The other day I was talking with my buddy Chris about vibe coding, and we ended up circling the same question: is everyone going to start building their own apps, or will most people continue to buy what’s available?

On one hand, you can’t build everything.

Every project you start is another app to maintain, and unless you want to run ten businesses, you have to choose your battles.

But at the same time, tools like Lovable, Bolt, Replit, etc. make building apps so fast and addictive that it’s harder to resist.

Plus, the easier and cheaper it gets, the lower the barrier to entry.

Chris’s response was great. He put it in car terms.

“There’s always going to be the guy who takes his car to the mechanic, no matter what. Even if it’s just for a burned-out light. Then you’ve got the DIY folks. They’ll change their own oil, swap a filter — but anything serious? Fuggedaboudit. And then you’ve got the backyard mechanics who love it. Stuff breaks, whatever, that’s the fun part.”

That’s exactly where I think software development is heading.

Some people will keep buying stuff off the shelf.

Some will dabble in DIY.

And the backyard mechanics will find themselves tweaking things at midnight, purely because it’s too fun to stop.

Case in point: Chris’s business partner Doug recently built his own road trip planner for a drive from Toronto to Thunder Bay. He used Bubble to map out all the campsites and hotels, threw in points of interest, and shared it with his wife so there’d be no fumbling or forgetting.

That’s not really a startup idea. That’s not something you buy. That’s just one guy building the thing he needed for the weekend with pure DIY/backyard-mechanic energy.

For non-DIYers, my guess is we’ll see the rise of “The App Guy.”

The App Guy (or Gal) is the modern version of your tech-savvy teenager — or that dude down the street — who used to fix your computer or spin up cheap websites because you were too busy/lazy to do it yourself.

Only now, instead of a Wordpress site, he/she is building you apps that solve oddly specific problems:

• A toddler translator so babysitters can understand your 2-year-old
• A dog-walking scheduler that adjusts routes based on avoiding neighbors
• A meal planner that miraculously figures out what to serve when your celiac + paleo + vegan relatives are in town.

A lot of people won’t want to give up their Love Island time to learn how to build these tools themselves, no matter how easy it gets (again, see website analogy), but they’ll gladly give their App Guy or Gal a shot.

That’s a whole cottage industry right there.

Even if a lot of people have an “App Guy” for a while, you have to assume that AI eventually replaces that too.

My crystal ball is foggy, but at some point in the next 3-5 years, I assume ChatGPT goes full Jarvis and you won’t even need apps at all.

You’ll just say, “File my taxes,” and it’ll scan your accounts, receipts, and photos and get it done. No logging expenses, no fussing with budgeting apps. Jarvis will just do it.

Until then, we’re in the golden in-between.

If you want to make money with this stuff, be the App Guy or Gal and get in while the going’s good, because there’s no telling how long it lasts.