By Fabien Girardin and Lisa Gansky in collaboration with Patrick Pittman as part of a series of essays on personal software.
Software design is in more hands than ever. For most of its history inside organizations, software was something people used rather than shaped — systems procured, platforms rolled out, tools embedded into daily work. An idea rendered by a small group. Everyone else adapted to it or tolerated the gaps. Most people hacked around the parts that didn’t fit. Since the Generative AI jolt of 2024, that arrangement has begun to loosen in genuinely practical ways. The ability to turn a few sentences into functioning software without writing a single line of code is no longer a developer’s privilege. It belongs to anyone who can describe a problem clearly enough for a Large Language Model (LLM) to help solve it. This shift isn’t arriving at the edge of our communities or economy. It’s happening inside regulated banks, global manufacturers, massive consultancies and government institutions. When a multinational bank can enable thousands of employees to shape their own tools without setting their compliance requirements on fire, the risk calculation changes now and for everyone. The question is no longer, is this possible? The pointed question for any leader to ask is: what’s our excuse?