The Apps Are Dead, Long Live the Apps!

Coding agents can now generate working websites and applications in minutes. If you haven’t tried it yet, the experience is genuinely incredible: you describe what you want, and a functional app appears. It works. It’s tailored to your need. And it took less time than downloading an alternative from the App Store.

Right now, this power is mostly in the hands of developers. They’re the first to realize the capabilities because they understand what’s happening under the hood. But this won’t last. The interfaces are getting simpler, the barriers are dropping fast. It’s a matter of months, not years, until personalized app generation is accessible to everyone.

And when that happens, it will fundamentally rebalance how we use our devices and their apps.

The Sora precedent

We’ve already seen a version of this shift play out. OpenAI’s Sora created a whole separate TikTok-like feed with AI-generated videos only. A new content ecosystem, born from a generation tool.

My bet: soon, either OpenAI, Anthropic, or another major player will ship a dedicated space that lets anyone create their own hyperpersonalized experiences. Not static apps you download and configure. Dynamic agents that adapt in real time to how you use them.

The app doesn’t serve millions of users anymore. The app serves you.

What this looks like in practice

Let’s walk through a few areas where this shift will hit hardest.

Language learning

Duolingo is built for scale. It’s the same lesson structure for everyone, with minor adaptations based on your answers. Now imagine an AI agent that knows your native language habits, pulls data from your actual writing and speech, understands the specific grammar patterns you struggle with, and builds a learning plan that evolves daily. Not a curriculum designed for millions. A curriculum designed for one.

I study Japanese, and the gap between what a generic app offers and what a personalized agent is doing is enormous. I built mine last week, and I feel my progress increasing already. No more wasted time on topics I already know.

Productivity

How many todo apps have you used in the past 5 years? Todoist, Notion, Things, Asana, Linear, Trello. Every 6 months, a new shiny tool promises to finally organize your life. The problem isn’t the tool. The problem is that you’re still the one managing the system.

An AI agent flips this entirely. It organizes your tasks, prioritizes based on your actual patterns (not just due dates), handles your email triage, and surfaces what matters when it matters. You stop managing the productivity system and start being productive.

Travel planning

Right now, planning a trip means juggling 5 tabs of flight comparators, hotel review sites, Google Maps, and a shared doc with your travel partner. An AI agent that knows your preferences, your budget, your pace, your interests, that you hate layovers and love walkable neighborhoods. It just hands you the plan. You adjust, you confirm, you go.

Health and fitness

Not a generic 12-week program from an app that doesn’t know if you slept 4 hours or 9. An agent that tracks your progress, adapts your routines, adjusts based on your energy levels, your sleep data, your recovery. A personal trainer that actually knows you, without the personal trainer price tag.

Home and apartment search

Current real estate apps let you filter by price and bedroom count. An AI agent filters by your actual life: commute time to your office, proximity to your gym, neighborhood noise levels, distance from your kids’ school, walkability score. It doesn’t show you 200 listings. It shows you 5 that actually make sense.

And more

Dating. Personal finance. Meal planning. The pattern is identical everywhere: generic apps built for millions of users will lose ground to personalized agents built for one.

The signal for app developers

This isn’t a distant future scenario. The building blocks exist today. Coding agents are productive, AI models are cheap enough to run per-user, and the interfaces for non-technical users are improving fast.

If you’re building an app that serves a broad audience with a standardized experience, the question is straightforward: how do you evolve your product so that it becomes the personalized agent, rather than being replaced by one?

The companies that figure this out will thrive. The ones that keep shipping generic experiences for generic users will watch their audience quietly build something better. For themselves, by themselves.

Which app category do you think will be disrupted first? I’d love to hear your take. Reply to this email or find me on LinkedIn.

This is part of an ongoing series on how AI is reshaping the way we work and live. Not hype, not fear. Just real observations from someone building in this space every day.