Writer and photographer Craig Mod published an essay in March 2026 detailing how Anthropic's Claude Code turned him from a self-described "OK-but-not-great coder" into a prolific builder of deeply personalized software. The piece, titled "Software Bonkers," chronicles a year of building custom applications for his paid membership community SPECIAL PROJECTS — including a bespoke Twitter-like social platform with deliberately humanizing constraints (posts expire in seven days, only two posts allowed per day, images display in 1-bit black and white until clicked) and a searchable archive of forty hours of members-only video content. Mod, who holds a computer science degree but does not work as a professional developer, describes Claude Code as a conversational partner that makes software feel "organic and pliable."
The centerpiece of the essay is TaxBot2000, a custom accounting application Mod built in five days using Python, Flask, and SQLite during tax season. His financial situation is genuinely complex: multiple bank accounts across the US and Japan, income from Random House book royalties via a New York agent, direct Shopify store sales, freelance writing and media work for global clients, a membership program, and both public and private investments — all requiring reconciliation across currencies and two different national tax systems. No commercial accounting software could handle the combination, so he built his own. The result is entirely local, handles multi-currency with live and historical foreign exchange conversion, ingests arbitrary CSV files, and learns from past expense categorizations. Mod explicitly canceled his Quicken subscription after completing the project, citing Quicken's failure to reliably connect to two-factor-authenticated accounts and its habit of silently losing financial data.
Mod uses the essay to argue that AI-assisted coding is enabling what he calls "software for N of 1" — tools shaped to a single person's exact situation, impossible for any SaaS product to replicate at scale. He pushes the argument into economics: subscription software companies serving technically literate power users face structural pressure as that segment gains the ability to self-build. His explicit framing — "Maybe we really should be shorting a bunch of SaaS companies" — identifies personal finance managers, membership platforms (he bypassed both Patreon and Substack in favor of a custom Memberful-integrated solution), and niche productivity tools as the most exposed categories. The companies whose moats rest on workflow familiarity and switching-cost lock-in, rather than on proprietary data networks or regulatory positioning, are the ones Mod's argument puts most directly in its sights.
Mod acknowledges the current moment is still a "dorks-only phase," requiring enough technical literacy to prompt, iterate, and debug effectively. But he anticipates near-future interfaces — voice-driven, drag-and-drop composition — that could <a href="/news/2026-03-14-grief-and-the-ai-split-how-ai-coding-tools-are-exposing-a-long-hidden-developer-divide">expand who builds their own software</a> by an order of magnitude. "The tools," he writes, "are getting good enough that the limiting factor is imagination, not skill."