Tools like Claude Code and Codex are available to everyone now. Not to a priesthood of engineers — to everyone. And they let you build software that is, more or less, sophisticated enough to ship.
Technical experience still makes a difference, especially when the project gets big. But not nearly as much as it used to. And that’s the part I want to talk about, because I think most developers are reading this shift wrong.
You don’t need a developer to start a software company anymore
You probably don’t. Maybe you need a consultant you call every once in a while to fix the specific stuff — and honestly, maybe not even that, considering how many of the products doing well right now are trivial at the infrastructure level.
Here’s the thing people forget: when you’re starting something, you don’t need a sophisticated product. You need the simplest product that gets you to the goal. And the goal, since we live in a market economy, is that the thing generates revenue — by giving real value back to users, obviously, but revenue nonetheless.
To do that you need a product that solves the problem as fast as possible. And then you need distribution. You need access to the ears of the people you want as customers. That second part hasn’t gotten one bit easier.
The bar didn’t drop. It moved.
The numbers make this uncomfortably concrete.
According to Sensor Tower data reported by the New York Times in July 2026, the App Store added around 560,000 new apps in the first half of 2026 alone — nearly matching the ~600,000 released in all of 2025. New releases had already grown 30% in 2025 over the year before. In the first half of 2026 they roughly doubled.
Downloads over the same period? Up 2%.
Supply doubled. Demand moved 2%. Analysts attribute the surge to exactly what you’d expect: agentic coding tools putting app development in everyone’s hands.
So no, the bar didn’t get lower. Building got easier and being chosen got dramatically harder. Every developer who spent a career getting good at the building part is now watching that skill get commoditized, and I understand why that’s frightening.
I think it’s the opposite of a problem.
What actually differentiates you now
If everyone can produce a technically competent product, the technical product stops being the differentiator. What makes someone pick your thing out of a hundred thousand others is what it always was, just now with nothing else to hide behind:
- Storytelling. Why this exists, why you made it, why it should matter to them.
- Taste. The specific human choices in how it looks, how it moves, what you left out.
- Communication. How you talk to the person on the other side — before, during and long after they pay you.
Because the one who pulls out a credit card is still a human being. Not a robot. Humans don’t evaluate architectural sophistication. They get convinced by a story, by a feeling, by trust.
So yes — product development, meaning sophisticated technical product development, is largely dead as a moat. Which means the ask for us developers has changed: become entrepreneurs. Absorb the product management. Absorb the marketing. Learn to talk to the user who shows up.
And we can do it, precisely because we understand what AI actually enables. We know where the leverage is, so we can carry all of those functions at once in a way that wasn’t realistic five years ago.
What I learned building EasyPapiro
The biggest effort we put into EasyPapiro has nothing to do with code. It’s customer care.
Every single ticket gets answered by me, in first person, with zero AI in the loop. That’s a deliberate choice, and it is expensive in the only currency I actually have — time. But it’s also the thing users remember, and the reason the product’s reputation is what it is. The technical part of EasyPapiro could be rebuilt by a competent person in a couple of weeks. The relationship couldn’t.
That, plus the storytelling around it, is the whole product.
Which brings me to Armadio
Armadio is the app I’m launching now, the first product out of the app studio I’m building. It’s an AI stylist: you photograph the clothes you already own, and it composes outfits from your real wardrobe — matched to the occasion and to today’s weather. No shopping suggestions, no clothes you don’t have.
Here’s the honest part: I vibe coded the entire thing. I did not write a single line of code.
I’m a developer with years of native mobile behind me and I chose not to touch the editor, because the code was never going to be the reason someone keeps this app on their home screen. All the attention and all the care went somewhere else — into how the app presents itself, into how well the user can communicate with me and I with them through it.
That’s the only thing that counts at the end. Everything else is now a commodity, and the sooner we make peace with that, the sooner we get to do the interesting work.
You can try it at armadio.app.
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