Software at the speed of creativity makes design the job.
I'm a little fixated on the Delta app.
The story starts around 2009. I was working with Delta and their agency at the time, Modem Media out of Connecticut, on advertising for Kindle. Delta wanted to run flat ads on the Kindle's surface, because travelers read on Kindles on airplanes. Back then we weren't even allowed to have our devices on during flights, but Kindles were allowed. Delta wanted to align itself with the forward edge of technological innovation.
I didn't have an iPhone yet, and I honestly don't remember whether Delta had an app. If it did, all it did was look up your confirmation code. But Delta already had a vision of what its future could look like: how digital could change the way it served customers. That would be better for the business and great for travelers. Fewer missed flights, less breakage, less of the friction that frustrates the traveler and also hits the bottom line.
I think they've really done it. Today, the moment you decide you need to be somewhere, the app takes over the parts you used to carry in your head. You book the flight and it already knows your seat. It tells you when to leave for the airport. It knows your gate before you do. If the gate changes or the flight slips, it tells you, and often it has already rebooked you. It pings you when your boarding group is called, and when you sit down, it welcomes you to your seat. The app, the airport and the plane work as one experience. You don't think about what's next, because something else is already thinking about it for you.
Most of us have no idea how complex that is. Behind every one of those moments are data connections and systems that all have to talk to each other, and someone had to put it all together so it feels effortless. It didn't happen in one leap. It was a long run of friction points removed one at a time, until the trip felt like one continuous thing instead of a dozen separate chores. Plenty of major companies still struggle to pull off that kind of omnichannel experience.
Everyone caught up
Every so often I fly United or American, and the experience is comparable. Sometimes they have features I wish Delta had. I'm still a Delta loyalist, but that's the point: the whole category moved. Banking did the same. Depositing a check, paying a friend, seeing where your money went used to take a trip, a form or a phone call. Now it takes a few taps.
Those industries got there because they had a business model big enough to pay for a decade of design and engineering. The rest of life didn't.
The rest of life
Our personal lives are still full of the old friction. So many emails from school. The sports signup deadline you missed. The game you can't remember the time of. The birthday party on Saturday. Your grandmother's anniversary. The friends who moved, and you can't remember where.
We don't demand much, because nobody has offered more. But consumers vote with where they cluster and what they pay for, and I think this is where it's going: the same ease we expect from an airline or a bank, designed around our families, our homes, every part of our lives. Built around our own criteria, not the constraints of whatever software we were handed.
Why now
For most of my career, building software like that took a team, a roadmap and a reason big enough to justify both. Not anymore.
Over the last few months I've built a small fleet of apps for my own family: a wardrobe app that tells me what to wear and helps me buy less, a shared kitchen that turns what's in the fridge into dinner, a kids' bank modeled on the one my dad ran for me, a project manager for our home renovation. None of them took a team. Most of them started as a conversation.
The wardrobe app started with a packing-list problem. In a single morning, it turned into a working app on my own domain. I wrote up the experiment, from the first conversation to the finished product, in How I built my closet app in a day.
When software moves at the speed of an idea, building stops being the bottleneck. The hard part is deciding what to build and how the pieces fit together. Design becomes the job.
What the system looks like
The apps aren't the interesting part. The structure is.
- A shared core. Everyone in the family, their roles, and the connections between apps live in one place, so no app has to work out who someone is and what they can see.
- Specialist apps. Each does one job well: the closet, the pantry, the bank, the reno tracker. Some are live, some are sketches, and one is waiting for a reason to exist.
- One front door. Thibault Central is where the family actually goes. Its assistant, Anton, is named because my husband wanted someone more interesting than a robot. Anton doesn't own any data. He asks the apps and brings back the answer, the way the Delta app asks the airline where your gate is.
- A studio layer. Every app ships with the same kit: feedback, a ticket queue, usage insights, a build log and weekly notes. Nothing gets built unless it's a ticket. That keeps a fleet of small apps from turning into a junk drawer.
- An editor. The newest piece, and the one publishing this post. It turns what's happening across the apps into something worth sharing.
Not an apocalypse
There's a lot of talk about the SaaSpocalypse: the idea that AI eats software and the industry collapses. I think it's the opposite. When anyone can build, we don't get less software. We get an explosion of it.
What's changing is the moat. One product built for millions, priced per seat, where you bend your life to fit its constraints: a lot of companies thought that model was uncrossable. It isn't. Software isn't going anywhere. It's about to be everywhere, shaped around each of us.
And the bar keeps rising. We expect more personalization, and also more privacy. Those pull against each other, because software can't personalize anything if it doesn't know you. So there are new things to solve for: trust, governance, and who gets to see what.
Where it shakes out
I'm building mine by hand, but I don't think most people will. I expect it to shake out the way airlines and banks did: a handful of models, and you pick one and make it yours. A good one will have an organic flywheel, learning from the way you already live. Each week, another little friction point disappears.
The scaffold already travels. The same shape works for running a small hotel, teaching a semester-long class, or helping a friend whose business is drowning in paperwork. Change the people and the jobs, and the rest holds.
That's why I think this matters for the whole industry, not just families. How I run my personal life and how I approach my work are the same practice. Work is so big and complex that changing it is like turning a cruise ship. It's much easier to see the mechanics on the little skiff of my own life, then carry them back to the ship.
And more is coming: drones delivering everyday purchases, little robots running around the streets of Philadelphia. Some of this is inevitable. You can't put the genie back in the bottle. But we have a chance to direct it in constructive ways, and there are so many ways it can help us. We have to sit up and take the wheel on our future.
It took Delta almost twenty years to get from a confirmation code to giving you real-time updates on the location of your checked luggage. Our lives won't take that long. The question isn't whether your life will run like the Delta app. It's who designs it.