The Personal Software era
50 years after Personal Computers, we've finally reached Personal Software.
For several decades getting something done with a computer has meant finding the right software and bending your work to fit it. You buy a tool built for everyone, learn its thousand buttons, figure out the ten of them that you care about, and then spend the rest of your day copying data from one window into the next. The software is generic because it has to be. To sell to everyone, it has to do everything. The work of making it fit you was yours.
AI Agents like Sauna aren't typical software. They're more like assistants. They can be taught which tools you use, they can be plugged into your integrations, given access to your data, prompted to know the way you like things done. They can use this information to automate a bunch of your work. All from a humble chat interface.
Beyond the chat interface
These same agents are great at coding, they can write and deploy working software at superhuman speed. In the past year or two, "vibe-coding" has taken over. Around the world right now, teams of software engineers are grinding away to produce this same one-size-fits-all software at 10x the pace.
At Sauna, we are working towards a future where this simply doesn't make sense. What if you could get custom apps, made just for you, just for the task at hand. What if you stop shopping for software entirely and made it instead. For the exact job in front of you, and nothing else.
The software used to be the product. Now your work is the product and the software is just a stage in getting it done.
Personal Software is software built for you, by an AI agent, out of everything it already knows about you and your world. This isn't vibe coding, you're not building 'the next SaaS' for the world. You are building a bespoke application, just for you or your team, with the exact features you need for the tasks at hand.
An app that's half CRM, half outreach tracker? Great.
A tinder swipe interface to triage your inbox? Done.
A virtual futuristic cityscape that lets you mark Slack messages as read by shooting them with lasers? Sure.
None of these is a product someone shipped for a market. Each is one piece of software that fits one workflow exactly. Made in the time it used to take to find the settings page.
3d printing software
Personal Software is an agent extending itself visually. The visual matters, seeing the thing is how you come to trust it. You watch the total recompute, you click the row that's wrong, you believe it because you can look at it, the same reason people reach for a spreadsheet over a script. But the screen isn't where the value is. The value is underneath. the data pulled into one place, the connections between your systems, the small interfaces one app exposes so the next one can build on it. One dashboard reading from your Stripe sync, your email sync, your calendar. That composition is the hard part, and it's the part generic software can never do for you: it was built for everyone, and the shape of your work is the one thing it doesn't have.
This is the line between buying software and being able to make it. Some tools do your work for you; some tools, in this vibe-code era, let you build apps for the world.
This is the other thing. Software you make to get your own work done, shaped to you, thrown away or kept or shared with your team.
It can also build software for the world, but honestly I wouldn't bother, the world won't need it.
In the old world, you found software and stitched it together. In the new world, you are the software.