Where’s My AI Shareware?!

Have you noticed all the folks bragging about the cool new tools they’ve hacked up using AI? In the last month or so, I’ve read newsletters from half a dozen or so people detailing vibe-coded apps that help them do research, organize their life, or even build entire websites. And it’s not just media types who are building things. As I wrote about earlier, my son built a custom CRM system for his company over one weekend. That kind of capability is impressive. It feels like something new and big is underway.

Which got me thinking. If we’re all hacking up these cool tools, how come we can’t share them with each other? Why are we all consigned to re-invent the wheel each time we want to build, say, a “Searchblog Query Engine“?

Back at the dawn of digital technologies, when the PC was young and the Web a dream in the distant future, a vibrant sharing culture emerged around the Macintosh. I was part of the early Mac scene in the mid to late 1980s, and I vividly recall the excitement of getting new software utilities from friends and colleagues in the industry. These were neat hacks built by passionate tinkerers and validated by peer review and word of mouth.

Most utilities came via “sneaker net” – IE, they arrived via a beat up 3.5-inch floppy disk carried from one user to another. They often came with a business model known as “shareware” or “freeware” – you could use the utility for free, and you’d pay the developer only if you felt you were getting value from the product.

Shareware filled in the many holes left by commercial software providers at the time – and often pointed the way to entirely new markets that would later become billion dollar opportunities. We all installed “Disinfectant,” an early anti-virus utility (its maker refused to accept payment.) And given how precious disk and RAM space was back then (the average Mac had about 128K of RAM and a 20-MB hard drive), compression utilities were one of the first to break out big – we had our choice of Stuffit, DiskDoubler, and dozens of others. SuperClock! put a clock in your menu bar – at the time, that was a very big deal. After Dark gave us customizable screen savers. And Quick Keys let you automate various tasks via your keyboard – a precursor to the era of agentic AI we are now entering. We could download custom sounds, fonts, and games – and we took pride in souping up our machines with these novel hacks.

So now that we’re in the era of vibe coding, I gotta ask: Where are my AI utilities?! When Troy makes a media distillation utility, or Mario makes a “knowledge dashboard,” or for that matter, when my son Ian makes a CRM, why can’t they easily share their work for fun or profit? Something feels broken around the time-honored practice of tinkering in our current AI culture. And I think I know why.

Back when the Mac was new, no one controlled distribution. Anyone could make a copy of software on a disk, and everyone did it, all the time. The ensuing software industry quickly invented copy protection, but that was fine – none of the utility makers employed it. User groups like BMUG became arbiters of taste when it came to utilities, building sharing libraries and user reviews as part of their services*. Sharing was built into the culture of early computing.

Today’s computer culture, if we can claim to have one at all, is built on the ethos of profit and extraction. If you build an awesome agent using Claude, sharing it is structurally difficult. Anyone using your agent has to have a Claude subscription. Plus, they’ll need to recreate your agent’s core integrations from scratch, because their computer and web usage will be different from yours. If you make an app, well, now you have to play Apple or Google’s app store games – good luck getting found without paying a marketing tax, not to mention the 15-30 percent cut the platforms will take. Oh, and they can deny your app entirely, or pull it once they realize it might threaten their profits.

I could write thousands more words on this, but I think the point is made: Our current technology landscape is hostile to the freewheeling sharing culture which gave birth to the digital revolution. Perhaps that’s just what progress looks like, but to me, it’s a little bit sad.

* I even edited the BMUG newsletter for a couple years during this time.

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