangible outcomes.

Read in full here:

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I guess we’ll be out of jobs in a few years :frowning:

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You’re right.Can we discuss to get the jobs?

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The work shifts toward requirements, review, and owning production failures.

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The “cheap” part is doing a lot of work in that argument. A personal tool that calls a small model a few dozen times a day costs pennies, but an agent that browses apartment listings for a week can quietly run up a real bill if it sits on a frontier model. Disclosure: I work on aicost.tools, where we compare per-token prices (https://aicost.tools/), and the gap between model tiers is often more than 10x, so for personal software picking the model is half the design.