Software as a Product is Dead in the Water.

It might not be super obvious now, but it will be- and it will come quick.

Last week I wanted to dither some images. It is a very very specific scratch I needed to itch and I just needed to scratch it. (Rabbithole ADD type of scratch)

There is a commercial app called Ditherboy that does this very well. It costs 45 Pounds, runs on Mac and Windows, has a ton of dithering algorithms and a clean interface. Good product. Very fair price.

I did not buy it immediately.

I opened Claude , sent the website and described what I wanted. A couple of moments later I had Ditter: a fully functional dithering application with 50+ algorithms, a studio mode for designing custom dithering patterns, preset support, WebGL acceleration, real-time preview, PNG/JPG/WebP export, light and dark themes, and a Tauri wrapper that packages the whole thing as a native desktop app at 10 megabytes.

I am not a super 100x developer. I did not hand-write 3,600 lines of dithering engine code.

I described what I wanted, iterated on the output, and tested the features.

The result is a production-quality tool that sits on my dock next to apps I paid for. It has error diffusion, ordered dithering, halftone…