Welcome to the era of digital hyperpersonalization
i.
In 1975, Andy Warhol made the observation that “a Coke is a Coke, and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking.”
Marc Andreessen referenced this in 2023 and threw in an extra line: “Same for the browser, the smartphone, the chatbot!”
That’s kind of cool in some ways, right? The richest and most powerful people in the world are opening the same Slack as we do. They’ve got the same smart phones. Their Duolingo owl sends them the same guilt-tripping Your streak is in peril! notifications.
Sure, with more money, you can buy a private chef, a private jet, a private yacht. But when you sit down at your laptop, you’re using roughly the same software as every other fresh-faced college intern.
That was before. Going forward, I no longer believe this holds.
ii.
Let me back up a bit.
If you have multiple young kids, like I do, you will be familiar with famous challenge known as the “Mommy, who do you love more?”-barrage. After copious trial and error, I have learned that the best method is to sidestep the question and actually answer a different one: tell each what I love about them specifically. It seems to work: after all, we humans love what’s unique to us. In 1959 a psychologist named Neville Moray played two streams of speech into people’s ears. They were told to just focus on one of the streams, but a third of them still heard their own name in the stream they were supposed to be ignoring. Dale Carnegie once wrote that a person’s name is, to that person, the sweetest sound in any language.
Personalization has been commercialized ever since. Coke, if you can believe it, had a period where they printed your first name onto their bottles. Nike lets you pick the color of your own swoosh; Louis Vuitton advertises more than 200 million monogram combinations.
And it’s not just names and colors; entertainment is now personalized to your tastes. In the 1980s, a single show could still command over 70% of the TVs in use. Today, streaming is almost half of all TV time and sliced into the thousands of niches that make up the long tail. A good three-fourths of YouTube watching starts from a personalized recommendation.
AI knows us better than ever. That trend is only continuing.
iii.
And yet, most software today, with the exception of personalized social, feels rather uniform. Duolingo, with its 58 million daily users, personalizes how hard the next sentence is, but not what those sentences are about. My seven-year-old loves the app but let me tell you, he is never going to tell someone “My, your kitchen looks so lovely!” in any language.
Where software played with personalization was largely in the settings menu. We got dark mode, color themes, maybe a font size slider here and there. But settings operated like a rule book. Somebody decided in advance the small handful of things one would be allowed to change. Designer Jared Spool once asked several hundred people to send in their Microsoft Word settings files and discovered fewer than 5% had changed a single setting. And if what you wanted wasn’t in there, you’d send a support ticket or beg for it on the forums.
This model made sense because software used to be expensive to make, so it had to be made for a lot of people at once. Clay Shirky wrote in 2004 that building an application for a few dozen users was “an absurd target population.” Twenty-one years later, it’s time to rethink what’s possible.
iv.
Here is the story that changed my mind.
I run a lot of AI agents at once, usually across multiple projects both personal and professional. I work in the command line for the flexibility and power of it. My typical set-up is eight terminal windows open on my home machine, and I arrange them by hand like a poor game of Tetris. While on the go, I used an app called Mosh to control my terminal windows remotely, but the entire setup was six clicks deep. Meanwhile my husband was using the remote control version of Claude and Codex, and I jealously watched as he attached screenshots and two-tapped between his agent tasks. I was gearing up to trade my homemade setup for the more polished third-party version, despite having to give up some of the flexibility of my setup.
Then a thought crept into my mind: could I build the thing I was envying?
Half an hour later, I got a mostly-working version that answered my question with a resounding yes.
[VIDEO: screens/agent-app-phone.mp4]
My app: two-taps to switch agents (real interface, not-real data)
With the core questions answered, I spent the next few days elatedly designing for myself, adding in little moments of delight that would make sense to very few others.
I wanted to know how many subagents were working at a time by looking at the number of sparkles. I reinstated Claude’s status verbs with my own twist. I wanted more clarity on what subagents were doing. I called this app Mog Squad. If you know, you know, kupo.
[VIDEO: screens/agent-app-thinking.mp4]
one session at work: the General delegating, three workers doing their thang.
Two days later, satisfied with my mobile app, I turned my attention to the desktop version.
[VIDEO: screens/agent-app-desktop.mp4]
So many sweet, sweet threads of work.
After this, I thought to myself, I never want to use third-party software again. I don’t mean it boastfully. I don’t think my version is better than the official apps. But it works better for me.
For one thing, it lets me use both Claude and Codex, and neither official app does that. It’s hyper-optimized for my workflow, with my eight agents arranged in a grid. (Why eight? Because it’s the ideal number for me. Fewer, and I get the itch to start something new. More, and I start losing track of ongoing projects.) It has none of the bloat from features I don’t use. Because I created it, I know exactly how every button and drawer and keyboard shortcut works. When I find a little friction point, I remove it. When I get a new idea, I implement it. The feedback loop could not be more efficient. Because I am my best customer, I care immensely about making myself happy. I will never complain about my own software!
Economists even have a name for this feeling, the IKEA effect: we love the things we assemble ourselves more than the ones that come pre-packaged for us.
v.
I’ll share one more example of hyperpersonalization.
My kids love Duolingo, so over the summer I built them a Duolingo-inspired math and reading app.
