This blog post is Human-Centered Content: Written by humans for humans.
You Are Not The Average Customer
Software is designed for the average customer, but the truth is that no customer is the actual average. That’s why we’re always dealing with trade-offs. Our tool process flow doesn’t quite match the reality of our business. The analytics dashboard doesn’t quite capture the right metrics. The CRM stages don’t fit the way we think about selling. So often, we conform to our tools and deal with the rough edges.
The future of tools, however, looks different.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been spending my free time coding with Claude, and it’s more obvious to me than ever that the cost of building a tool that truly fits your business is lower than ever. I’m not talking about a one-sentence prompt that magically generates the perfect tool — that’s not AI, that’s magic. But I do think that Claude and tools like it are making it so that the people who best understand the problem can engage with solving it using code, like never before.
I’ve Felt This Before
I’m long past the days where I could dedicate the majority of my week to programming. Despite a schedule that included a conference and a family vacation, I’ve built three different applications that each fill me with excitement. I can build thing again. Good things. I don’t think I’m special in this regard.
At the start of my career, I was building dashboards using C# and SQL. When Tableau entered the scene, my projects took 10% of the time. It was an accelerator in so many impressive ways and changed how I approached business intelligence and the trajectory of my career. It was worth the cost of the licenses, the decrease in performance and the rough edges that appeared when it didn’t quite match my needs. In this moment, I feel that same excitement that first lit when I began building interactive dashboards that wowed executives with capabilities they had never seen. This moment with AI feels similar, except I’m back to working in code, with all the benefits of flexibility and fit, without giving up that wonderful sense of acceleration.
Of course, as Pedro Tavares points out in his post, “Writing Code Was Never The Bottleneck.” Deploying code, managing servers — all of these things are challenging and not quickly solved by AI alone. That is why I think businesses need to spend more time focusing on enabling this upcoming wave of citizen developers by making a paved path to deploying these new AI-developed solutions. We don’t have to make the trade-off of tools built for the average user when we can build them rapidly, but that also means we need to enable being able to deploy rapidly as well.
We Can Just Do Things
This reminds me of Aaron Francis’s Talk at Laracon, where he speaks about the spirit of being able to choose to “just do things” and build what you want. While he’s not talking about AI specifically, his philosophy about being empowered to build what you want resonates deeply with this moment. He sees Laravel as giving you the tools to just build — and I see AI as part of that same journey.
The convergence is already happening. The combination of Laravel and AI, with tools like Laravel Boost, is a great example of this synergy. It’s not just about generating code faster — It’s about creating an environment where the friction from idea to production is as low as possible.
One of the great insights of lean methodology is that single-piece flow unlocks efficiency. Whenever we can build something without constant handoffs, we’re going to be faster and more efficient. AI gives us new ways to do this, and we should leverage them.
Faster Cars != Faster Traffic
Faster code doesn’t not mean faster outcomes if we solely focus on the ability to generate code. We need to pay attention to the entire process — from code review to deployment, from prototype to production.
If we make the right investments in developer experience, we’re going to see things transformed. Not because we can generate code faster, but because we can reduce the friction at every step of the process. When the people who understand the business problems can directly engage with solving them through code, when deployment is as smooth as development, when AI assists with the entire lifecycle rather than just the typing — that’s when we’ll truly move beyond the compromises of average.
The tools we need aren’t just better code generators. They’re comprehensive ecosystems that understand our frameworks, integrate with our workflows and help us navigate the real bottlenecks: Understanding existing code, coordinating changes and safely deploying to production.
Better Than the Average
We’re at an inflection point. The question isn’t whether AI can help us code faster (it does) — it’s whether we’re ready to reimagine how we build software entirely.
When we combine AI’s acceleration with thoughtful investment in developer experience, we can finally build the tools that fit our actual needs. Not the average customer’s needs. Not close-enough compromises. But tools that work the way we work, measure what we need to measure, and flow the way our businesses actually flow.
The future isn’t about conforming to tools built for everyone else. It’s about building exactly what we need, rapidly and confidently. And for the first time, that future feels achievable for all of us — not just the companies with massive engineering teams.
We’re entering an era where custom is the new standard. Where fitting your business perfectly is more achievable than settling for average. Where the people who understand the problems can build the solutions.
And I, for one, can’t wait to see what we build together.
