If you want to understand despair, try building a book tracking app and then searching the App Store to see what the competition looks like. Hint: it’s brutal out there.
My book tracker is called QuietReads. It has an AI assistant, a nifty note taking feature, and I get a lot of value out of it. But let’s be honest: QuietReads is not going to fund my retirement.
The reason is simple. It’s easy to understand what a book tracker does. You search for books, track what you are reading, maybe have some note taking functionality. Anyone can build a fairly comprehensive book tracker with some rudimentary knowledge and a weekend of token-maxxing with Claude Code.
AI has removed the friction between ideas and code and that has resulted in an absolute explosion of apps in crowded domains like, well, book tracking.
Pondering my predicament made me think of an article I read about Indian leopards. Habitat loss and competition with humans has led leopards in marginal areas of India to become more nocturnal and more specialized. More opportunistic. They survive by knowing their specific territory so intimately that no newcomer can navigate it.
Maybe there is a lesson here. AI has turned the software ecosystem into a dark forest. Brutal competition. If you expose yourself too much, you get copied. Features replicated, vulnerabilities exploited as soon as the are exposed.
The leopard has an answer: adaptation and specialization. AI can copy what your product does. It struggles with why you built it that way: the customer workflows you spent years understanding, the edge cases that only surface at scale, the tradeoffs you made because you know this domain from the inside. It may be knowing that using floating point numbers for money is a terrible idea, or why user engagement may be a dangerous metric for an AI app. It’s the scars that earn their keep.
That knowledge is your ecological niche. And AI doesn’t erode it. It lets you compound your advantages. Domain experts who use AI to build move faster inside a territory only they can navigate.
The time for the generalist is ending. The specialists are taking over. QuietReads may not make me rich, but I have enough scars that I don’t mind navigating the dark forest.