Benedict Evans Says Apps Aren't Dead. The Premise Was Always Flawed. Do Keep Up.
Benedict Evans pushes back against the popular fantasy that AI turns every office worker into a software builder. He argues this misunderstands how most people think and where software actually comes from, and notes that big labs now run their own deploycos, blurring the line between research and product delivery.
The mental model here is what I call the literacy fallacy. The mechanism: access to a capability does not produce adoption of a behavior. Giving someone a code-generating model does not make them a tool-builder, just as giving someone a pen does not make them a novelist. The principle is that transformation in how organizations work follows from changes in workflow and habit, not from mere availability of technology.
Benedict Evans, writing in his newsletter at ben-evans.com, argues against the notion that AI democratizes app creation. He references the emergence of deploycos within big labs as evidence that vendors, not end users, remain the primary builders.
- Open a consumer AI assistant like ChatGPT or Claude and ask it to build you a simple task tracker app.
- Notice how quickly you hit the wall of needing to specify requirements, test outputs, and iterate.
- Reflect on whether you would realistically do this for every small workflow need, or whether you would prefer a pre-built app. The exercise demonstrates Evans's point: the capability exists, but the habit does not follow automatically.