Anyone can cook

In the Pixar film Ratatouille, Remy the rat is inspired by acclaimed chef Auguste Gusteau, and becomes a gourmet chef. Shenanigans ensue and the climax of the film sees Remy preparing dinner for notorious food critic 'Grim Eater' Anton Ego ¹. The dish Remy serves is the titular ratatouille. It is a traditionally humble vegetable stew, prepared by a chef from the humblest of origins who becomes the very embodiment of Gusteau’s motto’s, "Anyone can cook".

What if the same were true of software?

For most of its history, software belonged to a select few: developers trained in the rituals of terminals and frameworks, well-versed in arcane sigils that are coherent only to the initiated. Behind closed doors, they cook up wonders: programs used by millions everyday and lines of code that run the world.

But for everyone else, it remained a locked kitchen.

Kitchen staff only

The year is 2025 and large language models can now write code.

Yet, even with the plethora of coding assistants and vibe coding apps we have today, we haven’t quite reached the stage where anyone can make an app. Writing the code is only part of the story. Developers often forget how daunting it can be for someone to run a "Hello World" program for the very first time, not to even mention deploying the code on a server or provisioning a database.

Maggie Appleton talks about something similar that she calls the command line wall, and how this fundamentally undermines the idea of ownership.

Why this matters

Software isn’t just code. It is one of the cheapest, fastest ways to turn an idea into reality. A small app can reshape a family routine, help a neighbor, or preserve a personal ritual.

It may be a child building a tracker for her grandmother so she never misses a pill. Or a neighbor sharing a watering calendar for the community garden. Or a gig worker creating a budgeting tool to track unstable income and plan rent payments.

But too often, these small ideas fizzle out in notebooks and conversations. The people who feel the problem most acutely never get past the command line wall. Or they get locked into platforms, and now grandma needs a subscription for her pill tracker.

And so we lose an entire universe of home-cooked apps ². The quirky, personal, meaningful ones that are too small to scale but can mean the entire world for someone. The ideas that may never make a dime but are priceless to the people who need them.

We believe things can be different.

A better kitchen

If the command line is a wall, we need a kitchen where the door is wide open. A welcoming space where anyone can step in and begin creating anything they want.

A while ago, we started building a thing called Booplet. It is an app builder made with three principles in mind.

1. Own your software.
   We launched Booplet as a desktop app. Any app generated with Booplet is stored on your device ³. It means the tools you built are really yours to keep. It also means I don’t need to store anything for you, and I don’t need to charge you a subscription just for using what you made.
2. Creating software should be easy.
   Apps are tools, and tools should make your lives easier. Something is terribly wrong when building an app becomes more painful or time-consuming than the problem it was meant to solve ⁴. Creating software should feel simple, empowering, even exciting, but never intimidating.
3. Safe by default.
   Booplet is designed for an audience that may never know the difference between Java and JavaScript. But this should not prevent them from building software that is technically sound and secure. They should never have to worry about accidentally leaking their data or wiping their hard drives.

Booplet is our attempt to reclaim the lost universe of home-cooked apps, where anyone can create software without being intimidated or locked in. It is not quite there yet and there remain dozens of questions. But the stove is lit and we've set the table.

A great app can come from anywhere

Software can’t fix everything. But at an age where the digital world is so intertwined with the physical, software carries so much potential to make the world better.

The ability to code should not be a barrier to creating a great app. Because it was never about the code, but what the code does. A great app is simply one that makes the world a better place.

It could be a classroom, the dining table, an idea doodled on a napkin at a café. From someone who would never call themselves a "developer", but finally have the means to bring their idea to life.

Not everyone can build a great app; but a great app can come from anywhere.

So go, make yourself some apps.

Further readings

• An App Can Be a Home-Cooked Meal, Robin Sloan
• Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers, Maggie Appleton
• Situated Software, Clay Shirky

Footnotes