Two months ago I decided to try my hand at this vibe coding thing I had been reading about. I downloaded Cursor and started to work on a fun little project: a web-based mechanical split-flap display (like an old-school train station departures board), first using GPT 5.2 as a backend, then Claude. It was fun—an IDE on AI steroids—and I made my little web app in a few days.

Feeling encouraged I decided to try Claude Code, which had begun to get a ton of attention in the tech world, and something amazing happened. You know that scene in Star Wars when the Millennium Falcon makes the jump to light speed and the stars turned into streaks? Well, yeah. It was like that. And I’ve been cruising through hyperspace ever since. And no, it ain’t like dustin’ crops, boy.

In the five weeks since I started using Claude Code I’ve created eight new apps—some for the web, some for iPhone and iPad, and even one for Apple TV. Lots of people I know are experiencing the same explosion of creativity and productivity—it’s a rush!—and I love seeing what people are coming up with.

At the same time, it’s worth taking a step back to consider what’s going on and what it all means, particularly for the software industry, where I’ve spent my whole career.

It’s no exaggeration to say that tectonic shifts are happening. Cost structures are imploding. Time to market is collapsing. Tiny teams are becoming terrifyingly effective. And incumbents are looking obese and slow. In short, a disruption bomb has just gone off.

As my friend Todd Vernon recently noted, the old way of doing startups was to have a novel idea and then go raise some money to pay a team to build an initial version of your product over multiple months, then see if the market had an appetite for it. The answer was usually no, and the million or so bucks you raised to build your MVP became a loss for the investors, hopefully to be offset by someone else’s ten-banger. And so it went.

But what happens when a solo developer can bang out an MVP—not a prototype, mind you, but a functioning, shippable piece of commercial software—over a weekend? What happens when a team of one or two can iterate through the whole software development lifecycle of analysis, design, implementation, and testing in minutes and hours instead of days or weeks?

Two weeks ago I had an idea for an iPhone app I wanted to make. My last startup’s product, Numerous, had a very popular feature that I have been missing ever since we shut that company down ten years ago: countdowns. I liked being able to set a countdown to track the days until my kids come home for the holidays or the next rocket launch. People tracked holidays, special events, product launches, days since their last menstrual cycle, you name it.

Now, there’s a whole category of countdown apps on the App Store. But they’re all pretty janky and plagued by bad design, full-screen ads, and constant nags to buy a subscription to unlock basic functionality. So I decided to write one myself.

I fired up Claude Code, put it in planning mode, and told it what I wanted. It asked a couple of clarifying questions, which I answered. It created an implementation plan, which I approved. And off it went to create my new app. Five minutes and fourteen seconds later, it was done.

Five minutes and fourteen seconds.

I’ve spent the last two weeks adding functionality, polishing, getting feedback from users, and navigating the App Store submission process (which itself is something that really needs to be automated). I submitted my new app Countdowns to the App Store last night. It’s better than the countdowns feature of Numerous ever was. It’s far better than any of the countdown apps currently available. And for me it heralds a new age of software, one that happens at light speed. As Han Solo said, “Go strap yourselves in.”

The implications for the software industry are profound. I’ll be writing more about them in the coming weeks.