A few years ago, if you worked in the trades and wanted better software, you were basically out of luck. Hire a developer? Sure, if you wanted to blow your budget and wait six months for something that still didn’t work right. Use one of the generic tools? Fine, but you’d spend half your day working around it. Most people just dealt with it. Not because they were happy about it but because what else were you going to do.
So that’s what happened. Whole industries ran on software that mostly fit. Close enough. Good enough. Everyone knew it was a little broken and nobody had a real answer for it. That’s recently starting to shift.
I’ve been noticing it more lately – guys in the trades, actual electricians and contractors and operators, building stuff for themselves. They’re not trying to become software people but are just tired of a specific thing not working and, for the first time, actually being able to fix it.
It starts with something small. Usually kind of ugly but then it works better than expected. Then someone else asks for it and then it’s not really a workaround anymore, it’s a product that is solving a real need for the business.
These are people who’ve been living inside these industries for years. They know the weird exceptions. The stuff that falls through the cracks. The problems that never make it into any product roadmap because the people building the software never actually worked the job. For a long time that knowledge just kind of sat there. Now it’s actually useful in a new way.
Most software, historically, got built from the outside in. Someone smart but disconnected from an industry would take a shot at it, and then distribution did the rest. Sometimes it worked out. A lot of the time it didn’t, and people just settled.
What’s happening now looks like the opposite of that.
Jensen Huang made a comment recently and said if he were a carpenter, he’d go completely berserk with AI. Not because it changes what a carpenter is, but because of what it opens up. I keep thinking about that.
You’re still a carpenter and still know what you know, but now that knowledge can compound in ways it couldn’t before. You can build tools, systems, and maybe something other people need too.
The trades aren’t going away. They’re probably getting more valuable in the age of AI. The people already in them are starting to build things that actually make sense for how the work gets done – instead of waiting on someone from the outside to figure it out.
A lot of it is rough still but something has genuinely changed. I don’t think the next generation of software for these industries is necessarily coming from the usual places. It’s coming from the job site.