There are three choices when you need to automate something:

1. Look for an existing solution.

2. Build your own.

3. Hijack an existing platform.

When trying to solve a modern problem, first start by trying to find a solution that’s already out there. Because it’s almost certainly cheaper to pay someone $20 a month if they truly have solved your problem.

But if you’re like me, and you’re constantly amazed how terrible commercial software products can be with billions of dollars behind them and fleets of world-class engineers (anything Microsoft has ever made, for example), you’ll find that off-the-shelf solutions may not cut it for you.

In that case, now you can build your own version of many tools, exactly the way you want, with AI coding.

But a third use case is particularly interesting, as well. You can also hijack an existing platform to get it to do things it wasn’t necessarily intended for. For example, I love Slack, and I quickly realized that replacing it wouldn’t be worth the effort. So I happily pay them their fee.

BUT, I’ve got an army of bots hooked into my Slack letting it be my central hub for managing a team of remote coding agents, for handling all my calendar bookings, for keeping my CRM up to date, for instantaneous universal translation for remote workers, for logging time-tracking in my custom agency platform, and so much more.

So when you come to a piece of software that really is good, don’t replace that one. I love Slack, so it stays. Just buy it. But consider which apps you use can become even more useful to you by extending their functionality in surprising ways.

In the future, only the apps that truly earn their keep will stay, and we’ll appreciate them all the more.