Apps no more

Apps will die and so will vibe coding apps.

People are super excited to be able to vibe code their own apps now but this won't last. Because the concept of an "app" where we write UI code, logic code, backend code and create database tables will vanish as Elon Musk said this week, there won't be apps.

Instead we will have:

AI UI: Chat/voice/text/glasses/[new UI inventions]

Logic Layer: LLM will reason with Skills added

Database: LLM will create database tables on the fly

Let me show how this will work with a real-world example.

Here are 6 skills I taught my personal AI, Cloe, that auto-created database tables on the fly and stored my personal data + memories in a private Arca vault. I own this data and can export it any time.

There are tons of apps in the app store that track meals, exercises, grocery lists, wishlists, people religiously track their weight daily in Google sheets. None of that needed. My personal AI does it all for me.

Let's create a new skill: ability to track my todo list. Normally people use todo apps for this (thousands of them in the app store?)

I ask it to add a skill, it figures out on its own what type of data we need to store for that (because LLMs are great for reasoning for things like this) and creates a database table in Arca for storing my todos.

Another example, now that Foursquare/Swarm apps are no more, I sorely miss using them. I've used them for over a decade to track all the cool places I've been to so we can remember. So I've told my AI to add a check-in skill.

Then I gave it a check-in for a cool place we discovered. It created the checkins skill and a table with all the columns it figured it needed and saved my data. I didn't have to architect a table schema for this or create migrations to an actual database server, which is what we normally would have done.

Let's do one more.

and...

And how to pull up the data we just saved.

So where does all this data go? To my private Arca vault as vector memories and structured data tables that are all full exportable as CSV files.

Watch these screenshots in a short video here.

In the future everyone's going to have their own custom personal AI. Many people will build it themselves. Non-engineers are shipping real apps in a weekend.

They’re realizing they don’t have to wait for a platform to “add the feature they want.”

They can just build it themselves. But instead of vibe coding apps, they will be customizing personal AIs that do the things vibe coded apps would have done.

So apps will go away, personal AIs with all the needed skills will remain.

Our data belongs to us, the people. Not to the cloud AI companies who store them in abstract blobs that we can't get out.

Our data should live with us.

Portable, private, and not locked in some company's data jail where we can't get it out.

So then if everyone builds their own AI... where does all that data live?

Enter Arca.

Arca is the data layer for personal AI.

It gives us a foundation to store, structure, and move our AI’s memory + structured data as skills, all under our control.

Dynamic Tables: Create structured data tables (as skills for your personal AI) through natural conversation (no code) instead of manually creating data tables for structured data.

Private Storage: Your private cloud storage space, your structured data in a serverless environment as Parquet files via DuckDB and vector memory files via LanceDB embeddings for semantic recall.

Portability: Export all of your data (structured + vector) to CSV anytime.

Simple MCP: Hook up the Arca MCP server to your AI assistants/agents easily.

I used to code up manual tables for this kind of thing before. But when AI can build data tables on the fly, why write code?

If you're building your own custom personal AI (which you should be!), reply to this email or DM me on LinkedIn up so I can give you access to Arca which can be the data backend for your personal AI.

If you want to try all of this using Cloe as your personal AI, go to https://cloe.fyi/join and once you've verified your phone number you can message Cloe by sending a Whatsapp message or calling the phone number you'll be given.

Or connect Cloe to your Claude or ChatGPT using custom connectors: https://mcp.cloe.fyi/mcp is Cloe's MCP server url you can use. In the examples above I've used Cloe as an MCP server custom connector in Claude. It works great!

Cloe now uses Arca as its memory + structured data store so you can teach it skills for any type of data you track and see if this new type of AI interaction replaces some of the apps that you use.

Let me know how you get on!