Now, like many kids, my kids are not especially motivated to answer math and reading questions. And I didn’t want to resort to state-of-the-art gamification techniques like streaks or “you got a 2x boost for the next 15 minutes!!!” So I tried a different tack: the stories would be about their lives: their real friends, their real life news, and their real hobbies. My daughter’s stories are about fashion and theater. My son gets Minecraft, Geometry Dash, and a large dose of Pokemon. When we take a trip, those stories show up in next week’s lessons. And just as I used to sneak veggies into their meals, I make sure the stories carry a sprinkle or two of our family’s values in what the characters choose to do.
[VIDEO: screens/kids-app-pair.mp4]
A story about an arcade trip (names changed to protect the innocent; the raccoon is real tho)
There is a “feedback” button at the end of every lesson so the kids can tell me if it was too easy or too hard, or if they want a particular story (my daughter has used it more than once to request a story in which she meets and gets to sing with Idina Menzel.)
One request was not about the stories at all but about the rewards. They wanted something to collect. So I made holographic cards of their favorite stuffies. The rarer the card, the shinier it is when you tilt it!
[VIDEO: screens/kids-app-card.mp4]
Rooney the raccoon is now immortalized in virtual trading card form.
There is some research beneath this: in 2013, a study gave 145 ninth graders algebra problems. Half were standard and half were rewritten around each student’s own interests. The personalized group solved them faster and more accurately, with the gain being largest for the students who were struggling. Best of all, it stayed after the personalization was taken away!
This makes sense to me: even as an adult, I pay more attention and do better work on the things I’m actually interested in.
vi.
So what did I learn from these experiments?
Hyperpersonalization is the next great trend. And there are two major reasons for it:
The first reason is workflow utility: anything you do fifty times a day is a place where friction compounds. Two clicks instead of one. A menu with 20 items rather than 2 that your eyes have to process. Two screens you need to flip through to remember the context. When I wrote last week about how to pull off an AI transformation, I made the point that workflow improvements are great early wins. And workflows are deeply personal, influenced by our unique brains (are you an audio or visual learner? Do you like tl;dr or details?), lifestyles (are you constantly on the go, or do you sit in front of a computer all day?), and the constellation of tools at our disposal. Even where best practices exist for a single tool, there are hairy seams between tools because vendors are not typically incentivized to make sure every possible combination of tools works beautifully. The only people who can describe a perfect workflow are the ones living it.
The second reason is expression. I have a closet full of shirts that perform the same utility in keeping me warm, but I’ll still have favorites that I think express myself better. Software has tended towards utility: most software (especially enterprise software) is bland, most UIs converge (can you even tell the difference between the main chat screens of ChatGPT or Codex or Gemini?), and I get it, bland is safe, bland is least-likely-to-offend when you’re creating for millions. Turn your agents into a flock of winged cat-creatures and a lot of people will reasonably be like WTF? But hey, it puts a smile on my face. And I’d hope your own software tickles you too.
I think this is where interface design goes next. When I wrote about conversational interfaces last year and talked about the golden opportunity of personalization, I was thinking from the perspective of a company learning you well enough to customize what it shows you. I now think the inverse is also true: enabling you to tune the thing for yourself, whether that’s UI or content.
A lot of people will not do this, at least for some time, and that’s fine. Just like not everyone cares about fashion or eking out that last ounce of optimization, not everyone will care about perfecting their workflows or expressing themselves through software.
But enough will. And no software is safe from the personal remixes to come.
vii.
I think about software now in levels.
At the left are the use cases. This is where most software lives today, because use cases are tangible. An app that creates photo collages or helps you tune your guitar or lets you watch movies solves for very specific problems that need only a yes-no answer: Does this solve a problem I care about?
One level up from that is a platform builder like Shopify, Webflow, Roblox or Lovable, that helps you create a personalized version of a certain type of thing: whether an online store, a website, a game, or an app. Here, you need some imagination to picture how it might look and feel, and what functionality is important. But there are still guardrails around how much you can build or change.
One level beyond that is the anything builder: a coding LLM with a full set of tools and permissions to create whatever your mind conjures up.
Each step from left to right requires more imagination and delivers more freedom. The far right is where few live today. But slowly but surely, everything to the left will start shifting more and more to the right. That’s why the Replits and Lovables of the world are growing the way they are. If operating systems are smart, they’ll get in on this. It’s hard to imagine that an AI-first operating system of the future will look like a grid of apps.
If you build software today, I’d love for you to consider four things:
Make your interface malleable. A UI should be something a person can take apart and put back together in the way that best suits them.
Let preferences reach past the rule book. A descriptive vision is worth more than fifty toggles.
Let feedback change the product. Give people a chance to tell you what they really want, and immediately make it so.
Treat the seams as part of the experience. Nobody lives in just one tool, so a better workflow is a more integrated experience across the tools a person already uses.
viii.
Cokes remain popular today. They are still cheaper and more efficient than making your own drink. Perhaps one day, when personal robots can prepare ambrosia to our specific tastes, this will no longer be true. Until then, we’ve got software to play with. Happy remixing.
A note
This essay first ran on The Looking Glass, my newsletter. Paid subscribers there get one more section: the rough steps I used to build both apps.
Read it, and subscribe, here: https://lg.substack.com/p/i-never-want-to-use-third-party-software
