Welcome to the AI For Humans newsletter!

Are you old enough to know what OG ‘shareware’ was?

In the 1980s & 90s, software devs (often amateurs) would create programs and ‘share’ them for free via demo disks you could find in computer stores or magazines.

I loved discovering new shareware as a kid, some created by hobbyists to manage things like my comic collection, while others created games and IPs that would go on to do very big things.

You know what happened next…

Software became a big (the biggest) business.

And ‘shareware’ became professionalized ‘trial-software’ and today’s ‘free-to-play’ games, all designed to maximize you spending money on the product.

Well, this week I saw this very cool, very weird Claude Code-d piece of software from Joe Weisenthal of the Odd Lots podcast called Havelock AI.

Havelock AI is designed for a singular purpose: To determine how much of a piece of text (either yours or someone else’s) reads like someone speaking rather than writing.

It’s based on work from academics like Walter Ong and if it’s not for you, that’s totally fine and 100% not my point.

Peak season is here. Most retail and ecommerce teams face the same problem: volume spikes, but headcount doesn't.

Instead of hiring temporary staff or burning out your team, there’s a smarter move. Let AI handle the predictable stuff, like answering FAQs, routing tickets, and processing returns, so your people focus on what they do best: building loyalty.

Gladly’s ROI calculator shows exactly what this looks like for your business: how many tickets AI could resolve, how much that costs, and what that means for your bottom line. Real numbers. Your data.

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Joe is a busy guy. Between TV appearances, podcasts and tweeting as much as any professional I know, you’d barely think he had time to breathe, let alone release a piece of software that many people are finding useful.

But he did. And you can too.

This is the dawn of lil’ software.

Yes, I admit it.

I made up the name lil’ software. But we need to call it something.

I’ve grown to dislike the word ‘vibe-coding’ as it’s been hijacked by the AI growth bros online. Plus, we need a noun to describe the thing that’s being made, not just the act of making it.

My definition below:

The key part of lil’ software definition is the personal part.

People making lil’ software aren’t looking to recreate <insert SaaS business here> or making automation apps as a lead magnet for digital products.

They are making things that they either need or find fun.

Are some lil’ software devs thinking that other people might find that software fun or useful too? Or that eventually they might be able to make money off of it?

Of course.

But first and foremost, lil’ software comes from a person doing something that they genuniely want to make.

We’re at a huge turning point in terms of the capabilities of the AI models.

Anthropic’s Opus4.5 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 Pro (both very expensive to run) are capable of writing code that can compete with at least average software developers.

The new rumored OpenAI model (see below) looks to push even further and there will be at least three more turns at increased capabilities this year alone.

And, while you might not push the state-of-the-art models in math or science, when you’re vibe-coding an idea you have you notice the difference immediately.

It just works.

Lil’ software changes the way we, as humans, think about not only what software can do but also what we can do with software.

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The amount of software engineers on earth may soon be nearly the entire human population. Each of these humans have unique perspectives, wants and needs when in comes to what they might want software to do.

My new personal website I shared above is an example of personal lil’ software I made for myself.

It solved a need I’ve had for a while (my old website was a bad Squarespace template) and gave me a chance to dive into Claude Code.

Wait, you might ask, a personal website is considered lil’ software?

Reader, lil’ software is literally anything you want it to be.

The website isn’t fancy but it does have some specific stuff I worked with Claude Code to come up with. Claude walked me through the step-by-step integration of the Nano Banana Pro API, deployment via Vercel and even email forwarding via Cloudflare.

Here’s a simple three step process for making your own lil’ software:

It’s that easy. Have fun & we’ll see you on Friday for a new episode!

-Gavin

In this week’s AI For Humans: Google’s Personal Intelligence comes to Gemini👇

Dear reader, I played a LOT of Warcraft 2.

It came out when I was in college and had just gotten a pretty decent laptop for the time and I got good at it. Not like professional good but still.

So when I saw this new project announcement from AI dev Ido Salomon, I knew all that time pushing orcs around wasn’t wasted. I was just learning how to work with AI Agents!

AgentCraft is a new user interface for agentic AI deployment designed to feel like an old-school real time strategy game. You can sign up here for the waitlist.

Let’s just hope Blizzard’s lawyers see enough promise (and differentiation) to not take this down before it comes out.