The end of software as we knew it.
The old software building playbook was: spend two years building, launch, then update slowly. AI just killed that. The new playbook builds software around your business in real time.
Something quietly changed in the software business this year, and most people haven’t caught up to it yet.
For thirty years, software companies built behind closed doors for two or three years, launched, and then dragged their feet on updates. AI just broke that model. A new kind of company is emerging that ships rough versions to real customers on day one and shapes the product around them in real time.
Today’s newsletter is about why that shift is happening, what it means for any business that buys (or builds) software, and how I’m running this exact playbook right now on a product called OmniLegislation. I’ll also tell you why OpenAI just quietly launched a four-billion-dollar service company, because it’s the same story from the other direction.
Let’s get into it.
Word of the Day: Adaptive Software
Adaptive software is a product that gets shaped around its customers in real time, instead of being designed in a lab for two years and then launched at them.
Think of it like the difference between a tailor and a department store. A department store stocks one hundred different sizes of the same shirt and hopes one of them fits you. A tailor measures your shoulders, asks where you wear it, and adjusts the fabric in front of you. Same shirt category. Completely different result. The tailored one fits perfectly.
For your business, this matters because the software you buy is about to get a whole lot more tailored. And the software you might build for yourself is about to get a whole lot more possible.
The old way is breaking
For decades, software worked like this. A company spent two or three years building a product behind closed doors. They guessed at what customers wanted. They launched. Then they sat in quarterly planning meetings deciding which features to add over the next year.
If you wanted them to change something for your specific business, you got one of two answers. “That’s on our roadmap” (meaning “no, but politely”) or “we can do that as a custom build” (meaning “open your wallet”).
AI just changed the math on all of this.
What’s actually new
Recently I read an interview with Boris Cherny, the engineer who built Claude Code at Anthropic. He said something that stuck with me.
“The best person to write accounting software won’t be an engineer. It will be an accountant.”
Think about that for a second. The person who knows what accounting software should do is an accountant, not the person who knows how to code. Until now, those two people had to find each other, work together for two years, and pray they understood each other. AI just made the accountant capable of building the software directly.
That changes who builds what. It also changes how fast it gets built. A small team, or even one person who knows the work, can now:
Build a rough version in a weekend
Put it in front of paying clients on Monday
Customize it quickly as requested
Test new ideas with real users instead of focus groups
Run several different versions of the same product at the same time
Ship daily instead of quarterly
That used to be a dream. Now it’s a Tuesday.
The proof: a story I’m living right now
I’m not going to ask you to take any of this on faith. Let me show you what it looks like in practice.
Right now, my team at DigitalTreehouse is building a product called OmniLegislation. It’s a tool that watches every state and federal bill being introduced, debated, and voted on, and alerts the right people the moment something changes. Attorneys care about this. Lobbyists live and die by it. Today, the existing tools in this space are expensive, slow, and built around twenty-year-old assumptions.
Here’s the part I want you to pay attention to. We are not building this product in a basement and then unveiling it. We are doing the exact opposite.
We are letting attorneys and lobbyists use our legislative monitor right now, for free, in exchange for one thing. Honest feedback. What works. What doesn’t. What’s missing. What slows them down. What they wish it could do that no tool currently does.
In return, the software is getting shaped around their actual workflow, week by week. The features that get built next are not coming from a strategy deck. They are coming from real users telling us, “if Omni could just do this one thing, you would replace three tools I currently pay for.”
That is adaptive software in motion. The customer is the product manager. AI is the engineering team. We are the connective tissue.
If you happen to be an attorney or a lobbyist reading this, reply to this email. We will get you in.
See our Legislative Scanning Tool live.
The line is disappearing
Here’s the strange part. The old distinction between “software companies” and “service companies” is starting to blur.
A consulting firm can now build software for a client that becomes the spine of a larger platform. A software company can now offer hands-on customization without going bankrupt. Both ends meet in the middle.
