How to survive the chaos
Distributed building risks sprawl: unapproved apps wired into live data. The winners build the right tools, maintain them, and know when to stop building and buy.
The TL;DR about marketplaces is that more free plugins are likely to emerge, be reused, and further developed. Which is again not great news for small, medium and niche SaaS.
All of this has an obvious risk. Sprawl.
In that same survey, most of the people building were working outside any IT oversight. Many organisations had no measures in place for this at all.
The shadow IT problem of the 2010s can return, in a more dangerous form. Back then, each team bought its own unapproved software. Now each team can build its own unapproved apps, wired straight into live data, with no record of who did what.
The difference between a Mega Drive and enterprise software is simple. Nobody's live database was at risk when you left a game paused overnight.
Judgment: building the right tools, maintaining them, and knowing when to stop building and.
The TL;DR about marketplaces is that more free plugins are likely to emerge, be reused, and further developed. Which is again not great news for small, medium and niche SaaS.
The difference between a Mega Drive and enterprise software is that nobody's production database was at stake when you left Sonic paused overnight.
In that same survey, most of the people building were working outside any IT oversight.
So the question is not whether building will spread out. It already has. The question is how to make distributed building durable instead of chaotic.
That is a judgment problem, and it is where your work now sits. The winners will not be the teams that build the most tools. They will be the ones that build the right tools, keep them maintained, and know when to stop building and simply buy.
If you work in strategy, design, or product, that judgment — what to build, what to govern, when to stop — is the part the tools cannot supply.
The difference between a Mega Drive and enterprise software is that nobody's production database was at stake when you left Sonic paused overnight.
Judgment: building the right tools, maintaining them, and knowing when to stop building and buy.
Distributed building risks sprawl: unapproved apps wired into live data. The winners build the right tools, maintain them, and know when to stop building and buy.
This is the short version. Read the full-length essay, “Enterprise assisted-coding is the new Mega Drive. How to survive the creative chaos?”.
This issue is part of Everybody's Smart, a newsletter on taste, judgment, AI, culture, cognition, and the future of professional work. New issues every 2 to 3 weeks, free on LinkedIn.
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