My friend runs a shop that sells and repairs mowers and other small engine equipment. For years she’s ranted to me about how lousy her dealer management software is, and on a number of occasions she’s asked “could I make something myself?”
And for years I’d tell her it’s probably not feasible, because building something new from the ground up takes several engineer-years of effort.
She’d have to own a small chain of maybe 10-20 of these shops before the economics start to potentially make more sense, and even then she wouldn’t win on price; she’d win on being able to have better software.
But we have LLMs now, and they’re really helpful at building software now (especially compared to [just a year ago](https://icanthascheezburger.com/wordpress/2025/01/ais-threat-to-software-developers/)).
We’re not in “she can build her own DMS” territory, but she has options now that she didn’t have before.
Even without adding an engineer to the payroll, she can use LLMs to become even more of a power user. One of the first things she could start doing is gleaning more insights from her databases. LLMs are great at taking a natural language description of something you want to know, and making that into an SQL query.
She can make decisions about what inventory to order with more confidence.
She can gather really detailed data about past machine repairs and give customers a better picture of total cost of ownership that’s based on hard data and not just anecdotes.
Eventually it might make sense for her to hire an engineer part-time to help her build out simple internal apps based on opportunities she sees.
These incremental improvements add up. Her shop can serve its customers better. The team can become happier because they spend less time on busywork. She can get the shop paid faster for warranty repairs. She can go from “that’s a good idea but I don’t have the time to dig into it” to “that’s a good idea, let’s try it out” as her new default MO.
## Build Vs Buy
For decades, the “build vs buy” question hasn’t even been an option for small businesses; buying off-the-shelf software is the only affordable option. Even big software companies eventually shy away from stuff built in-house as they mature because they decide that those things aren’t core competencies. When I worked at GitHub we had a number of apps built in-house that eventually became unstaffed and then replaced with off-the-shelf software that was always worse in some big ways.
Every business spends time fighting with their software trying to nudge it into working with them. You see it as a customer too; do you ever listen to that customer service agent on the phone? They’re spending 80% of the call just trying to get your information entered into the ticketing system.
As someone who’s spent his career making software I catch a glimpse of these systems all the time and I think “this could be so much better.”
With the help of LLMs, the small business has the opportunity to enjoy making nice bespoke software for themselves that’s fast and perfectly suited to just their needs.
I get strangely giddy at this idea. Everyone deserves great tools to do their best work.
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