My Podcast Player and Ads Revenue Model

A few weeks ago, Andrej Karpathy shared his experience vibe coding a custom app for his treadmill. Coincidentally, almost at the exact same time, I vibe coded a bespoke software for my own use as well.

I never liked the podcast player I downloaded from the app store because it was bloated with features I didn’t need, it was buggy and it was full of ads. Eventually I got fed up, and vibe coded my own podcast player.

The vibe coding itself was not that interesting. I used Claude code and it took me less than an hour to have it up and running. It took me longer to test it, and multiple iterations to iron out all the bugs, and I’ve been using my own podcast player app for more than a month.

This experience got me thinking:

1. The vibe coding experience is really easy for someone with a bit of technical background, but not a total non technical person. I don’t see how a total newbie (e.g. imagine a grandma) has enough confidence to navigate through Claude Code to write their own bespoken software. There’s still a market for a more structured software to vibe coding software for non techies. Existing software like Replit and Base44 can do it, but they have hosting restrictions.
2. There will be an explosion of apps since it’s so easy to make, but what’s the revenue model? If building software is so easy, who’s going to pay for software? Wouldn’t everybody just build their own bespoke software? Maybe we’ll revert back to the model in the 60s & 70s where software came free with the hardware, or instead of standard software, hardware makers just provide APIs for a fee for everybody’s own bespoke software?
3. There’s still plenty of demand for quality content but the content distribution business model has changed. I’m still listening to my podcasts, but I’m not looking at any ads. Even the sponsorship type of ad messages within podcasts can be easily skipped through a bit of AI moderation. The same idea can be applied to other types of content consumption: once can build a bespoke news reader, video player that doesn’t show any ads, and skip all sponsorship messages within content. It’s just a matter of time before the ads business needs to reconsider their model.

TLDR: in a world that everyone can make bespoke software, there’s no software industry, but hardware (e.g. Treadmill maker) producer and content producer (e.g. New York Times) still need to adapt.