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I’m thankful to Pete Cohen for sharing this article with me, which enables me to put aside the awful term ‘vibe coding’ once and for all. I’ve created a bunch of software over the past few months, which you can see here: dynamicskillset.com/tools.

The bit of software I use the most, though, isn’t on that list. You can absolutely have a look at the source code but, really, I made Overflow just for me. It’s an app for my Mac which plays music from my Plex music collection on my home server. I tinker with it quite a bit, and now the app is 90% how I want it.

So, yes, folk software. I like it.

I’ve… made a CRM that works the way I work, a serendipity engine, a hype decay tracker, a draft graveyard and heaps more things.

I’ve started calling this folk software.

The songs of folk music emerged from communities rather than studios, passed around and adapted, never focus-grouped. Folk music didn’t disappear when recorded music arrived. It just stopped being the only option. For a while, if you wanted music, you either made it yourself or knew someone who could.

Software has been in its “recorded music” era for decades. If you wanted a tool, you either bought what the industry offered or you didn’t have it. The threshold for creation was high enough that almost everything had to be commercially justified. Will enough people pay? Can we get budget for this?

That threshold just collapsed.

Tools like Claude Code, Cursor, Replit mean the calculus is now simply: do I want this? The answer can be yes for an audience of one. And sometimes that audience will turn out to be more than just you.

Source: Move37

Image: Claude