At PKM Summit this weekend one thing that stood out was that many have started creating their own tools, and were using vibecoding to create them.

While the term agency turned out to be unknown to almost all participants, that is of course what such tools create. The ability to do things, individually or as a group, in this case by creating your own tools to get there.
The power of finding new agency was felt and expressed by quite a few, and played a role in a good number of sessions too.

When I first encountered computers, in the early 1980s, creating your own stuff was the norm. It was almost the only option. Making the machine work for myself. Like software to keep my ham radio logs and print QSL cards.
These days I run a good many smaller and larger personal pieces of tooling on my laptop. Things like making it easy to search by date in my photos on Flickr, or posting to my website from my internal notes, or from within my feedreader.
Things that reduce friction, speed things up, reduce dependency on external systems.

Vibecoding, and especially the Claude Code style of vibe coding, is bringing people to create their own tools, who weren’t able to do so before. A pool of latent needs they can now tap into on their own.

Some I know are really now learning how a computer works under the hood through their vibe coding. Testing the limits of their machines, finding out how fast local stuff can be. Discovering the power of APIs, the utility of cron jobs, and learning how to run their own VPS or local servers.
Others are creating little tools that work the way they want. An app to present books from their collection in that one specific way just so. A mobile app for public transport built on your own existing commute patterns and nothing else. Apps pulling in data from several sources and presenting them in one interface that likely only makes sense to themselves.

Tools built by people realising they are pretty predictable to themselves, and that such highly localised and specifically contextualised predictability now lends itself to automation by the intended user themself.
Tools, in short, where, access to and control over data lies fully with the user, where applications are views on that data (and multiple apps use the same data), and interfaces queries on the data. Along the lines of Ruben Verborgh’s 2017 article “Paradigm Shifts for the Decentralised Web“ but then way more personal. The decoupling that is possible between data, applications and interfaces is even more powerful when you can do them all three for yourself. And then mash them up in any which way you want.

Vibecoding is allowing people to jump the barriers to entry to that. And judging by the stories they share, it feels like pole vaulting over them, not just clearing the barriers. That energy then propels them on to do more.

Over the past months I’ve also heard regularly how people are cancelling paid subscriptions to various online services, and switching to their personal tools that fit their use case much more precisely.

There are many ethical, political, and societal issues with much of the gen AI world, and how models come about, and how corporate vendors exploit and leverage their power.
Yet, where these things are not just consumed but used locally as a leg-up to a different level of self-reliance, it looks quite different. Something is brewing it feels like.
A shift, and I’d love to see more people explore and extend their own agency with such tools.