OpenAI is doing both ends of this at once, in public. Yesterday they launched a brand-new arm of the company called the OpenAI Deployment Company, with more than four billion dollars behind it. The job of the new unit is to help businesses actually use AI inside their real workflows, not just give them a chatbot and a login. The quote from OpenAI is almost an admission of guilt. The bottleneck, they say, is no longer access to the model. It’s understanding how to use it. It’s connecting the model to your messy data, your permissions, your approvals, your existing tools, and your team.
Last night they followed that with a developer update that goes even further. One of their own engineers, talking about a project called Symphony, said this:
“Six months ago we made a pretty wild decision: no human-written code in the repo.”
They forced themselves to use AI to build their own product. The result? A 500% increase in shipped work. Inside the company that builds the AI, the humans are no longer the ones typing. The humans are the ones deciding what to build next.
If OpenAI is moving in this direction, every other software company will follow. They have to.
The trap
I want to give you the good news and the warning together, because too many people only hear the first half.
The good news: you can now get software that fits your business instead of forcing your business to fit the software.
The warning: this only works if there is discipline behind it.
Customization without discipline is a slow-motion disaster. If you say yes to every weird request from your team or clients, you end up with Frankenstein code that no one can fix. AI does not solve this. AI just makes it cheaper and faster to create the mess.
The companies that will win in this new era are the ones that move quickly and stay simple at the same time. They customize where it counts. They refuse the edge cases. They watch for patterns in software usage and client requests and turn the repeating ones into core features. They keep one foot in the boutique business and one foot in the platform business.
That’s harder than it sounds. Strategy still matters.
What you can actually do this week
If there’s a tool your business needs and either the software doesn’t exist yet, or the one you’re currently paying for doesn’t quite fit how you actually work, you can build a rough version of it this month. Not a polished one. A rough one. The goal is to get something working that solves the most painful part of the problem. You can make it pretty later.
Here are the tools to start with, depending on what you’re trying to build.
Lovable (lovable.dev). The friendliest starting point if you have never built anything before. You describe what you want in plain English and Lovable builds you a working website or app you can share with a link. Great for internal tools, client portals, landing pages, and simple workflow apps. Around $25 a month.
Bolt (bolt.new). Similar to Lovable but a little more developer-flavored. Good for slightly more complex apps where you want more control over how things look and work under the hood. Free to start, around $20 a month for serious use.
Claude Code (claude.com/claude-code). The right tool when your project gets bigger and you need real code running on real servers. This is what we use at DigitalTreehouse for production builds. It comes with a Claude Pro subscription at $20 a month, or you can get heavier usage through Claude Max plans.
Replit (replit.com). Best for full apps you want to host online without thinking about servers. It writes the code, runs it, and publishes it for you, all in one browser tab. Around $25 a month for the AI features.
Here is the simplest possible way to start. Pick one tool from the list. Open it. Type one sentence describing the problem you want to solve. See what it builds. Then talk to it like a coworker. Tell it what is wrong. Tell it what to change. Tell it what to add. Keep going until it works.
Once you have something rough, put it in front of two or three real users you trust. Watch what they actually do with it, not what they say they want. Fix the things they trip over. Ignore the things they only suggested. Repeat that loop for two weeks and you will have something better than what most software companies ship in a year.
If you want help, reply to this email. This is exactly what we do at DigitalTreehouse, and it’s the same playbook we’re running on OmniLegislation right now.
The Bottom Line
For thirty years, software companies built first and listened second. The good ones listened a little faster. None of them listened in real time.
That era is ending. Not because the technology is finally smart enough to figure out what we want. Because the cost of making something, putting it in front of a real user, and changing it on the fly is finally close to zero.
OmniLegislation is one example. Yours could be next. The companies that win the next ten years will not be the ones with the most features on day one. They will be the ones who learn the fastest from real customers and have the discipline not to lose themselves in the noise.
Build rough. Ship early. Listen hard. Cut ruthlessly. Repeat.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing.
SmartOwner is published (almost) daily by the team at DigitalTreehouse. Want AI consulting or automations for your business? Reply to this email.