There was a yesteryear when there were no chairs to buy. If you wanted to sit you had to chop down a tree. You’d measure your family’s legs and backs and cut the wood accordingly. When they finally sat down, the chairs would wobble—but they’d feel something built just for them. The process wasn’t too abstract to grasp. You could learn by studying the joinery, proportions and curves of your neighbour’s chair. Then you could check your result against it.
Eventually some folks build good enough chairs to become carpenters. Then they stopped measuring the youngins and grandmama, and started making their chairs one-size-fits-all.
But once tinkering becomes trade, there remains a calling to return to craft. Artisans spend months perfecting one chair rather than stamping out hundreds.
In 2026, software is completing this full circle as well. Early software was hacked together to solve bespoke problems. Then the guild of software engineers formed to abstract everything into frameworks and enterprise platforms.
Now we’ve returned to craft. The onset of Claude Code and the current generation of LLMs allow anyone to create software. There’s now a tangible through line from idea to product again. The guild that guards the middle of the process (read: execution) is being refactored as we speak.
Does this mean we’ll all be hucksters selling slop software? Far from it. Network effects and agglomeration will still leave thick moats around enterprise firms big enough to matter. Rather, every person will be able to craft a software suite for their personal use case. In the last quarter I’ve built a custom dashboard for my morning commute, a calculator for a niche investment decision, and a budgeting app that reads the data from my bank. I haven’t spent effort trying to get any of these to be broadly legible. I’ve hardcoded my bus stops, my tax jurisdiction and my .csv format because I can. This is the future of software. My budgeting app might wobble a bit. But it’s mine, built for exactly how I live. We aren’t all going to be software engineers. But we can be, if motivated, digital artisans. It’s time to return to craft.