Malleable software: 80% solid base, 20% custom code wins the productivity market
Malleable software = solid bases and custom code
After 22 years in the productivity tools market, the author argues that the ideal solution is a solid base covering 80% of needs (storage, permissions, history, collaboration) plus custom code for the remaining 20%. AI has made custom code easier, but building from scratch or using vibe-code tools often leads to a dead end. Malleable tools like Notion and Fibery are well-positioned because they already have a work base and can add extension points, while specialized tools and low-code platforms face different challenges. The key advice: choose your base, not the interfaces, because data and permissions are hard to migrate.
The solid base should cover what's identical for every team, and custom code should cover what makes yours different.
- watty
This is great insight, I agree with the author! Check out my [INSERT VIBE CODED GITHUB LINK] which follows these patterns!
- momojo
Love this take. In the bio-imaging space, Napari is a great example of this. Wonderfully solid base, but extremely extensible since its just python all the way down.
There's something wonderful about having my coworker walk up with an issue, and being able to bang out a Napari plugin that solves their exact problem before lunch.
My order of 'tool escalation' usually goes:
- Can I solve their problem from napari's inline terminal?
- Can I solve it with a one-off script?
- Can I solve it with a one-off script that creates a one-off plugin interface?
- Should I add the plugin to our company-wide repo since this problem seems to occur a lot?
- mickael-kerjean
That's the path I've been on with my Dropbox alternative [1]. The 80% is the fast core that focus on file management, the remaining 20% is coming via plugins which implement one of core interfaces so you can handle your own storage, authorisation, authentication, custom apps to handle file types, ... Fun fact, there is 10x more code in the various plugins [2] catering to everything than the core code that was supposed to be the 80%, unsurprisingly everyone needed a different 20%. Plus I find it cool that the guy who needed a gobd compliant log system that have ton of properties to keep auditors happy enforcing hash chained signed with rfc3161 does not contribute to making the system shittier for everyone else
[1] https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/fdrive
- genatron_ai
Having that working base that agents can then customize from is a great approach because you get some of the brownfield benefits where there are established patterns that it can continue to follow. This is often much faster and predictable compared to starting from scratch, where even though agentic development is fast you need to have a true dev mindset and think about everything.
- pavo-etc
Pi is a great example of this. I've used it as the basis for a fleet of agents I'm running on my server, but rather than using the Pi TUI I run it in headless-mode and have extended it to use XMPP as its communication layer so I can use any device with the same sessions, and so agents can talk to each other.
The Pi harness is built to be extended like this, and it's a joy to work with.