Have you heard that the age of hyper-personal software is upon us?
Typically what people mean is that agentic AI allows the creation of simple and small software built by individuals, often not super technical individuals, to solve a personal problem. As a result, we will see this explosion of software and the death of SaaS.
Naysayers point to the lack of many new software projects being launched as proof that agentic AI is all hype.
It’s not hype. It’s just that much of this software is hidden. Maybe we’ll call it dark matter software.
Hyper-personal software, an example
I personally have many of these dark matter software projects. So I thought I would share an incredibly straightforward one to inspire you as well as make the concepts concrete.
I’ve stopped using Google search a long time ago. I’m not a big fan of how it works, the tracking, and so much more. I bounced around from different search engines, even used the paid Kagi one for a while.
These days I’m using Start Page at https://www.startpage.com. It’s great, very fast, has good results, and cleans up much of the extra junk that Google adds to its results.
However, recently they started adding advertisements, sponsored links to their results. Now, if these were chill, small, little sponsored links, I would have absolutely had no complaint with them. After all, I do want to support Start Page. But the amount of ads that were included is pretty egregious.
Here is the results for searching for an AI course on my 5k monitor:
Check this out. Even on a huge monitor, not a single organic result is visible. This is expected from Google, but not here (not for me anyway).
Claude, I need a browse extension
I am very hesitant to install third-party browser extensions. A few hundred are outright malicious. And most frightening of all, sometimes the good ones get hijacked, phished, or outright purchased by less well-meaning folks.
But what I need to solve this problem is a browser extension.
I could create one from scratch. I could go through all the tutorials and so on and actually create one. It wouldn’t take that much time. Maybe half a day? But this problem is not that bad. I can page down once or hit the space bar after a search and deal with it. I don’t want to waste half a day which likely turns into 2 days. ;)
This is where agentic coding comes in. Instead of continuing to be frustrated yet again after doing a search, I fired up Claude Code inside of my editor and asked for a web browser extension that would remove just the ads from Start Page. I gave it the exact example HTML that is used. I described what I want, I hit enter, and I walked away.
I came back 15 minutes later and I had a local browser extension. Of course, instead of publishing it to the Chrome Web Store, I just loaded it locally.
I was so ready to run my next search. I gave it a try and there were literally no results on the page. It didn’t work. But after one or two more exchanges with Claude to narrow down the selectors, I have a perfectly crisp start page result set.
Look at that crystal clear search page. My hyper-personal browser extension solved my problem perfectly.
Startpage-clean is just for me
It’s a small project as you can see from Tallyman
Even so, I have no intention of sharing it with the world. I don’t want to create or maintain yet another ad blocker. If something like Ad Block Plus or whatever wants to take this on they can.
I had a problem that software would solve. I spent 10 active minutes and I had that software created exactly as I wanted it. That’s hyper-personal software.
So where is this explosion of software?
Now, when you hear people claim that agentic AI is a productivity bust, think back to this example. It’s the perfect use case of an absolutely zero stakes project that tangibly changes my day-to-day work, and yet no one will ever see it. You wouldn’t even know it existed if I didn’t take the time to use it as an example.
There’s a lot of dark matter software out there, and its genesis is just beginning.
More to come
Beyond dark matter software, I think there will be an explosion of new software because of AI. I have a lot more to say on this with concrete examples as well. So be sure to subscribe to the blog if you’re not already.