Insight
Better for Everyone Stopped Being Better for You
Software has always been built for everyone — one product, broad appeal, millions of users. AI made it cheap to build your own instead. Once you can shape a tool around exactly how you work, the generic "best" tool stops being the better choice.
Optimized for everyone
The standard model: one tool, built to be broadly excellent, shipped to millions who each adapt their own workflow to fit it.
Optimized for one
A tool built and reshaped around a single person's exact workflow — no wider audience to serve, so every choice can be exactly what they'd choose.
For most of software's history, you adapted your workflow to the tool, not the other way around. Building something custom was too expensive for anyone but the largest companies, so everyone else bought the same generic product and lived with the parts that didn't quite fit.
Julie Zhuo, the product design leader who spent years building Facebook's design organization, wrote about building her own app — "Mog Squad" — to manage her Claude and Codex agents instead of using any of the existing ones: an eight-agent grid, her own status indicators, any detail she wanted wired in immediately. She's careful to say this isn't that the third-party apps are bad. It's that once building costs almost nothing, "better for me" starts to beat "better for everyone" — the same pull furniture-assembly research calls the IKEA effect, where you value what you built more than what you bought, even when it's objectively rougher.
I think a lot of us are already heading down that same road — reaching for the tool we'd build ourselves before the one built for a million other people.
The best tool for everyone stops being the best tool for you.