Over the course of roughly 2 hours, I’ve managed to create a pretty good POC for an Obsidian plugin that creates a Kanban view over all todo tasks in the Vault. Granted, there’s already a flood of plugins implementing this specific idea, but none work the way I wanted to do this. 1
This got me thinking: with LLMs becoming reasonably good at writing code, and being accessible at a flat 20€/month, I believe we will see a large boom of personal software. Instead of adapting our workflow to fit any large, generalized product, we are able to just generate our own tool that behaves exactly how we want it to. I fully expect SaaS sales to keep falling (Forbes: SaaS value drops), because the need will keep shrinking.
Although a world full of tailor-made software for one’s specific needs sounds awesome, there is another side of the coin: how do let these tools talk to one another? If I don’t run a CRM, but instead have a custom email program, a custom contacts manager, and a custom reminder tool, how do I tie them together? What happens when the company grows, and other people need access?
We will need open standards, a sort of open source ontology, that lets our tools communicate. Interestingly, the AT Protocol has roots of such an ontology with their Lexicon system. I can imagine running an AT Protocol relay locally, with different apps listening to it. This would enable standardized communication while keeping everything on device. Adding a different device or a second user would be trivial, by just pointing the local apps to a remote (but access controlled) relay.